THE AVERAGE WOMAN STILL EARNS $11,620 LESS THAN A MAN IN 2026, DESPITE INCREASES

Women’s pay grew faster than men’s in 2025, but the gap runs far wider in many white-collar jobs and has grown worse for Black women

Women’s pay grew faster than men’s in 2025, closing the gender pay gap by more than three cents in a single year, yet the typical woman working full time still takes home $11,620 less than the typical man. A new analysis of federal pay data by employment law firm Moon Law Group draws on Census Bureau figures to show that the gap runs far wider in many white-collar jobs, where women earn as little as 63 cents for every dollar paid to men.

The analysis finds that women’s median earnings rose 3.2% after inflation to $60,760, while men’s pay held flat over the same period, lifting women to 83.9 cents for every dollar men earn. On the surface that looks like one of the strongest years for pay equality in recent memory, and for many working women it will have meant a real rise in what they take home. Yet the jump mostly wins back ground that had already been lost, because the gap stood at 84 cents in 2022, which means that after three years of ups and downs women have ended up right back where they started.

The Gap Grows Wider at the Top

The picture gets worse the further up the career ladder women climb, and the jobs with some of the widest gaps are the ones that demand years of training, long hours and high levels of skill. Women who work as chief executives earn a median $2,325 a week, against $3,098 for men in the same role, which leaves them with just 75 cents on the dollar and a gap worth about $40,200 over a full year. Reaching the very top of a company, in other words, does not close the gap, and the dollar cost of it only grows as pay rises.

Even in human resources, the field that sets pay for everyone else, women hold four in five manager jobs yet earn only 76 cents for every dollar paid to the men who work beside them. That gap sits in the very department that most workers would turn to if they had a question about fair pay, and it shows how deeply the problem runs even where women make up the clear majority of the workforce.

Some of the widest gaps of all sit in finance, design and tech. Female loan officers earn just 63.3 cents on the dollar, the lowest figure in the analysis, while women architects earn 64.3 cents and lose close to $44,000 a year compared with men in the same field, the largest yearly gap on the list. Women computer programmers earn 66 cents and women financial advisors 68.4 cents, which means that in each of these careers a woman gives up well over $30,000 a year. Even women lawyers, who earn some of the highest weekly pay in the analysis, take home only 80.3 cents for every dollar their male colleagues earn, a gap worth almost $30,000 a year.

These job-level figures come from Bureau of Labor Statistics weekly pay data for 2025, with each yearly gap worked out by multiplying the weekly gap by 52 weeks. Because the figures are medians, they compare what the typical woman and the typical man earn in each job rather than workers doing the very same tasks, but the pattern repeats across such a wide spread of careers that it is hard to explain away as chance.

Not Every Woman Shared in the Gains

While women’s pay rose overall, the gains were far from even, and for some women 2025 brought a step backward rather than a step forward. Among full-time workers, Black women were the only group whose pay gap got worse in 2025, as their typical full-time earnings fell 1.7% to $51,950 at the same time as women overall gained 3.2%. That leaves Black women with just 64 cents for every dollar paid to white men, down from 69 cents in 2022, so the slide has been building for several years rather than showing up as a one-off dip.

“Progress on a spreadsheet doesn’t mean progress on a paycheck,” said Kane Moon, founding partner of Moon Law Group. “The national gap looks smaller this year, but Black women are being handed a bigger one. That’s not a rounding error… That’s the group getting left out of the win.”

Latinas face an even steeper gap, with typical full-time earnings of $48,670, which works out to just under 60 cents for every dollar paid to white men. For millions of women in these groups, the headline gains of 2025 have done little to change what lands in their bank accounts each month, and the national figure that suggests steady progress hides a very different story for the women who were already furthest behind.

Why the Gains May Not Last

There are also signs that the overall progress may not hold. A second federal measure, the Bureau of Labor Statistics weekly pay data, shows women slipping from 82.7 cents on the dollar in 2024 to 82.1 cents in 2025, moving in the opposite direction to the Census figures. The 2025 BLS figures are based on 11 months of data rather than 12, because October data were not collected during the federal shutdown, which adds a further note of caution to any claim that the gap is now closing for good.

The longer view shows just how slowly change has come. Women first reached 60 cents on the dollar in 1976, then 70 cents in 1990 and 80 cents in 2016, and in the near decade since then they have gained only about four cents more. Each step forward has taken longer than the one before it, and the latest data suggests that the women with the most ground to make up are the ones being left out of even the slow progress that has been made.

The overall figures in this analysis come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Income in the United States: 2025 report and are adjusted for inflation to 2025 dollars, while the figures by race draw on Census data reported by TheGrio and the Center for American Progress.