By Louis Jacobson | PolitifactPublished On 6 Sep 20256 Sep 2025President Donald Trump said US workers are already benefitting from his economic policies.“The average American worker has already seen a $500 wage increase this year,” Trump said during an August 26 Cabinet meeting.Trump’s White House cherry-picked data that favours a higher earnings gain. Experts prefer a different measure, based on a larger sample size, that shows a smaller increase.How the White House calculated a $500 pay bumpWhen we asked the White House press office for Trump’s data source, a spokesperson pointed us to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers, seasonally adjusted.This data shows that median weekly earnings rose from $1,185 in the fourth quarter of 2024 to $1,206 in the second quarter of 2025, which closely aligns with Trump’s second term in office.Because those figures represent weekly earnings, we multiplied them by 26 to see how much a typical worker gained during the half-year period. Multiplying by 26 weeks produces a cumulative $546 rise in wages. This measure does not include part-time workers, who account for about a quarter of the workforce, or account for inflation.Experts consider other measures more reliableEconomists said the White House’s chosen dataset isn’t as reliable as a different set – and the more reliable study shows a smaller wage increase.The other dataset – average weekly earnings of all private-sector employees – is produced monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Advertisement Over the first six months of 2025, this statistic found a cumulative pay increase of about $121. That’s about one-quarter …
