Pandemic Inflation Took Away 7% Of Your Wages, And You Never Got Them Back

New research from the University of Chicago and payroll provider ADP estimates that inflation permanently took about 7% of Americans’ wages in real terms. The study, published this week as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, compares wage and inflation trends against what wages would have been if the pre-pandemic trajectory from 2017 to 2019 had continued. As of December 2025, real wages were 7% lower than that counterfactual. The authors built an inflation-adjusted “real wage” index using ADP payroll records covering about one in seven U.S. workers and cross-checked it with the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker. They find that after inflation surged to 9% in June 2022, many workers’ raises lagged prices, and losses were never fully recovered.