Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s real wage growth claim, made on 23 September, is that the Biden years produced negative real wage growth and that the current administration is delivering ‘substantial’ gains. The income data sitting beneath that assertion tells a more complicated story, and the complications are not minor.
What the Broad Income Figures Actually Show
Over Biden’s four full years, real personal income rose from $18,677 billion to $20,338 billion, a gain of $1,661 billion or 8.9%. Real disposable personal income (after taxes, adjusted for inflation) climbed from $15,090 billion to $16,607 billion, up 10.1%. Over the 19 months of Trump’s current term through August 2026, real personal income has risen just 1.0%. Real disposable personal income has moved from $16,635 billion to $16,615 billion: minus $20 billion, down 0.1%. That is not a rounding error; that is a negative number where Bessent is claiming a positive trend.
To be precise about the scope of these figures: ‘real’ means inflation-adjusted, and ‘disposable’ means after taxes. These are not cherry-picked metrics designed to flatter one administration. They are the standard measures the Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes, and on all three of them (total, ex-transfers, and disposable) the Biden-era trajectory outpaces the Trump second-term trajectory by a wide margin.
None of this is to say that headline averages tell the whole story. They demonstrably do not. But Bessent’s claim that Biden produced ‘negative real wage growth’ is not a matter of interpretive disagreement. It is flatly contradicted by the numbers.
Where Bessent’s Preferred Numbers Come From, and What They Miss
The Treasury Secretary is not simply inventing figures. He is selecting them. According to the Los Angeles Times, Bessent’s administration has argued that real hourly wages for blue-collar workers grew 1.7% in the first five months of 2025, a rate the administration describes as the highest for any president since Richard Nixon. That is a defensible data point. The problem is what surrounds it.
TheStreet reports that real average hourly earnings for all private-sector employees fell 0.3% from August 2025 to August 2026. The administration’s preferred blue-collar measure and the broader all-employee measure are moving in opposite directions. Selecting the subset that flatters the narrative while describing it as a general condition is, at minimum, an incomplete characterisation.
Meanwhile, Fortune notes that at no point in 2026, per the Atlanta Fed, has median wage growth for the bottom percentile of earners exceeded that of the top percentile. Bessent has publicly declared the so-called K-shaped economy to be over. The Atlanta Fed’s own tracker suggests otherwise.
The one genuinely positive headline number is real median household income, which Yahoo Finance reports hit $87,460 in 2025, the highest level since tracking began. That is real. But median household income is a snapshot; it does not capture the trajectory under this administration, and it sits awkwardly alongside falling real disposable personal income over the same period, a tension the administration has not addressed.
There is also the question of context around the Biden numbers themselves. A portion of the real income gains recorded under Biden reflect the unwinding of pandemic-era distortions as the labour market tightened during the economic reopening. That complicates any straightforward attribution. It does not, however, make negative numbers positive, which is what Bessent’s claim requires.
The broader pattern here is familiar: an administration selects the sub-measure that works, describes it as the general condition, and counts on the headline not being challenged. The consensus coverage of Bessent’s 23 September statement has largely focused on whether the claim is ‘misleading.’ The more direct reading is that, on the headline income measures the government itself publishes, it is wrong, and the Atlanta Fed’s distributional data suggests that even the measures where the numbers are better are not reaching the workers the administration most frequently invokes.
Real disposable personal income under Trump’s current term is, through August 2026, negative. That number is not going to improve by selecting a different cohort of workers and a different time window.
