Equal Pay Day arrives again — this year observed on March 26 — marking how far into 2026 women must work to earn what men made in 2025. The date moved one day later than in 2025 because, for the second consecutive year, the U.S. gender pay gap widened.
Census Bureau figures show women working full-time, year-round now earn an average of 81 cents for every dollar earned by comparable men, down from 83 cents a year earlier and 84 cents the year before that. Deborah Vagins, director of the Equal Pay Today coalition, which organizes nine separate equal pay observances for different groups of women, says this is the first back-to-back widening of the gap since the 1960s.
Equal Pay Today has set other dates recognizing disparities for specific groups: Black Women’s Equal Pay Day on July 21, Moms’ Equal Pay Day on August 6 and Latina Equal Pay Day on October 8. “We are reversing decades of hard won progress,” Vagins says.
The Census data used for this year’s calculation covers 2024, when Joe Biden was president; 2025 data will be released this fall. The bureau notes one key factor: between 2023 and 2024 men’s median income rose by 3.7% while women’s median income showed no growth.
The Biden administration supported several equal-pay actions, including steps to narrow gaps among federal workers and contractors, but advocates ran into resistance in Congress. Equal Pay Today pushed for federal pay-transparency laws that would require salary ranges in job postings and prohibit employers from asking applicants about prior pay. Vagins argues pay-history bans are important because “even a well-meaning employer could carry forward the effects of prior employers’ pay discrimination.”
Some states have passed transparency laws; research shows mixed results. Pay-transparency can reduce inequities, but it doesn’t always translate into higher wages for women. Still, Vagins says closing the gap will be difficult without broader legal tools.
The pool of tools has shrunk in other ways. During the Obama administration, Vagins helped implement an EEOC requirement for employers to submit pay data broken down by sex and race — data that revealed persistent occupational segregation and pay disparities. The Trump administration later halted that data collection, citing burdens on employers. “If you can’t measure what’s going on, you can’t fix it,” Vagins says.
Multiple forces drive the wage gap. Occupational segregation is a large contributor: women are overrepresented in lower-wage jobs such as restaurant work, hotel housekeeping and child care. Pay differences also persist within the same fields; studies have found male doctors earn more than female doctors across specialties.
Those disparities have long-term consequences: lower lifetime earnings mean smaller retirement savings, reduced Social Security benefits and fewer opportunities to build generational wealth. “It has very, very long-lasting impacts,” Vagins says.