What Do Wages in Online Job Postings Tell us About Wage Growth?

We use data from millions of online job postings to construct monthly estimates of annual growth in advertised wages in the US, UK, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain from 2019 to 2022. The resulting wage growth tracker is a source of timely and forward-looking data on the wages of the marginal worker and serves as a useful leading indicator of momentum in wage dynamics. We show that the online job postings data benchmarks well against official sources on job vacancies, new hires, and wage levels. In both Europe and the US, growth in advertised wages accelerated sharply after the pandemic. Granular data shows a heterogeneous pattern of post-pandemic wage growth, with lower-paid jobs experiencing stronger wage growth in most of the countries in our sample. We attribute this to stronger labor demand for lower-paid jobs coming out of the pandemic.