Although the U.S. economy has posted 25 straight quarters of GDP growth since the Great Recession of 2007-2009, the nation's labor market remains weak. Using newly released data from the Census Bureau's American Communities Survey, this interactive shows how each of the survey's 218 common occupations have performed in the recovery. Although some occupations have seen robust earnings growth, earnings in most occupations have stagnated over the past seven years. This is true for occupations across the earnings spectrum.

After adjusting for inflation, average yearly earnings for employees in low-earnings occupations are down 2 percent, earnings for mid-earnings occupations are down 1 percent, and earnings for high-earnings occupations are down 5 percent. Employment has recovered for low- and high-earnings professions, but for professions in the middle, employment has dropped nearly 4 percent.

Earnings lag for all income brackets

The relatively flat trajectory of the first graph below shows that, although a number of low-earnings occupations have seen significant drops in earnings since 2007, earnings growth has been fairly even across the earnings spectrum.

Most professions have seen their nominal earnings increase, but these gains are illusory. If 2014 earnings are adjusted for inflation, earnings growth across the spectrum has been anemic, with the majority of occupations losing real pay. This is true regardless of whether one uses the personal consumption expenditures price index (PCE) or the consumer price index for urban consumers (CPI-U) as a measure of inflation.

See how your occupation compares:
  • Use the menus below to select the occupation you work in.
  • Your selection will be highlighted on the graph.
  • Hover over points to see earnings in other occupations.
  • Toggle between nominal (what workers are actually paid at each point in time) and inflation adjusted (where all earnings are expressed in constant 2007 prices) views.

Choose an occupation from the dropdown menus and I'll tell you more about it.

Employment remains stagnant for professions in the middle

Employment in high- and low-earnings occupations has recovered since 2007, but mid-earnings occupations have yet to make up job losses sustained during the Great Recession, as shown in the graph below.

If you've chosen an occupation from the menu, the broad occupation group to which that narrower occupation belongs will be highlighted below. To see another occupation, select it from the menu, or explore the biggest winners and losers by hovering over a line in the graph.

Methodology

Data for 2006-2013 is from the Census Bureau's American Community Surveys as cleaned and distributed by the University of Minnesota (IPUMS-USA, University of Minnesota, www.ipums.org). Data for 2014 was downloaded directly from the Census Bureau.

Workers who reported working fewer than 40 weeks in the year or fewer than 35 hours a week were eliminated from the dataset to minimize the risk of conflating earnings with employment. Some occupations were eliminated from the scatterplot to make visual interpretation easier and to eliminate possible outliers. Occupations with weighted employment of fewer than 100,000 workers were pruned for this purpose.

Low-earnings occupations are those below the 20th percentile, high-earnings occupations are those above the 80th percentile, and those in the middle are all other occupations. Occupations in each group were weighted by employment to find the percentile cutoffs.

The Census Bureau occasionally changes the occupation list available to survey respondents. At times, occupational codes have been merged to maintain consistency from year to year. The raw data and code used to produce this visual are available at the project's GitHub page.