We analyse the long-term trends in wages in South Africa, using the data from the October
Household Surveys, Labour Force Surveys and Quarterly Labour Force Surveys. We show that
outliers and missing data need to be taken into consideration when working with these data. Our
results show that overall mean real earnings among employees has risen over this period. Median
real earnings, by contrast, have lagged. We show that the top end of the earnings distribution has
moved away from the median, while there seems to have been a relative compression of the
distribution right at the bottom.