Despite a better-than-expected jobs report Wednesday, there’s a wider, inconvenient fact about life in the 21st century: labor takes home an ever smaller share of the economic pie. The pattern has been accelerating for nearly 50 years, in fact.
In the third quarter of 2025, the share of gross domestic income going to employees’ wages and benefits fell to 51.4%, down from 58% in 1980, according to U.S. Commerce Department data, as noted by The Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator, Greg Ip. Over the same period, corporate profits, or the leftover cash used to grow a business or pay owners, have been on the rise, reaching nearly 12% of the share of gross domestic income in the third quarter, up from 6%.
Axios ran these numbers, and calculated the decline in wages as a share of gross domestic income adding up to $12,000; as in, that’s how much less per year the average American is bringing home as a result of this dynamic. It totals some $2 trillion in annual compensation for working Americans. That would mean a nearly 20% pay boost in the annual median income.
“There’s no question that contributed to inequality and kind of the stagnation of median earnings,” Harry J. Holzer, a labor economist at Georgetown University, told Fortune.
