The US federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. It has been $7.25 since July 24, 2009 — the third and final step of the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007. No federal increase has passed Congress in the 16 years since.
The Raise the Wage Act has been reintroduced in nearly every session, most recently in 2023 with a target of $17 per hour by 2028, and has not reached a vote in both chambers in the same session. At 16 years, this is the longest gap on record between federal minimum-wage increases. The previous longest stretch, between 1997 and 2007, lasted 10 years.
What the country has instead is a patchwork. Thirty states and the District of Columbia have set their own higher floors. The other 20 default to the federal rate. The ratio between the highest US minimum (DC at $17.95) and the federal floor ($7.25) is 2.5 to 1 — wider than the ratio between the highest and lowest national minimums in the European Union.
The federal floor exists; it just does not function as the floor for most US workers.
01 / What inflation has done in real terms
The dollar amount has not changed; the dollar has.
Between July 2009 and May 2026, the US Consumer Price Index rose 53 percent. A worker earning $7.25 today has the same nominal pay as one earning $7.25 in 2009, with about $4.74 of 2009 purchasing power. In real terms, the federal minimum wage has fallen roughly 35 percent since the freeze began.
The $7.25 of 2026 is worth less than the $5.85 of 2007.
Congress did not design this erosion. It is the cumulative effect of nominal stasis colliding with normal inflation. The statute contains no indexing provision. The underlying assumption — that Congress would periodically raise the rate — has not held.
Fig · 01 — Federal minimum wage, nominal vs real, 1968–2026
02 / The state-level response
While Congress did not move, 30 state legislatures and the District of Columbia did. As of May 2026, the highest state floors are:
| Rank | Jurisdiction | Hourly minimum |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | District of Columbia | $17.95 |
| 2 | Washington | $17.13 |
| 3 | Connecticut | $16.94 |
| 4 | California | $16.90 |
| 5 | Hawaii | $16.00 |
| 6 | New York | $16.00 |
| 7 | Rhode Island | $16.00 |
| 8 | New Jersey | $15.92 |
| 9 | Colorado | $15.16 |
| 10 | Arizona | $15.15 |
Of those 30 jurisdictions, 23 have tied their rates to indexing formulas — automatic annual adjustments based on a state CPI measure that move the rate every January without further legislative action. That structural choice matters more than any single rate decision. It removes minimum-wage maintenance from the recurring political calendar.
The effect is geographic stratification. A worker earning the Washington state minimum makes $17.13 per hour. A worker in Atlanta earning the federal floor makes $7.25. The 2.4-to-1 ratio between them is larger than the gap between the highest and lowest national minimum wages in the OECD.
Fig · 02 — State minimum wages, May 2026
03 / The 20 holdouts
Twenty US states still default to the federal $7.25: Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
Five of those — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee — have no state minimum wage law of any kind. The federal floor applies by default under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Workers in industries not covered by FLSA in these states have, in effect, no statutory wage floor at all.
The geography is not random: 18 of the 20 are in the South or Mountain West. State legislatures in these jurisdictions have considered raises repeatedly and rejected them. Preemption laws in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee additionally prohibit cities and counties from raising local minimums above the state rate, blocking municipal action.
The federal minimum is the active minimum in roughly 30 percent of US states. By population, the share is smaller. Texas accounts for most of it.
04 / What might end the freeze
Three paths could end the federal freeze, in rough order of plausibility.
Continued state-level drift until the federal floor is functionally obsolete. This is already happening. The BLS series tracking workers earning at or below the federal minimum has fallen from 4.9 percent of hourly workers in 2009 to 1.1 percent in 2024. The share has dropped every year of the freeze as state-level raises have absorbed most low-wage workers into higher state floors. At the current trajectory, the share approaches statistical noise within a decade. At some point the federal rate becomes symbolic rather than active — a number on a Department of Labor poster that does not describe anyone’s actual paycheck.
Federal indexing legislation. A bill tying the federal minimum to a CPI measure would not require Congress to vote on dollar amounts again. This is the policy proposal most consistently supported in opinion polling and least consistently pursued in legislation. The closest serious attempt was the Wage Growth Through Investment Act of 2021, which did not exit committee.
A direct increase passed under reconciliation or attached to a must-pass bill. The 2021 attempt to attach a $15 increase to the American Rescue Plan failed when the Senate parliamentarian ruled it ineligible for reconciliation. That precedent stands, but parliamentarian rulings have been overruled before, and a future administration could test the question again.
None of these paths require the federal wage to change on any particular timeline. The freeze can continue indefinitely. What ends it is either a procedural workaround or enough state-level action to make the federal rate functionally meaningless.
The data already suggests the second condition is mostly met.
Fig · 03 — Share of US hourly workers earning at or below the federal minimum, 2009–2024
05 / What this means
The federal minimum wage has not changed in 16 years. Real purchasing power has fallen by roughly a third. Thirty states and DC have built their own wage floors above $7.25. Twenty states have not. The result is a country with parallel minimum-wage systems — a federal system that still exists in statute and a 50-state patchwork that does most of the actual work.
This is the longest period of federal stasis in the history of the law. It is also the period during which states took the most aggressive action of any era. Both facts have to be true to describe the present moment. Neither implies the other.
The next federal increase, if it comes, will face a different country than the one the 2007 increases addressed. Most states have already set their own floors. When the federal rate moves next, it will catch up to floors most states have already set.