Minimum wage by state

Federal floor, state reality

There isn’t one minimum wage in America — there are dozens. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, set by the Fair Labor Standards Act and unchanged since 2009. But that figure is a floor, not a ceiling. States are free to require more, and most do: as of 2025 roughly thirty states plus Washington, D.C. set a minimum above $7.25, with several clustered around $15 to $17. Only a minority — concentrated in the South and the Mountain West — still default to the federal rate, either by setting no state minimum at all or by keeping one below $7.25 that federal law overrides.

The rule that ties it together is simple: workers get the higher of the state and federal rate. So in California the effective minimum is the state’s $16.50, while in Texas, which has no higher state law, it’s the federal $7.25. Pick a state above and the tool shows its current minimum, how far that sits above the federal floor, and what the gap is worth in real dollars.

The tipped minimum and the tip credit

Tipped workers play by different rules. Federal law lets an employer pay a cash wage as low as $2.13 an hour and count gratuities toward the rest — the so-called tip credit. The catch is a guarantee: cash wage plus tips must reach at least the full minimum wage for every hour worked, and if a slow shift leaves a server short, the employer is legally required to top them up to the minimum.

Not every state allows this. A group of states — including California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Minnesota, Montana and Alaska — ban the tip credit outright and require the full minimum in cash before tips. For those states the tool shows the tipped minimum as “—”, because there isn’t a separate, lower tipped wage. Where a tipped figure does appear, it’s the cash wage an employer may pay before tips are factored in, not the worker’s total expected pay.

Which states index to inflation

One reason state minimums keep drifting upward is indexing. A growing number of states tie their minimum wage to a cost-of-living measure — usually the Consumer Price Index — so it rises automatically each January instead of waiting on a legislative vote. Indexing protects buying power: a wage that doesn’t move loses ground to inflation every year, which is exactly what has happened to the federal $7.25 since 2009. By one common measure its real value has fallen by close to a third over that stretch. Other states phase in scheduled step increases toward a target like $15 an hour, then switch to indexing once they arrive.

Because of all this, a state figure can change mid-year, and the current calendar year’s number may not be published until late in the prior year. The tool always shows the effective year alongside the wage, so a 2025 figure is honestly labeled as 2025 even after the calendar turns — and it refreshes to the newest published rate as data lands.

Local minimums above the state

Statewide isn’t the end of the story. Dozens of cities and counties set their own minimum wages above the state level — Seattle, Denver, New York City and much of the San Francisco Bay Area among the best known, several already past $18 to $20 an hour. Where a local ordinance is higher, it governs, so an employer in that city has to pay the local rate, not the state one. This tool reports the statewide minimum; if you live or work somewhere with its own wage law, treat the state figure as the floor and check the local rate, which may be a few dollars higher.

From hourly to a full-time year

To make wages comparable, the tool also shows the full-time annual equivalent: the hourly minimum times 2,080 hours, the standard 40 hours a week across all 52 weeks. At the federal $7.25 that’s about $15,080 a year before taxes; at $16.50 it’s roughly $34,320. The figure is a gross, full-time benchmark — a clean way to compare states — not a promise of take-home pay. Real earnings come in lower once payroll taxes and any other deductions come out, and plenty of minimum-wage jobs are part-time or have hours that swing week to week, so a worker may never reach the full 2,080.

To see what an hourly wage actually lands in your account after federal tax, Social Security and Medicare, run it through the take-home pay calculator, or estimate your full federal bill with the income tax calculator. And if you’re weighing an hourly role against a salaried one, our guide on hourly vs. salary pay walks through how the two really compare once benefits and overtime are in the picture.