Total Compensation Statistics (2026)

Employer costs for employee compensation averaged $49.32 per hour worked for civilian workers in March 2026.

Of that, $33.72 was wages and salaries and $15.60 was benefits.

Private industry averaged $46.60 an hour, split 69.9% wages and 30.1% benefits. State and local government averaged $66.41, split 61.5% and 38.5%.

For a private-sector worker, roughly 30% of what the employer spends on them is benefits rather than pay.

That covers paid leave, insurance, retirement contributions, supplemental pay and legally required benefits such as Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance.

It is the reason a salary comparison between two jobs can be actively misleading, and why the useful question at an offer is what the whole package costs rather than what the number on the letter says.

In private industry, total compensation was $18.06 an hour at the 10th wage percentile, $34.78 at the median and $89.70 at the 90th.

Wages alone ran $14.88, $24.15 and $60.39, a ratio of about 4.1 to 1 between the top and bottom of that range.

Benefits ran $3.18, $10.63 and $29.31, a ratio of about 9.2 to 1. Benefits are therefore more than twice as unequally distributed as wages, and total compensation is more unequal than salary alone.

Employer retirement and savings contributions in private industry were $0.10 an hour at the 10th wage percentile, $0.82 at the median and $4.20 at the 90th.

That is a ratio of about 42 to 1, by far the widest of any component the BLS reports.

This is where a pay gap becomes a wealth gap. A worker receiving ten cents an hour in employer retirement contributions is not accumulating a retirement account through their job in any meaningful sense.

Employer costs for paid leave ran $0.48 an hour at the 10th percentile, $2.24 at the median and $8.04 at the 90th, a ratio of about 17 to 1.

That matches what the access data shows separately: 43% of the lowest-paid tenth of civilian workers have paid sick leave against 96% of the highest-paid tenth.

The cost data adds the magnitude to the access data. It is not only that low-wage workers are less likely to have paid leave, but that where they have it there is far less of it.

Legally required benefits ran $1.57, $2.75 and $6.16 across the same percentiles, a ratio of about 3.9 to 1, the narrowest of any component.

That is by design. Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance are statutory percentages of pay, so they scale with wages and nothing else.

Everything above that baseline is discretionary, and the discretionary part is where the distribution stretches.

State and local government compensation cost $66.41 an hour against $46.60 in private industry, a difference of $19.81.

Wages account for $8.22 of that gap and benefits for $11.58, so most of the difference is not salary.

The retirement figures make it concrete: a state or local worker at the 10th wage percentile receives $2.20 an hour in employer retirement contributions, 22 times the $0.10 their private-sector counterpart receives.

Supplemental pay, which covers overtime, bonuses and shift differentials, runs $0.31, $1.31 and $4.14 an hour across the private-industry percentiles.

In state and local government it runs $0.18, $0.70 and $0.91. At the 90th percentile a private-sector worker gets more than four times as much supplemental pay as a public-sector one.

Retirement runs the other way by a wider margin: $4.20 an hour private against $18.26 public at the same percentile. The private sector pays for performance now and the public sector pays for tenure later, and comparing the two on salary alone misses both halves of that.

A salary difference of a few thousand dollars is easily outweighed by the benefit package, which is 30% of compensation on average and a third at the top of the distribution.

The components worth pricing are the employer retirement match, the employer share of health premiums and paid leave, because those are the three that vary most between otherwise similar employers.

The match is the one to price first, because it is a guaranteed return on money you were going to save anyway, and it is forfeited by inaction rather than by choice.

The 42-to-1 gap in employer retirement contributions does not stay 42 to 1. It compounds.

Over a full career, a difference of a few dollars an hour in employer contributions becomes a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars in accumulated assets, before any difference in the worker's own saving rate.

That is the mechanism by which a labour market outcome becomes a wealth outcome, and it is visible in a dataset about hourly costs rather than in any statistic about wealth.

The employer's contribution is set by the job. The worker's own contribution rate is not.

For anyone whose employer contribution is small, the practical response is a higher personal rate and an IRA alongside the workplace plan, because the workplace plan is doing less of the work than the averages suggest.

For anyone whose employer contribution is large, the failure mode is the opposite: contributing below the match threshold and leaving the most valuable part of the package unclaimed.

These are costs per hour worked, from the employer's side, not take-home pay. Income tax and the employee's own deductions are not reflected.

Civilian workers means private industry plus state and local government. Federal government workers are excluded.

One change is coming: from the December 2026 data, the BLS will remove workers compensation costs from the ECEC, so totals after that point will not be directly comparable with the figures on this page.

Every figure is from the BLS release Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026, published 12 June 2026 as USDL-26-0827, table A and tables 1 to 4.

The percentile ratios and the civilian benefit share are our arithmetic on the published BLS dollar figures, labelled as such rather than presented as published values.

This dataset measures cost. The separate question of which benefits are offered at all is measured by the BLS Employee Benefits Survey, and the two are not interchangeable.