People who work for a living need to be able to make a living. Raising the minimum wage is a vital part of the solution to the affordability crisis.
The cost of food, housing and other necessities has risen sharply. But the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since July 24, 2009. That’s 17 years with the same minimum wage, but a much higher cost of living.
Full-time work at $7.25 an hour amounts to just $15,080 if you are paid 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year.
The economy has grown since 2009, but the federal minimum wage has not. A red light for minimum wage is a green light for increasing inequality.
Workers’ share of national income is at record lows while corporate profits are at record highs.
The minimum wage keeps falling further behind
the rising cost of living. The federal minimum wage peaked in buying power way back in 1968, when it was worth $15.62 in 2026 dollars, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator. Millions of workers make less than that today.
Nationally, 14 million workers make less than $15 per hour and 20 million workers make less than $16, including overtime, tips and commissions, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Low Wage Workforce Tracker.
Twenty states have minimum wages no higher than the $7.25 federal level: 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 states – Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee – don’t have a state minimum wage and in Georgia and Wyoming the state minimum is $5.15, so the federal $7.25 minimum wage applies.
The minimum wage matters for workers making the minimum and it matters for workers making more than the minimum, but still not earning enough to make ends meet.
For example, the median hourly wage for home health and personal care aides in 2025 was just $10.83 in Louisiana and $11.65 in Texas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median wage is the midpoint in wages, not the bottom. The median wage for childcare workers was $10.60 in Mississippi and $10.92 in Alabama. Half of those workers earn less than those amounts.
In Pennsylvania, the $13.85 median hourly wage for fast food cooks was much lower than the $17.20 median wage for fast food cooks in neighboring New York. New York has increased minimum wages multiple times since 2013 while Pennsylvania has stayed stuck at $7.25. Comparing counties on both sides of the state border, the Keystone Research Center reported that “Leisure and hospitality employment growth in New York far outpaced Pennsylvania’s.”
Raising the minimum wage will help workers keep up with the cost of living and bolster the consumer spending that businesses and the economy depend on.
It’s important to remember that workers are also customers.
Raising the minimum wage is a very efficient way to boost businesses and the economy because it puts more money in the pockets of people who most need to spend it.
Fairer pay also helps business by reducing costly employee turnover and improving productivity and customer service.
Employees often make the difference between repeat customers and lost customers.
Decades of rigorous research of actual minimum wage increases show that raising the minimum wage is beneficial and does not cause job loss.
There’s nothing radical about a decent minimum wage. As Adam Smith, the “father of modern capitalism,” put it in 1776, “It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.”
Holly Sklar is the CEO of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, a national network of business owners and executives who believe fair pay makes good business sense.
This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: OPINION: The $7.25 minimum wage is failing working Americans
