Number of full-time employees in the U.S. 1990-2020
Employment and salary
The number of full-time employees in the United States has increased by almost 20 million people since 1991. In 1990, there were 98.67 million full-time employees which had increased to 116.31 million employees in 2013. After the recession, the number of full-time employees dropped and part-time employment increased significantly. There were about 25.2 million part-time employees in the country as of December 2020. Full-time employment usually is associated with certain benefits that are otherwise not offered to part-time employees, such as health insurance and annual leave. In the United States, the Affordable Care Act defines a full-time workweek as 30 hours or more.
Salary in the United States can vary greatly between ethnicities and gender. The median weekly earnings of a full-time salary worker, was 1,174 U.S. dollars for the Asian population, but only 735 U.S. dollars for the Black or African American population. In 2019, the median hourly wage for female salary workers earned an hourly was 14.85 U.S. dollars, while males earned an hourly wage of 16.76 U.S. dollars. Based on a constant value, the wage among salary workers has fluctuated since 1979, where employees earned a median of 14.37 U.S. dollars compared to 15.35 U.S. dollars in 2019, the minimum wage in the United States was established at 7.25 U.S. dollars per hour as of 2009.