International audience The distribution of wages varies with workers' age. In this article we present the principles which allow to build a model able to explain this evolution. This model is based on the search model developed by Burdett and Mortensen (1998). It considers two age groups, the juniors and the seniors and takes into account three channels of wage evolution: the job-to-job mobility, the evolution of the balance of power, and the human capital accumulation. Using US data, we show that these three channels allow to reproduce quite well the aggregated wage distribution as well as the evolution of it over the workers life-cycle. The channels of job-to-job mobility and the evolution of the balance of power account for the lower density of low wages in the seniors' wage distribution and the human capital accumulation for the lower density of very high wages in the juniors' wage distribution.