I'm am looking for national or regional (west coast) data that would
tell me what the average annual raise is for employees.  Ie... So
taking all professions, the average employee in America recieved a 4%
increase last year.  Would need to make sure its total raise, many
facilities give a COLA of a certain %, then a merit of another certain
%, I'm looking for the total average % raise that employees recieved
last year.  Thanks!

Hello, and thank you for an interesting question:

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the
average hourly wages for all "health related occupations" in the
United States as a whole, and in what's called the "Pacific Census
Division" (Pacific: Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and
Washington) were as follows:

..........US.............Pacific

1997 --  $21.83..........$23.93

1998 --  $22.56..........$25.57

1999 --  $27.12..........$26.62

2000 --  $27.33..........$27.33

2001 --  $28.14..........$28.57

As you can see, the national hourly health care wages rose 3.0%
between 2000 and 2001, while wages out west rose quite a bit faster,
at 4.5%.


The data are taken from the BLS's "National Compensation Survey" data
base, which can be queried at:

http://data.bls.gov/labjava/outside.jsp?survey=nc


The BLS public query system is very fliexible.  You can select factors
such as:

--geography (the country as a whole, regions, individual cities, etc);

--occupational categories (all jobs, broad sectors like "health
related occupations";

--more select categories such as physicians, nurses, pharmacists,
assistants, etc);

--worker "levels" (senior management, entry level, etc).  

The system will return wage data for the years 1997-2001.

An explanation of the National Compensation Survey, along with details
of what is actually covered and what is excluded from the survey, can
be found here:

http://data.bls.gov/help/pdq/nchlpover.htm

and on the links at the bottom of this page.

----------

I hope this meets your needs.  If anything here needs further
explanation, feel free to post a Request for Clarification, and I'll
be glad to assist you further.


search strategy:  Google search on:  Bureau Labor Statistics

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Clarification of Answer by pafalafa-ga on 01 Apr 2003 17:59 PST

By the way, I presented the data for the health care industry, as
indicated in the title of your question.  You can easily re-run the
queries for all wages in all industries, if you want to expand the
scope beyond just health care.

---

Clarification of Answer by pafalafa-ga on 02 Apr 2003 07:55 PST

P.S.  You ought to have a look at this BLS site as well:

http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs035.htm

which provides a very nice overview of occupations and earnings in the
health care industry.