Wages and salaries increased for retail trade workers for the year ending in December 2020

Wages and salaries for private retail trade workers, excluding incentive paid occupations, increased 4.4 percent for the year ended in December 2020. This was higher than the 2.8 percent increase in wages and salaries for all private industry workers.

For the year ended in December 2020, wages and salaries also increased for workers in service-providing industries (2.9 percent), goods-producing industries (2.5 percent), and wholesale trade, excluding incentive paid occupations, (2.4 percent).

Incentive-paid workers are those who receive some portion of their earnings based on sales or output, rather than a unit of time such as an hourly rate or monthly salary. Examples of incentive-paid work include piece-rate systems found in manufacturing environments and commissions paid to certain sales workers

These data are from the Employment Cost Trends program and are not seasonally adjusted. To learn more, see “Employment Cost Index — December 2020.” We also have more charts on the Employment Cost Index. Historical data are available from our database tools. Private industry workers exclude employees of state and local government.