Average salary in 1960, and 1960s prices: what a week’s pay bought

In 1960 the median American family took in $5,620 for the year. A man working full time all year earned about $5,400, a woman about $3,300, and the average worker below the supervisor level made $2.09 an hour. A pound of bread cost about 20 cents, a gallon of gas 31 cents and a stamp 4 cents. The average new car went for $3,030, and the median home was worth $11,900.

Across the country, the median family income was $5,620 in 1960, about $64,000 in today’s money. A man who worked full time all year earned about $5,400, and a woman about $3,300. The average worker below the supervisor level made $2.09 an hour, which came to about $80 a week before taxes. If you’ve seen a 1960 “average wage” of about $4,000, that’s Social Security’s national wage index, a different measure from the hourly pay used here.

The government also drew up an ordinary city family for its budgets: a 38-year-old husband with a job, a wife “not employed outside home,” a boy of 13 and a girl of 8. They rented five rooms and a bath. “The wife does all the cooking, cleaning, and laundry without paid help,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics wrote. Her budget gave her a gas or electric stove, a refrigerator and a washing machine.

In the fall of 1959 the bureau priced out a year of the budget family’s life. The level was “modest but adequate,” it said, “neither a ‘minimum maintenance’ nor a ‘luxury’ level.” The budget allowed a used car every three years, the upkeep of a TV set and, for the first time, a telephone.

Even in Houston, the cheapest of the 20 cities priced, that life cost $5,370 a year, close to what the median family had in all. The bureau’s own guess was that big-city families like this one, with a single earner, really made $7,000 to $7,500, well above the national median. The budget kept the wife at home. Among all American women, 56% had some income of their own by 1960, from a job or otherwise, up from 39% in 1947.

What a week’s pay covered

That $80 or so paid for a 38.6-hour week, and factory hands did a little better, at $2.26 an hour. For a couple with two school-age kids, a week’s groceries took $23.70 of it on the Agriculture Department’s low-cost plan for April 1960, more than a quarter of the check. On the liberal plan they took $36.20, closer to half.

Rent was the other bill to plan around. The median, utilities included, was $71 a month, or roughly $16 out of each week’s pay.

What was left of the week went out a nickel or a quarter at a time. A 1-ounce chocolate bar cost a nickel at the store. Milk came two ways in the government’s price list, 24.7 cents a quart at the grocery and 26.0 cents if the milkman left it on the step.

Minutes of work, then and now

Prices 66 years apart are easier to compare in work, counted as the minutes or hours the average worker had to put in to pay for each thing.

Food got much cheaper in work. A dozen eggs went from 16 minutes to 4 and a gallon of milk from 28 to 8, while hamburger and gas barely moved. Housing went the other way, with a month’s rent rising from 34 hours to 46 and a typical home from about 5,690 hours to 11,060, nearly twice as many. Hours for a new car hardly changed. So pay outran the grocery bill, but not the rent or the price of a house.

Each price is divided by the average worker’s hourly pay in its own year, $2.09 in 1960 and $32.60 in September 2026. The two pay figures come from different government series. In 1964, the first year both cover, the current series ran about 7% higher than the old one, so the 1960 pay may be a bit low and the 1960 minutes a bit long. Rent and the house are Census figures for 1960 and 2024.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics ran the same sum for a factory worker in September 1960, in Table 9 of its Bulletin 1301. It came out at 5 minutes for a pound of bread and 16 for a dozen eggs, within a minute of ours. The bureau used factory pay, $2.26 an hour, where ours is the average worker’s $2.09, which is why bread shows 5 there and 6 in the table. Its point then was that food took less work than it had in 1953.

Minutes of work each food cost, 1953 and 1960, from the government’s Bulletin 1301 (1961). U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, public domain, via FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

A TV for Christmas, on easy terms

A 23-inch Silvertone TV on a lowboy base, “both yours for the TV price only,” went for $179.95 cash or $8.50 a month in the 1960 Sears Christmas Book. The cash price was more than two weeks’ pay for the average worker. A 4-transistor pocket radio in smoke gray was $16.50.

Credit was the pitch on the inside cover, which opened with “IT’S MAGIC!” and promised that with Sears Easy Terms “your Christmas shopping money is increased 10 times in purchasing power!” In Sears’s arithmetic, $30 used as a 10% down payment bought $300 worth of presents. On TV sets, washers, ranges and the other appliances on its list, there was “no monthly payment until February, yes, February!”

New cars went home the same way. Of the people who bought one in 1960, 61% borrowed the money or paid in installments, and by then 77% of families owned a car.

Who made less than the average

Hotel and motel workers got $1.10 an hour. The pay table that printed it carried a footnote, “Money payments only,” because board, room, uniforms and tips weren’t counted. Workers in general-merchandise stores (department stores, five-and-dimes, mail-order houses) made $1.40, and their week ran just 34.7 hours.

Factory pay depended on the state. In Mississippi a factory hand earned $60.50 a week, in Michigan $112.00. Southern families as a whole had about two-thirds of what families in the West took in.

City families had about twice the money income of farm families, whose median was $2,875. Many farmers, the Census Bureau pointed out, got “an important part of their income in the form of goods produced and consumed on the farm rather than in money.” A hired hand earned $6.60 a day without board.

For Black and other nonwhite families, as the tables of the day grouped them, the median was $3,233, a little over half the $5,835 that white families had.

Families headed by someone 65 or older had only $2,900. Counting every family in the country, the Census report found that “somewhat more than one in every five families reported less than $3,000 in money income in 1960.”

The $1 minimum, and who it left out

The federal minimum wage was $1 an hour, where it had stood since March 1, 1956, and it didn’t reach everyone. Large retail and service businesses came under the law only with the 1961 amendments, and laundries and large hotels, motels, restaurants and farms not until 1966.

On May 5, 1961, John F. Kennedy signed the bill that raised it. He said no one working in interstate commerce, for a company of substantial size, should have to work “for less than a dollar twenty-five cents an hour, or fifty dollars a week.” He called that “a very minimum wage.” By his count, the bill brought in 3.6 million people who hadn’t been covered.

Workers the law already reached went to $1.15 that September and $1.25 in 1963. But the newly covered started at $1.00 and didn’t get to $1.25 until Sept. 3, 1965.

By the end of the decade

Prices rose about 24% from 1960 to 1969 by the government’s index. Incomes rose faster, and the median family took in $9,433 in 1969. The average worker’s pay had reached $3.04 an hour, and the minimum had been $1.60 since Feb. 1, 1968.

Regular gas hardly moved, at 34.8 cents a gallon on average in 1969, less than 4 cents above where the decade began. At $3.04 an hour, that gallon took about 7 minutes of work, down from 9 in 1960.