Median compensation in the U.S. has diverged starkly from labor productivity since 1973, and average compensation from productivity since 2000. In this paper, we ask: holding all else equal, to what extent does productivity growth translate into compensation growth for typical American workers? We regress median, average, and production/nonsupervisory compensation growth on productivity growth in various specifications, finding substantial evidence of linkage between productivity and compensation. Over 1973–2016, one percentage point higher productivity growth was associated with 0.7-1 percentage points higher median and average compensation growth and with 0.4-0.7 percentage points higher production/nonsupervisory compensation growth. Further, we do not find strong evidence of co-movement between productivity growth and either the labor share or the mean/median compensation ratio. Our results tend to militate against pure technology-based theories of the productivity-compensation divergence, which would suggest that periods of higher productivity growth should also be periods of higher productivity-pay divergence. They suggest that factors orthogonal to productivity have been acting to suppress typical compensation even as productivity growth has been acting to raise it, and that faster future productivity growth is likely to boost median and average compensation growth close to one-for-one