Labour and the Conservatives were at loggerheads last night amid claims ministers made "selective" use of official figures to claim most workers saw inflation busting rises in their take-home pay last year.
A Treasury analysis said that all but the top 10% of earners saw a real terms increase in 2012/13.
But both Labour and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) accused the Coalition of ignoring cuts to in-work benefits, such as tax credits and child benefit.
Paul Johnson, from the IFS, said: "If you are looking at household incomes, that will be different from what's happened to take-home pay."
Shadow Treasury minister Cathy Jamieson said real wages had fallen by more than £1600 a year under the coalition.
The row comes as the Tories attempt to neutralise Labour's claim that the UK is suffering a cost-of-living crisis.
Business minister Matt Hancock acknowledged that people were still worse off than they were before the 2008 financial crash.
But he said yesterday's analysis - based on figures from the Office of National Statistics - showed things were "starting to turn".
"Put them together with the very good jobs figures, with the record rise in the number of jobs that we had this week, with the fact the deficit is coming down - put all these things together and we can see that the economic plan is starting to work and helping to make people's personal finances more secure."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article