evidence: These results indicate an economy that is delivering historic, broad-based real wage gains for workers while emerging from one of the deepest recessions on record. Policymakers should look to build on this momentum through policies that raise wages and cut costs of living, such as increasing the federal minimum wage, making more workers eligible for overtime pay, and improving the affordability of child care and health care. [...] If wages rise more quickly than prices, workers can maintain or improve their standard of living—and since the start of the pandemic, wage growth for a typical worker has been higher than inflation.4 Prices have increased 20 percent since the fourth quarter of 2019, while wages for a typical worker have grown 23 percent.5 (see Figure 1) In fact, real wages for a typical worker stand at about the level expected if there had been no pandemic or recession in early 2020 and if they had kept growing at the same rate as in years prior. 6 [...] This analysis calculates the share of workers who have received an inflation-adjusted raise by linking individual workers’ wage records from two consecutive years of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.16 It then calculates the share of workers whose inflation-adjusted wages grew (using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers17), reported as a three-month average.