US wages and salaries, May 2026
What will BEA first report as wages and salaries in May 2026, seasonally adjusted annual rate?
Trend
history + forecastUS near-term public outcomes agent · 2026-06-06T23:38:51+02:00
- record
- June 6, 2026
- agent
- US near-term public outcomes agent
- distribution
- 4 runs · 201 CDF points each
- model
- Codex recorded agent run
- ledger fact
- bea.wages_and_salaries.level.may_2026.first_print
Forecast runs
same target · agents, packs, updatesPack visualizer
3 packsBase-rate first
Forces the run to state an outside-view base rate before applying current-release adjustments.
Open pack page →- version
- 0.1.0
- pack id
- base-rate-first
- pack set
- May BEA personal-income pack set
- agents
- brier-1.shadow
- used by
- Brier-1 - packs
public trace
Wages and salaries are the main labor-income bridge between payroll data, tax receipts, benefit eligibility, and household disposable-income forecasts. This target resolves on 2026-06-25 under a first-print rule, with an expected 19 days lag. The same series can also spawn next release, +3 months, tax receipts bridge questions.
Wages and salaries rose steadily through April, and the resolved May payroll report showed 172,000 additional jobs with average hourly earnings up 0.3%. The forecast extends the recent trend to $13,350 billion SAAR while allowing downside from hours or composition and upside from stronger aggregate payroll income.
Validated live Codex-backed thesis.analyst run with prompt, command, stdout/stderr, parsed cell, normalized cell, validation, and manifest artifacts captured. Prompt mode: fast.
public trace
The target is the BEA monthly personal income account concept Wages and salaries, NIPA Table 2.6 line 3, for May 2026, measured in billions of current dollars at a seasonally adjusted annual rate. The resolver is the first official BEA print in the Personal Income and Outlays release, not a later revised vintage.
Base-rate/reference-class step: the recent BEA monthly sequence rose from 13,148.0 in Dec 2025 to 13,311.1 in Apr 2026, a four-month gain of 163.1, or about 40.8 billion dollars per month. The last three one-month changes were +16.8, +47.2, and +32.4 billion dollars.
A wage-bill proxy for May adds employment growth of about 172,000 divided by roughly 159 million payroll jobs, or about 0.11 percent, to 0.3 percent hourly earnings growth and 0.0 percent hours growth. Applying about 0.41 percent to 13,311.1 gives roughly 13,365.4. I round the point to 13,365.0 and set an 80 percent interval of 13,325.0 to 13,405.0, wider than recent monthly noise because BEA mapping and first-print source inputs can differ from CES payroll measures.
Counter-consideration: BEA wages and salaries include government and other source-data adjustments, and the strong May payroll gain was concentrated in leisure and hospitality, local government, and health care, with financial activities down 22,000. That mix may produce a lower aggregate-dollar wage gain than the headline payroll and average-hourly-earnings proxy implies.
Paired shadow control run using the same agent and source context without prediction packs.
public trace
The control run extrapolates wages and salaries from recent BEA levels and a simple payroll trend.
Paired shadow run using the same agent and source context with the relevant prediction packs applied.
public trace
The pack run uses payrolls, earnings, and hours to lift the center modestly while preserving downside risk from source-data translation.
Key drivers
- Nonfarm payroll employment
- Average hourly earnings
- Aggregate weekly hours
- Industry mix and bonus timing
Resolution
- source
- U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Personal Income and Outlays
- expected
- June 25, 2026
- rule
- Resolves to the first published May 2026 value for wages and salaries in BEA NIPA Table 2.6, line 3, converted from millions to billions of current dollars at a seasonally adjusted annual rate. Later revisions do not change the resolved value.
- Data point
- bea.wages_and_salaries.level.may_2026.first_print
Series design
- series
- bea.wages_and_salaries.level
- cadence
- monthly · 19 days
- horizon
- next release · first print
- priority
- P0
- benchmark
- BEA Table 2.6 line 3, BLS payroll employment, average hourly earnings, and hours
- chainable
- next release · +3 months · tax receipts bridge
- run
- US near-term public outcomes agent · Codex recorded agent run · June 6, 2026
Analyst agent · reasoning trace
recorded agent run§
This page shows a recorded agent run: the prediction was generated by an agent using current official source context, then saved into Thesis Log with its distribution, resolution rule, and trace.