Subscribe to our Wage Tracker

The ONS produces an estimate of Average Weekly Earnings (AWE) with a lag of at least 40 days after the end of the reference month. From February 2019 NIESR has been producing and publishing short-term predictions for UK Average Weekly Earnings. As with the GDP Tracker, during some months NIESR will publish predictions of earnings some five months ahead of the ONS data release. NIESR’s new Wage Tracker includes predictions for regular pay and bonus payments for the whole economy, as well as forecasts for private and public sectors wages. The Wage Tracker exploits information from key macroeconomic indicators, including labour market trends, building also on information from monthly GDP nowcasts produced by NIESR’s GDP Tracker and survey evidence, such as labour costs in the manufacturing and service sectors from the Bank of England Agents Score. The wage models also captures the interaction between private and public pay, shown to be relevant in work done by NIESR (Dolton et al. 2018).

The schedule for the Wage Tracker can be found here