evidence: Most workers’ raises have been larger than inflation 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 [...] The share of workers receiving an inflation-adjusted raise hit 50 percent in February 2023 and has hovered around its pre-pandemic level of 55 percent since May 2023. These widespread raises follow a period from April 2021 to October 2022 in which the share of workers receiving raises fell from about 55 percent to 45 percent. This decrease resulted from a surge in inflation mostly due to pandemic-driven supply chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine.10 As these disruptions and their effect on prices have eased in 2023, the share of workers experiencing raises higher than inflation has improved. This was also a period of rapid employment growth, so measuring the share of workers who received a raise does not fully capture the state of the labor market during this time because it excludes newly employed workers who do not have an initial wage to calculate the wage growth from.