“All workers who report weekly earnings above $2,884.61 (annual earnings for full-year workers above $150,000) are recorded as having weekly earnings of exactly $2,884.61, to preserve the anonymity of respondents," Gould writes. That top-code threshold hasn’t been updated since 1998. As a result, the survey is becoming less useful for tracking top incomes at a time when public concern over inequality is growing. Representatives from the Census Bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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“In the overall wage distribution, over the period analyzed in this report, the share of workers reporting weekly earnings at or above the top-code rose from 0.8 percent in 2000 to 4.2 percent in 2018,” according to the report. “In 2018, the share of white workers with weekly earnings hitting the top-code was 5.2 percent. For working men, that share was 5.9 percent in 2018.”

Economists are able to use a variety of statistical methods to adjust for top-coding, but that process becomes much less reliable as more workers’ wages are masked by the code. “Now that the top-code hits over 5 percent of the wage distribution of men and white workers,” Gould writes, "our 95th-percentile wage estimate has essentially become the weekly earnings top-code divided by a measure of usual hours. This makes our measure of 95th-percentile wages for working men and white workers unreliable.”

Nevertheless, the available data paints a clear picture of broadening disparities between top earners and everyone else. Adjusted for inflation, wages for the top 5 percent of earners rose from $50.46 an hour in 2000 to $63.10 in 2018, an increase of 25 percent. The median worker’s hourly wage, meanwhile, rose by 7 percent over that period, to $18.80.

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The divide was particularly stark among men: The wages of the top 5 percent of male workers rose by 42 percent from 2000 to 2018, while those of the median male worker rose by 0.8 percent.

One way to capture that dispersion is to look at the ratio between wages at the top and wages at the middle. In 2000, for instance, the top 5 percent of workers earned 2.87 times as much, per hour, as the typical, or median, worker. By 2018, that ratio had increase to 3.36. Among men only, the ratio between the top 5 percent and the median increased from 2.83 to 3.98.

However, there was little change in wage variation at the bottom of the distribution: The median worker earned roughly twice as much as the bottom 10 percent of workers in 2000 and 2018, among all workers and among men only.

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The report notes that bottom wages grew the fastest in the states that saw some form of minimum wage increase. From 2013 to 2018, for instance, 10th percentile wages grew by 13 percent in states with a minimum wage increase, and 8.4 percent in states with no minimum wage hike. That finding adds to existing evidence that raising the minimum wage is an effective way to bring up earnings at the bottom of the income distribution.