Average salary by age: How does your paycheck compare?

The average salary in the U.S. is between $64,500 and $69,800, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But those figures vary widely based on age, with young people earlier in their career earning less before peaking in their 40s and then dropping again as they near retirement.

That’s what a recent analysis by Investopedia found. The analysis looked at the median salary of different age groups. READ MORE

SEC Proposes Overhaul of Executive Pay Disclosure Rules

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is advancing an initiative to modernize how publicly traded firms report their leadership compensation packages. SEC Chair Paul Atkins has characterized the existing framework, unchanged since 1992, as a "Frankenstein patchwork of rules."

Public companies presently must file detailed reports about remuneration provided to their five highest-compensated officers, specifically naming the CEO, CFO, and three additional top earners. These filings must include methodology explanations and performance-based compensation breakdowns. READ MORE

AI Isn’t Coming for Our Jobs. It’s Coming for Our Wages.

The Economist recently ran a cover entitled “Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse,” citing widespread fear among the American public of artificial-intelligence-induced job losses. Such fearmongering is far from new. Information technology breakthroughs have led to many such announcements over the last few decades.

In the 1990s, we had the computer scare, prompted by best-selling authors such as Jeremy Rifkin and Viviane Forrester. More recently, in 2013, we had the robot menace, when an Oxford study estimated that 47 percent of jobs in the United States were at risk of computerization. At both times, such prophecies coincided with mass unemployment, not caused by technology but by economic recessions driven by financial instability and austerity policies. Yet such stories helped to naturalize and depoliticize unemployment. READ MORE

The 1 Big Compensation Decision Founders Should Never Hand to AI

AI has quickly made itself useful across hiring. It can sift through résumés, draft a job description in seconds, and match a role to market benchmarks. For a small company that never had a compensation team, that’s a genuine unlock.

But things get thornier when AI has a say in what the actual salaries that companies pay their employees should be. And that’s the bigger question that founders now have to grapple with—whether they should let AI set the number itself. That pressure is only growing, and this year it found a sharp edge in the law. READ MORE

College degrees becoming less valuable as salary premiums plummet, unemployment climbs

Break out the caps — and frowns.

Benefits of higher education appear to be waning as salary premiums shrank and unemployment among young graduates climbed in recent years, according to shocking new figures.

Recent American college grads earned 50% more than contemporaries who only held high school diplomas in 2025, according to numbers from the Federal Reserve recently compiled by the Economist. READ MORE

The 2026 Early-Career Compensation Index: Starting Salaries by Major & Location

Navigating your first full-time post-grad job search can feel like solving a puzzle where half the pieces keep changing shape. Between shifting economic priorities, evolving remote-work policies, and expanded pay transparency laws, understanding what you are actually worth in the 2026 job market is essential.

Whether you are evaluating your first job offer, preparing for a campus interview, or setting realistic targets for your fall application cycle, this benchmark guide breaks down current starting salaries across top academic majors, geographic cost adjustments, and total compensation structures. READ MORE

Thinking about relocating? This is the salary you'll need to earn to live comfortably in the US

Planning a relocation to the United States? A new study examined how much you would need to earn each year to live comfortably in every state. Nearly half of U.S. states now require an annual salary of more than $100,000 (about 300,000 shekels) for a single adult to live “comfortably,” according to an analysis by fintech company SmartAsset. READ MORE

1 Microsoft Team Has a Salary Band Nearly 2 Times Higher Than the Rest, New Data Shows

An internal spreadsheet detailing the salaries of nearly 600 Microsoft employees shows that some of the company’s highest-ranking engineers and technical leaders reported base salaries of up to $280,000 a year, more than double the $111,000 to $134,000 reported by many entry-level workers.

The employee-created document, leaked to Business Insider, includes self-reported information on base salaries, raises, cash bonuses, and stock awards. The leak comes as the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant has stepped up its search for AI-focused talent, despite thousands of layoffs earlier this year. READ MORE

Huge Leak Shows Microsoft Salaries That’ll Make You Jump Out the Window

A newly leaked spreadsheet has revealed just how wild salaries are at one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

Obtained by Business Insider, the spreadsheet compiled voluntarily-disclosed pay rates from some 600 Microsoft employees at various levels of seniority. While the tech giant employs over 220,000 people overall, it still provides a valuable snapshot into the work life at one of the largest tech firms in the game. READ MORE

CEOs earn 614 times more than workers at US’s 100 lowest-paying corporations

The average CEO of the US’s 100 largest, lowest-paying corporations earned 614 times more than their average worker last year, according to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

IPS’s latest executive excess report analyzed compensation at the 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay. Between 2019 and 2025, CEO compensation increased 41.4%, unadjusted for inflation, twice as much as the median worker pay increased at these firms during the same period, at 20.7%.

Inflation also outpaced worker pay increases, rising by 25.9%. READ MORE

New legislation would boost the overtime pay premium and benefit 13.4 million workers

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) set workplace norms that are still in use almost ninety years later. The FLSA established the 40-hour standard workweek and overtime protections for workers. It guaranteed pay at a rate of 1.5 times the standard hourly wage for work past the 40-hour mark. Overtime protections were designed as a safeguard for workers—to prevent employers from overworking employees and to require firms to pay workers fairly for their labor when they put in extra time on the job. By making long hours more expensive, the overtime premium incentivizes employers to hire more workers and spread the work around.

But as the country’s workforce has shifted over the nearly 90 years since the FLSA was enacted, the FLSA’s overtime rate has not. READ MORE

Microsoft Compensation Data Reveals Pay Gaps Across AI, Cloud And Technology Teams

A leaked internal compensation database has offered a glimpse into how Microsoft employees are compensated across businesses including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, security and gaming.

According to reports, the spreadsheet contains compensation information voluntarily submitted by nearly 600 Microsoft employees. The data includes base salaries, annual pay increases, cash bonuses and stock awards across different job levels and business units. READ MORE

‘Competitive salary’ isn’t the red flag jobseekers think it is, research finds

Jobseekers sometimes try to read between the lines of job listings to try to determine what the employer doesn’t want them to know. But when it comes to the ubiquitous phrase “competitive salary,” the ad usually means just what it says. 

In fact, competitive salary usually means higher, not lower, pay, a JobLeads analysis of more than 21.5 million job postings found. This holds true across all industries and contract types, as well as most seniority levels. Jobs with these two words offer a median salary that is between $5,270 and $13,972 higher than standard postings. READ MORE

Salary Or Distribution? North Carolina Court Limits Charging Order Reach In Joint Entities Opinion

A creditor may reach 100% of an LLC's distributions to a debtor. However, a creditor may only reach 25% of a debtor's wages after tax withholdings. That's a big difference. But in the context of an LLC where a debtor performs labor, is the money received therefrom to be characterized as a distribution or as wages?

Two dentists, Sharon Cobham and Nicole LeCann, formed a limited liability company called Joint Entities, LLC. Through that entity, Cobham and LeCann ran various dental practices from 2000 to 2010. READ MORE

Here’s the Salary It Takes to Live Comfortably in Each U.S. State in 2026

As housing, grocery, transportation and other essential costs pressure household budgets, earning a six-figure salary no longer guarantees financial comfort in much of the U.S. A single adult now needs at least $80,000 a year to live comfortably in every state, while the threshold exceeds $100,000 in nearly half of states. For a family of four, the income needed to live comfortably is as much as $329,000. READ MORE

Tesla paid Elon Musk 2.5m times more as CEO than its average worker in 2025

Elon Musk received over 2.5m times as much compensation at Tesla as the company’s average worker, according to a new report on the growing gap between top corporate executives and their workers.

Musk’s $158.3bn pay deal was an outlier but came as the gap between CEO and worker pay continued to grow. Excluding Musk, last year the average ratio of CEO to worker pay for the top S&P 500 companies was 312 to 1, up from a 285:1 ratio in 2024. With Musk, the average pay ratio was 5,387:1, according to the executive pay watch report released this week by the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US. READ MORE

S&P 500 CEO pay jumps to record as Musk-inspired compensation plans spread

Extraordinary corporate compensation deals for Elon Musk have opened the door ​for the CEOs of other S&P 500 companies to win huge paydays, a new study shows.

Even excluding the CEO of Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab and ‌SpaceX (SPCX.O), opens new tab, average compensation for chief executives in the S&P 500 soared 21% to $22.8 million in 2025, according to data to be released later on Thursday by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. That is the highest amount since the top U.S. labor federation began tracking the figure in the 1990s. READ MORE