It’s defined in many ways, but in the US I think it’s usually BLS. One thing that helped me when studying this stuff is that these are all based on some judgement and qualitative work and aren’t platonic terms. This used to frustrate me, but then I realized that these are really hard concepts to truly know so these seemingly arbitrary definitions because at least they allow some shared understanding. And also gets us past a lot of the standard “he said, she said” cycles of defining and trying to get reputable data.
Assuming that you agree with any given definition of "real compensation", that still leaves open the question of whether wages, which are 100% fungible, can be replaced by non-fungible compensation.
It is always super sketchy.