Wage Growth Is Increasingly Concentrated at the Top

• Wage inequality in advertised pay is widening: since 2022, salaries from new job postings for the highest-paying deciles have risen far faster than those for lower-paying roles.

• This divergence has accelerated over the past year as inflation has picked up. Between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026, real advertised salaries rose 7.5% and 6.4% for ninth- and tenth-decile jobs, respectively, while the lowest-decile jobs saw a 2.2% decline.

• Employers are paying up for knowledge workers. Wage increases within the Professional Services, Information, and Healthcare sectors account for most of the recent growth among the highest-paying positions.
  

The U.S. labor market increasingly resembles a K-shaped economy. While overall wage growth has cooled from its post-pandemic peak, employers continue to offer substantial premiums for the highest-paying jobs, even as wage gains for lower-paying positions have slowed dramatically. Rather than moving together, different segments of the labor market are increasingly traveling in different directions.

Using our COSMOS job postings dataset, we track advertised salaries on new postings: what employers are offering today, rather than what current workers already earn, which is what is captured by typical wage measures like average hourly earnings or the Employment Cost Index. By tracking what firms are offering to fill open roles now, we can show where hiring demand and wage pressure are building before those shifts appear in economy-wide pay data.

Through that lens, we find that wage inequality in advertised salaries has risen markedly over the past several years, especially recently. The highest-paying postings are pulling further ahead, while wage growth at the bottom of the distribution has largely flattened. The result is an increasingly K-shaped labor market, where competition for specialized, high-skilled talent remains intense even as conditions soften elsewhere.

Is Wage Inequality Increasing Again?

Although advertised wages have risen across nearly the entire salary distribution, the magnitude of those increases differs dramatically. Top-decile postings have added tens of thousands of dollars in advertised compensation since 2022, whereas salaries for the lowest-paid positions have changed relatively little.

Looking at the overall distribution of posted wages, we can see this story clearly. Compared with a few years ago, both the median and mean advertised salary have increased, but the mean has pulled further away from the median. That widening gap indicates that the upper tail of the salary distribution is stretching faster than the middle, as the chart below shows.

How Fast Are Advertised Salaries Growing at the Top vs. the Bottom?

Over the past year, the K-shaped pattern has become even more pronounced, with the gap between earnings growth exacerbated by higher inflation. Between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026, advertised salaries for bottom-decile jobs actually fell 2.2% in real terms (after adjusting for 3.8% CPI inflation), while ninth-decile jobs rose 7.5% and the top decile rose 6.4%.

In other words, job posting data suggests that the lowest-paying roles may be losing ground to rising prices, while employers’ willingness to raise pay becomes increasingly concentrated among already well-compensated roles.

Which Industries Are Driving Top-End Wage Growth?

Professional & Business Services, Information, and Education & Health together account for the overwhelming majority of recent wage growth among top-decile postings. These sectors continue to compete for workers with specialized technical, professional, and healthcare expertise, where labor demand remains resilient despite broader cooling in hiring.

This finding also goes against the idea that AI is mainly a white-collar shock. Recent Revelio Labs research shows that AI adoption is more strongly associated with weaker wage growth at the bottom of the pay distribution than at the top. In addition, we find that firms investing most heavily in AI continue to expand headcounts.

Together, these findings look less like broad displacement of high earners and more like a labor market that continues to reward specialized talent even as automation and uncertainty weigh more heavily on lower-paid, routine work.

What Does a K-Shaped Labor Market Mean for Workers and Employers?

The labor market has entered a more unequal phase of the post-pandemic recovery. Rather than broad-based wage increases, employers are increasingly directing larger raises toward the highest-paying jobs, while wage growth for lower-paying positions has slowed considerably. The result is a labor market that rewards specialization at the top while leaving the lowest-paid workers most exposed to rising prices.

For policymakers and businesses alike, headline wage measures tell only part of the story. Looking beneath the averages reveals widening wage inequality: a labor market where the competition for top talent continues to reshape the wage distribution.