Minimum Wage Statistics (2026)

The US federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, set by the Fair Labor Standards Act. It has stayed there since July 24, 2009, so a full-time worker at the federal floor earns $15,080 a year before taxes (see the table below).

Two sub-minimum rates sit beneath it: a tipped cash wage of $2.13 an hour (tips must lift total pay to at least $7.25) and a $4.25 youth training wage for the first 90 days for workers under 20. Some farm, seasonal, and outside-sales jobs are exempt entirely.

The minimum wage started at $0.25 an hour in 1938. It climbed in steps for decades, reaching $1.60 in 1968, $3.10 in 1980, $5.15 in 1997, and $7.25 in July 2009, its most recent increase (see the chart and table below).

That means the rate has now been frozen for about 17 years, the longest stretch without a raise since the law began. Congress last acted in 2007, phasing the wage up over three annual steps that ended in 2009.

Because the federal rate is not indexed to inflation, it only moves when Congress passes a law, and none has. Bills to raise it, including a 2021 push for $15 and a 2026 proposal for $25, have repeatedly stalled in the Senate.

In the meantime, prices have kept rising, so the real value of $7.25 falls a little more every year. States and cities have filled the vacuum, which is why the federal number increasingly describes a legal minimum that few workers in high-cost areas actually face.

Far fewer people earn exactly the federal minimum than many assume. In 2024, about 82,000 workers were paid exactly $7.25 and another 760,000 were paid below it (mostly tipped and exempt workers), roughly 842,000 in total, or 1.0% of all hourly-paid workers.

That share has collapsed over time. Because the federal rate has stood still while market wages and state minimums rose, the typical low-wage job now pays well above $7.25, so the federal floor binds a shrinking slice of the workforce (see the table below).

Minimum wage work skews young and concentrated in food service. Workers under 25 make up about one-fifth of hourly workers but 43% of those paid at or below the federal minimum, and 2.6% of paid teens earn it versus 0.7% of workers 25 and older (see the table below).

Women are somewhat more likely than men to earn the minimum (1.3% vs 0.8%), and the shares are similar across White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic hourly workers, at about 1.0% each. Nearly three-quarters of minimum earners work in service occupations.

Leisure and hospitality is the epicenter: 5.6% of its hourly workers earn at or below the federal minimum, the highest of any industry, and about two-thirds of all sub-minimum earners work there. Most are in food preparation and serving jobs.

That reflects the tipped system. The federal tipped cash wage is $2.13 an hour, with tips expected to close the gap to $7.25. Seven states, including California, Washington, and Oregon, ban the tip credit and require the full minimum before tips.

The single federal number hides enormous variation. Thirty states plus Washington, DC set their own higher minimums, and many index them to inflation so they rise automatically each January (see the table below).

The result is a floor that ranges from $7.25 to nearly $18 depending on which state line you stand on. Where you work, not just what you do, increasingly determines the legal minimum you can be paid.

Washington, DC has the nation's highest floor at $17.95 an hour, scheduled to rise to $18.40 on July 1, 2026. Among states, Washington leads at $17.13, followed by Connecticut ($16.94), California ($16.90), New York ($16.50 base, $17.00 downstate), and Hawaii ($16.00) (see the chart below).

Roughly 18 states plus DC now set minimums at or above $15 an hour, a threshold that was a political rallying cry a decade ago. Several cities go higher still through local ordinances that exceed their state's rate.

At the other end, 20 states still use the federal $7.25 as their minimum, including Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. A handful, such as Georgia and Wyoming, even keep lower state statutes ($5.15) that the federal law overrides for covered employers.

These states are concentrated in the South and parts of the Midwest. For workers there, the federal freeze is not an abstraction: their legal minimum has not risen in about 17 years, so its buying power keeps shrinking with inflation.

The share of hourly workers earning at or below the federal minimum has fallen dramatically. It was 13.4% in 1979, when roughly 7.8 million workers were at or below the floor; by 2024 the share was 1.0% and the count about 842,000 (see the chart below).

That drop reflects the frozen federal rate, not rising pay for the lowest earners in real terms. As the $7.25 number lags market wages and state minimums, fewer jobs cluster exactly at the federal floor even though low-wage work remains widespread.

Because the federal minimum is not indexed, inflation quietly cuts its value. Adjusted for the cost of living, the minimum peaked in 1968 at $1.60, worth roughly $14 to $15 in today's dollars, so at $7.25 its real value is down about 40% from that high (see the table below).

Even measured from the last raise, purchasing power has slipped: the $7.25 set in 2009 buys noticeably less in 2026. Analysts at EPI estimate that if the minimum had tracked worker productivity since 1968, it would be around $24 an hour today.

A legal minimum is not the same as a livable one. The MIT Living Wage Calculator estimates what a full-time worker needs to cover basic costs, and it finds that in no US state does the minimum wage reach a living wage for a single adult (see the table below).

The gaps are large. A single adult needs roughly $24 an hour in Georgia (minimum $7.25) and close to $38 an hour in high-cost San Jose (minimum $16.90). For families with children, the required living wage runs far higher still.

Full-time work at the federal minimum yields $15,080 a year, which sits below the 2025 federal poverty guideline of about $15,650 for a single person and well under the roughly $21,150 guideline for a two-person household.

In other words, a parent supporting even one child on a single full-time federal-minimum-wage income falls below the poverty line. That poverty math is a core argument in the long-running debate over whether and how much to raise the floor.

The minimum wage story is really a story about inflation eroding fixed dollar amounts, the same force that erodes idle cash. A number that does not grow loses ground every year prices rise, whether it is a wage floor or a savings balance sitting at a low interest rate.

The practical lesson for anyone building wealth is to keep money in assets that can outrun inflation rather than in figures fixed in nominal terms. Historically, diversified stocks have grown faster than the cost of living over long periods, preserving real purchasing power that a static dollar amount cannot.