Equal Pay Day, observed this year on March 26, marks how far into 2026 women must work to earn what men made in 2025. The date slipped one day later than in 2025 after the U.S. gender pay gap widened for the second straight year.
Census Bureau data show women who work 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. 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 also designates specific days for groups facing larger disparities: 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 figures behind this year’s calculation cover 2024, when Joe Biden was president; 2025 data are scheduled for release this fall. The bureau flagged a 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 backed several equal-pay measures, including steps aimed at narrowing gaps among federal workers and contractors, but advocates faced pushback in Congress. Equal Pay Today has pushed for federal pay-transparency laws that would require salary ranges in job postings and ban employers from asking applicants about prior pay. Vagins argues pay-history bans matter because “even a well-meaning employer could carry forward the effects of prior employers’ pay discrimination.”
Some states have passed pay-transparency laws, and research shows mixed results: transparency can reduce some inequities but does not always translate into higher wages for women. Vagins says closing the gap will be hard without stronger legal tools.
The available toolkit has narrowed in other ways. During the Obama administration, Vagins helped implement an EEOC rule requiring employers to submit pay data broken down by sex and race—information that exposed persistent occupational segregation and pay disparities. The Trump administration later halted that collection, citing burdens on employers. “If you can’t measure what’s going on, you can’t fix it,” Vagins says.
Multiple factors sustain the wage gap. Occupational segregation is a big contributor: women are overrepresented in lower-wage jobs such as restaurant work, hotel housekeeping and child care. Pay gaps also persist within the same professions; studies have found male doctors earn more than female doctors across specialties.
Those differences have long-term effects: lower lifetime earnings lead to smaller retirement savings, reduced Social Security benefits and fewer opportunities to build generational wealth. “It has very, very long-lasting impacts,” Vagins says.