The unemployment rate is low by any historical standard at 5.1 percent. Businesses are complaining of worker shortages in industries like health care, construction and trucking. Household-name companies like Walmart and McDonald’s have announced increases to their pay for low-wage workers.

Add those together, and it would seem to point to 2015 as the year American workers start seeing substantially larger paychecks. The only problem: There is no real evidence in the economic data that this is happening.

Rather, a wide range of economic measures points to the same sluggish pay rises in 2015 that American workers witnessed in 2011 and every year since. The giant question hanging over the United States economy — for workers hoping to see a raise, employers trying to decide whether to give them one, and the Federal Reserve as it decides when and how much to raise interest rates — is whether that is poised to change soon.

Average hourly earnings for all private-sector workers were up 2.2 percent in August from a year earlier, according to new data released Friday, roughly the same level at which wage growth has been for years. There has been no evidence of acceleration in pay as the year has progressed; in the last three months hourly pay rose at a 2.2 annual rate, below its level earlier in the year. Other data points to the same conclusion. Employment compensation costs — which includes both wages and the employer’s cost of health care and other benefits — rose 2 percent in the year ended in June, in line with recent years.