Find out how much your pay should have risen in the cost of living crisis

Costs for average Americans have gone up 20 per cent since Joe Biden took office in January 2021

The 2024 presidential election is just around the corner. Joe Biden is no longer on the Democratic ticket, but his record on the cost of living looms large over his successor.
Annual inflation has averaged 5.2 per cent since Mr Biden entered the White House—more than double the Federal Reserve’s two per cent target.
Kamala Harris, the vice president, has faced criticism over the administration’s record throughout her presidential campaign. She recently conceded that bills were “just too high” in America.
The average full-time worker at the start of the Biden presidency made $4,270 a month before taxes—equivalent to $51,250 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
They would have needed a $10,000 pay raise since then just to afford the same lifestyle today.
If earnings had risen in line with inflation, the average paycheck should have been $61,600 by July 2024.
In reality, real wages have fallen, and the average wage is barely over $60,000—leaving a typical employee more than $1,500 out of pocket.
The blame can’t be laid entirely at Mr Biden’s door: oil and gas prices began to soar in 2021, aggravated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, dragging up production and transport costs for all businesses.
But the consumer price index in the US rose faster and earlier than it did elsewhere—a fact linked by a number of economists to the president’s March 2021 American Rescue Plan.
The $1.9 trillion in spending kick-started the labor market and GDP growth after the pandemic, but is believed to have helped push inflation towards its highest annual rate in 40 years—hitting 9.1 per cent the following June.
While its impact will have been felt hardest by the poorer households—the United States Department of Agriculture has estimated that the annual cost of groceries for a typical family of four has gone up by $2,500 since the start of Mr Biden’s term—the most well-off have also been affected.
Someone on the cusp of the top 10 per cent of earners was making $146,500 a year in January 2021. To have a similar level of spending power now, they would need to be taking in nearly $30,000 more, or a salary of $176,000.
The effects of the past four years’ inflation were also felt differently across the country. Price rises were most acute in the Mountain region, encompassing states like New Mexico, Colorado, and Montana, up 22.1 per cent overall, BLS data show.
The most sheltered states were those in New England, where cumulative inflation came to just 17.2 per cent.