The Claim

Oversaw the largest increase in blue-collar wage growth in nearly 60 years.

The Claim, Unpacked

What is literally being asserted?

That during Trump’s second term (January 20, 2025 through January 20, 2026), blue-collar wages grew at a rate not seen since approximately 1966. This would make 2025 the best year for blue-collar wage increases since the mid-1960s.

What is being implied but not asserted?

That Trump administration policies — deregulation, immigration enforcement, trade policy — caused blue-collar wages to surge. That working-class Americans are meaningfully better off. That this represents a historic achievement attributable to presidential action.

What is conspicuously absent?

The data source. BLS does not use “blue-collar” as a statistical category. The closest standard proxy is “production and nonsupervisory employees,” which covers about 80% of private nonfarm workers. By every available measure of this category — nominal hourly earnings, real hourly earnings, real median weekly earnings, the Employment Cost Index — 2025 was not the best year in 60 years, or even close.

Also absent: the distinction between nominal and real wage growth. Even if nominal wages were growing rapidly (they were not, relative to history), inflation determines whether workers can actually buy more. The high-inflation era of the 1970s and early 1980s saw nominal wage growth of 7-9% annually — far above 2025’s approximately 4% — but those gains were consumed by even higher inflation. The claim does not specify nominal or real, which obscures rather than illuminates.

Also absent: the post-pandemic context. The 2020-2023 period saw the largest sustained wage acceleration for low-wage workers in decades — a trend driven by pandemic labor shortages, fiscal stimulus, and wage compression that began under Trump’s first term, accelerated under Biden, and was moderating by the time Trump returned to office.

Evidence Assessment

Established Facts

BLS data shows nominal wage growth for production and nonsupervisory workers was 4.04% in 2025 (annual average), decelerating from 4.16% in 2024 and well below the 2022 peak of 6.39%. The 12-month percent change in average hourly earnings (series CES0500000008) peaked at 7.0% in January 2022 — the highest reading since 1982. By December 2025, the 12-month change had fallen to 3.8%. Every year from 1965 through 1982 had higher annual nominal wage growth than 2025. The 1970s routinely saw annual growth of 6-8%, peaking at 8.58% in 1981. There is no plausible reading of nominal CES data that supports the “nearly 60 years” claim. ¹

Inflation-adjusted (real) wage growth for production and nonsupervisory workers was approximately 1.1% in 2025 (December year-over-year). With nominal wage growth of 3.8% (December 2025 YoY) and CPI inflation of 2.7% (December 2025 YoY), real hourly earnings grew approximately 1.1%. This is a positive gain — workers’ purchasing power improved — but it is not historically remarkable. Similar or larger real gains occurred in multiple years of the 1985-1986, 1997-2000, 2009, 2015-2016, and 2019 periods. ²

Strong Inferences

Real median weekly earnings grew 1.36% in 2025, a moderate but not historically exceptional gain. Real median usual weekly earnings (BLS series LEU0252881600A, in 1982-84 dollars) rose from $369 in 2024 to $374 in 2025. This is a meaningful improvement in purchasing power, but smaller than 2009 (2.99%), 1999 (2.49%), 1998 (2.23%), 1986 (2.19%), 2015 (2.10%), and 1985 (1.91%). It is comparable to 2023 (1.38%) and 2016 (1.76%). The 2020 figure (5.85%) is the largest in the dataset but was driven by a compositional effect — low-wage workers losing jobs during the pandemic, mechanically raising the median for remaining workers. ³

The Employment Cost Index for private sector wages and salaries grew 3.36% year-over-year in Q4 2025, a decelerating trend. The ECI (series ECIWAG) is a fixed-weight index that controls for changes in occupational and industry mix, making it the most methodologically rigorous measure of underlying wage growth. Its 3.36% annual rate in Q4 2025 is below the 4-5% rates of 2022-2023 and shows continued moderation, not acceleration. ⁴

The post-pandemic wage compression — which disproportionately benefited low-wage workers — began in 2020-2021 and was moderating by 2025. The 2020-2023 period saw an extraordinary narrowing of the wage distribution. The 10th percentile of usual weekly earnings grew 9.52% in 2022 alone, and 5.81% in 2019 — both far exceeding 2025’s 2.99%. This wage compression was driven by pandemic-era labor shortages, expanded unemployment insurance, fiscal stimulus, and the tight labor market that resulted. By 2025, this compression was moderating as labor market tightness eased. The trend that benefited low-wage workers began under Trump’s first term, accelerated under Biden, and was decelerating under Trump’s second term — the opposite of what the claim implies. ⁵

There is no standard BLS or FRED metric that supports the “largest increase in nearly 60 years” claim for 2025. We examined: CES average hourly earnings (nominal), CES average hourly earnings (12-month percent change), real median weekly earnings (annual), real median weekly earnings (percent change), the Employment Cost Index, CPI-adjusted real wage calculations, and 10th percentile earnings growth. None shows 2025 as the best year since the mid-1960s. The nominal CES data shows every year from 1965-1982 exceeded 2025. The real median weekly earnings data shows 2020, 2009, 1999, 1998, 1986, and 2015 all exceeded 2025. The claim appears to be unfounded by any standard measure. ⁶

The claim may rely on a cherry-picked metric or a non-standard calculation, but its construction cannot be replicated from public data. One possibility is a cumulative multi-year calculation that captures the 2020-2025 period inclusive of the pandemic-era wage surge — but this would attribute gains from 2020-2024 to the current administration. Another possibility is a comparison of specific months rather than annual data, or a selective industry subsector. Without the White House disclosing its data source, the claim cannot be verified, and no standard economic metric replicates it. ⁷

What the Evidence Shows

The BLS data tells a clear story: nominal wage growth for production and nonsupervisory workers — the standard proxy for “blue-collar” workers — peaked during the post-pandemic recovery period of 2021-2022, when annual growth rates reached 5-7%. By 2025, growth had moderated to approximately 4%, a continuation of the gradual deceleration that began in late 2022. This 4% growth rate is respectable but historically unremarkable — it is lower than every year from 1965 to 1982, and lower than the 2018-2024 average.

The more economically meaningful measure is real wage growth — what workers can actually buy with their pay after accounting for inflation. Here, 2025 was a positive year: with inflation running around 2.7% and nominal wages growing around 4%, workers gained roughly 1.1-1.3% in real purchasing power. This is genuinely good news for workers, and it represents a recovery from the real wage losses of 2021-2022 when inflation outstripped wage growth. But a 1.1-1.3% real gain is not historically exceptional. Multiple years in the 1985-1986, 1997-2000, 2009, 2015-2016, and 2019 periods saw comparable or larger real gains.

The claim’s “nearly 60 years” framing — pointing back to approximately 1966 — is the most demonstrably false element. In 1966, nominal wage growth for production and nonsupervisory workers was 3.99%, virtually identical to 2025’s 4.04%. By 1967 it was 4.42%, by 1968 it was 5.93%, and it continued climbing through the inflationary 1970s. On nominal terms, 2025 barely matches 1966 and is exceeded by the subsequent 16 years. On real terms, 2025’s gains are moderate and exceeded by multiple individual years in the dataset. There is simply no way to reach “nearly 60 years” from any standard wage metric.

The deeper irony is that the genuine wage story of recent years — the post-pandemic compression that lifted low-wage workers’ pay at historically rapid rates — peaked in 2021-2022 and was already moderating by the time this administration took office. The tight labor market that drove those gains was a product of pandemic dynamics, fiscal policy, and demographic shifts that predate the current administration. The 2025 data represents the tail end of that compression, not a new acceleration.

The Bottom Line

The claim is mostly false. No standard measure of wage growth for production/nonsupervisory workers — the BLS proxy closest to “blue-collar” — shows 2025 as the best year in nearly 60 years. Nominal wage growth in 2025 (4.04%) was lower than every year from 1965-1982 and lower than 2018-2024. Real wage growth (approximately 1.1-1.3%) was positive but comparable to multiple recent years and well below the highs of the post-pandemic surge period.

Steel-man: Real wages did grow in 2025, and this is a genuine positive for workers after the painful inflation-driven real wage losses of 2021-2022. The tight labor market that supported continued wage growth in 2025 was partly maintained by strong consumer demand and low unemployment. Workers were genuinely better off in purchasing power terms at the end of 2025 than at the end of 2024. But this moderate, positive real wage growth is a continuation of a trend that began in 2023 as inflation fell below nominal wage growth — not a 60-year record. The “nearly 60 years” framing is unsupported by any publicly available data, and the word “oversaw” does its usual heavy lifting, implying causation where the administration’s contribution to this trend is at most marginal.

Sources

Footnotes

1. BLS Current Employment Statistics, Series CES0500000008, “Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Total Private,” 12-month percent change. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000008?output_view=pct_12mths; FRED Series AHETPI, annual percent change. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI ↩

2. BLS CES average hourly earnings (CES0500000008) and CPI-U (CUUR0000SA0). Nominal wage growth 3.8% minus CPI 2.7% = approximately 1.1% real wage growth, December 2025 year-over-year. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000008?output_view=pct_12mths; https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SA0?output_view=pct_12mths ↩

3. FRED Series LEU0252881600A, “Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over.” https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252881600A ↩

4. FRED Series ECIWAG, “Employment Cost Index: Wages and Salaries: Private Industry Workers.” https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECIWAG ↩

5. FRED Series LEU0252911200A, “Employed full time: Median usual weekly earnings: Wage and salary workers: 10th percentile.” https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252911200A. Annual growth: 2019 (5.81%), 2022 (9.52%), 2025 (2.99%). ↩

6. Cross-reference of all metrics cited in footnotes 1-5. No metric shows 2025 as the highest since the mid-1960s. ↩

7. The White House “365 Wins” article does not cite a data source for the blue-collar wage growth claim. https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/01/365-wins-in-365-days-president-trumps-return-marks-new-era-of-success-prosperity/ ↩