Could someone help me find the average monthly wagemfor a person living in the USA?
Thank you.

tinyheart

According to Wikipedia, the average median income in the U.S. is $48,000 per year. Unless I'm missing something, that would make the average monthly income four thousand dollars. Hope that helps.

Fr_Chuck

Yes, but remember the US is huge. And wages in places like New York and living costs are many times higher than rual GA or TN for example.

I will give you an example, when my business in rual TN failed and I closed, the BEST very best job I could find was 10 dollars a hour, and everyone that knew me could not beleive I found such a great job.
** they even offered health insurance, which was unheard of around there. Walmart was considered by most the best paying job around.
But with that a two bedroom apartment only cost about 250 to 350 a month.

Compare this to Atlanta, where a 2 bedroom costs from 700 a month to 1500 a month and even fast food pays 10 dollars a hour normally.

worthbeads

Thank you both for the help. I'm not too concered about the USA being huge; I'm comparing the wages of the USA to that of Russia.

vingogly

Usually, when comparing salaries between populations, the median's used rather than the mean. Half the people in a population will have a salary greater than the median, half less than the median. The mean (average is the same thing) will be influenced by a few persons making a lot of money or very little money, the median won't since it's based on finding member number n/2 rather than summing everything together. Payscale.com, for example, uses the median rather than the mean ... but you may very well find stats for Russia that represent means rather than medians. So be sure you use the median for Russia vs. the median for the USA in your comparison.

worthbeads

In theory, the median cannot work. Example: Median of $1000 compared to $1 billion will make an outrageous median.

But yeah, I see what you're saying. Thanks for the tip.

vingogly

If you have 99 people making 1 thousand and one person making 1 billion, the median says half the people are making 1000 or less, half are making 1000 or more. Which is exactly right; the median is unaffected by outliers. It provides the middle score and as a stats text will say, it's much better than the mean at describing typical values. In the population you describe, the typical value is 1000, not 1 billion. That's why median is much better for measuring things like income and home prices: you're interested there in typical values and want to eliminate the influence of outliers.

The mean (average) in this example would be 10000990. This value obviously has little to do with the typical income value you'd encounter when you sample one of the population members. It's the mean that gives you an outrageous result in this case, not the median.

Vasily

worthbeads

Oh yes, I did the median wrong. I see what you are saying. My mistake. Thanks.