U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since 1947, at least

As corporate earnings soar and the U.S. GDP balloons, the American workforce isn’t feeling the same boom. American workers are taking home less of the country’s overall wealth, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show, and employment in the U.S. is set to continue to slow.

Labor share, or the portion of the U.S.’s economic output that workers receive through salary and wages, decreased to 53.8% in the third quarter of 2025, its lowest level since the BLS started recording this data in 1947, according to its labor productivity and costs report published last week. In the previous quarter, labor share was at 54.6%. This decade, the labor share average was 55.6%.

That’s despite corporate earnings skyrocketing, with profits for Fortune 500 companies hitting a record $1.87 trillion in 2024. The U.S. GDP grew 4.3% in the third quarter last year, exceeding economists’ predictions. 

That growth has not only come at the expense of how much of the pie of wealth workers are taking home, but also how many Americans are in the workforce, economists warn.

“That decline in the share of labor has got to be either falling earnings or falling numbers of people,” Raymond Robertson, a labor economist at Texas A&M’s Bush Sch...