In 2026 the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 2009, and the map around it has split into four groups. Thirty states plus the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands set rates above the federal floor. Thirteen states match it. Five states have no state minimum wage law at all. Two states keep a rate below the federal floor that most workers never actually receive. All of those counts come from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Consolidated Minimum Wage Table.
This article describes the structure rather than reprinting a rate table. Many states index their floors to inflation and adjust on their own schedules, several cities and counties set rates above their state’s, and a table copied into an article goes stale within months. The Department of Labor maintains the live version, and that is the figure to trust for any specific state.
The four groups
Above the federal floor. Thirty states plus the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands exceed $7.25, per the Department of Labor. Where a state rate is higher than the federal rate, the higher rate applies to workers covered by both.
At the federal floor. Thirteen states set a rate equal to $7.25, either by writing that figure into state law or by tying the state rate to the federal one so it moves automatically if Congress acts.
No state law. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee have no state minimum wage statute, according to the Department of Labor. Employers in those states covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act must still pay the federal $7.25.
Below the federal floor. Wyoming’s state minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. Georgia has a state minimum wage law that also sits below the federal rate. In both states, workers covered by the FLSA are entitled to $7.25 regardless, so the sub-federal state rate reaches only the narrow set of workers outside federal coverage.
Why the sub-federal rates still exist
A state rate below $7.25 looks like a drafting error until you notice what it governs. Federal coverage under the FLSA is broad but not universal. Certain small employers not engaged in interstate commerce and falling under the enterprise revenue threshold, plus several specific exempt categories, sit outside it. For workers in those situations, the state figure is the operative one.
The practical effect is small in headcount and large in principle. It means the answer to “what is the minimum wage in Wyoming” is $7.25 for nearly everyone and $5.15 for a residual group, and any single-number answer is wrong for somebody.
Indexing is the structural divide
The more consequential split is not high rate versus low rate. It is indexed versus not indexed.
A state that ties its minimum wage to a price index recalculates annually without any legislative action. A state that writes a dollar figure into statute holds that figure until a legislature changes it. Over a decade those two designs diverge substantially even if they started at the same number, because inflation does not pause while a bill moves.
The federal minimum wage is the clearest case. It is not indexed. Its nominal value has been $7.25 since 2009, so its real value has fallen every year since, by exactly the rate of inflation, without any vote being taken. The decline is automatic. Holding the number still is itself a policy with a continuous effect.
The layer the state table does not show
State rates are not the bottom of the hierarchy. Many cities and counties set higher local minimums, and in those jurisdictions the local rate governs. A state-level table therefore understates the floor for a substantial share of the workforce concentrated in metropolitan areas.
Tipped workers follow a separate schedule entirely. The federal cash wage for tipped employees is $2.13 an hour with a maximum tip credit of $5.12, and states vary widely, with some prohibiting the tip credit outright. The Department of Labor publishes those figures in a separate table for tipped employees, and reading the standard table alone will give the wrong answer for anyone paid a tipped cash wage.
What the rates do not tell you
A minimum wage figure is a legal floor, not a cost estimate. It was not derived from any calculation of what living in a place costs, and comparing two states’ rates without comparing their costs produces a meaningless ranking.
The MIT Living Wage Calculator estimates the hourly rate a household needs to cover food, housing, medical costs, transportation, childcare and required taxes in a specific county. Those estimates exceed the statutory minimum in every state, which is unsurprising given that no state derived its figure from that kind of calculation in the first place.
The gap widens on its own. A full-time year at $7.25 comes to roughly $15,000 before taxes. KFF put the total annual premium for family health coverage at about $25,000 in 2024, with the worker share above $6,000, and Child Care Aware reports center-based childcare commonly running $10,000 to $17,000 or more per child per year. The U.S. Census Bureau put median household income at about $80,000 in 2023. Those cost figures moved considerably between 2009 and now. The federal floor did not move at all.
This is the reason some organizations working on cost of living, including the nonpartisan 501(c)(3) Fight For A Living Wage, argue that the wage floor is one symptom rather than the whole problem, and that housing, healthcare, childcare, food, transport and education costs have to be read alongside it. Whether that framing persuades you is a separate matter from whether the underlying numbers are accurate, and they are published by the agencies named above.
Checking your own state
Three steps give a reliable answer. Start with the Department of Labor’s consolidated table for the current state rate. Then check whether your city or county sets a higher local minimum, because the local figure controls where one exists. Then, if the work involves tips, use the separate tipped-employee table rather than the standard one.
Where federal and state rates both apply and differ, the higher rate applies. That rule resolves most of the apparent conflicts in the table.