Estimated hourly wage penalty for part-time work: How much less part-time workers earn than full-time workers (in %)

Part-time hourly wage penalty
Raw Unadjusted Partially adjusted Fully adjusted Fully adjusted by type
Hourly wage penalty
All part time -52.4%*** -53.1%*** -29.3%*** -19.8%***
Part time for economic reasons
Due to “slack work or business conditions” -22.3%***
Because worker “could only find part-time work” -29.5%***
Part time for noneconomic reasons -18.3%***
Controls
State (51) X X X X
Year (16) X X X X
Gender (2) X X X
Race (4) X X X
Education (16) X X X
Age (5) X X X
Occupation (10) X X
Industry (13) X X

Notes: Part time is defined as usually working less than 35 hours per week on the primary job. Part time for noneconomic reasons category includes workers who say they work part time to take care of child care problems or for other family and personal reasons. The symbols *, **, and *** indicate that the wage penalty is significantly different from zero at the 0.10 level, 0.05 level, and 0.01 level, respectively, using heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors. Standard errors are available upon request from the authors.

Notes: Part time is defined as usually working less than 35 hours per week on the primary job. Part-time for noneconomic reasons category includes workers who say they work part time to take care of child care problems or for other family and personal reasons. The symbols *, **, and *** indicate that the wage penalty is significantly different from zero at the 0.10 level, 0.05 level, and 0.01 level, respectively, using heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors. Standard errors are available upon request from the authors. The noneconomic reasons include all those the BLS categorizes as "noneconomic" reasons: for working part time include “child care problems,” “other family/personal obligations,” “health/medical limitations,” “school/training,” “retired/Social Security limit on earnings,” “full-time workweek is less than 35 hours,” and “other for non-economic reasons.”  The sample of 1,756,419 observations is hourly and nonhourly wage earners, ages 16 and older, in the 2003–2018 EPI extracts of the CPS-ORG. Observations with allocated hourly wages or weekly earnings are excluded. Demographic controls include race, gender, and education dummies, and a quintic polynomial in age. Industry and occupation controls are dummies for Census recodes of major industry and occupation categories. Dependent variable is log hourly wages.

Source: Author's analysis of 2003–2018 Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group (CPS-ORG) microdata.

View the underlying data on epi.org.