Minimum Wage by State 2026: Every State Ranked, Highest to Lowest

Minimum wage law in the US is a patchwork: the federal minimum wage has been frozen at $7.25 per hour since 2009, but 30 states and DC have set their own, higher floors — many of them adjusted every January 1st for inflation. We pulled the U.S. Department of Labor's official state-by-state minimum wage tables to rank every state from highest to lowest for 2026, and to flag which states got a raise this year and which are still stuck at the federal minimum.

Notable Findings

• DC leads the country at $18.40/hr. Washington DC’s minimum wage adjusts every July 1 based on a cost-of-living formula, and it remains the highest rate in the country — well above every state.
• Washington is the highest-paying state at $17.13/hr. Connecticut ($16.94) and California ($16.90) round out the top three states, all indexed to inflation and adjusted January 1, 2026.
• Twenty states are still stuck at $7.25/hr. 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 have no state minimum wage above the federal rate — some have no state law at all, others explicitly defer to it.
• Nineteen states raised their minimum wage on January 1, 2026. Hawaii posted the largest jump (+$2.00, to $16.00/hr), while Missouri and Nebraska both climbed to $15.00/hr. Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Montana also increased under automatic inflation-indexing formulas.
• The federal minimum wage hasn’t moved since 2009. At $7.25/hr, it has now gone over 16 years without an increase — the longest stretch since the federal minimum wage was created in 1938 — while every state that has increased its own rate has widened the gap.
• Local minimums can beat the state rate. New York City, Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk counties pay $17.00/hr versus $16.00/hr for the rest of New York State; Portland’s metro area in Oregon pays $16.80/hr versus $15.55/hr statewide. This ranking uses state-level rates only — your local rate may be higher.

Full Rankings: Minimum Wage in Every State (2026)

Basic minimum hourly rate for non-tipped employees, per state law as of 2026. Where a state sets no minimum or defers to federal law, the $7.25 federal minimum applies. Annualized full-time figure assumes 40 hours/week, 52 weeks/year, before taxes.

Ranked highest to lowest. Ties broken alphabetically. "Federal min." indicates states with no state minimum above $7.25. Figures exclude tipped-employee sub-minimums and local (city/county) minimum wages, which may be higher.

Methodology — How We Compiled This

Why the Minimum Wage Gap Matters

The dollar-for-dollar gap between the highest and lowest minimum wage states is enormous when annualized: a full-time worker at $18.40/hr in DC earns about $38,272 a year before taxes, while a full-time worker at the $7.25/hr federal floor earns about $15,080 — a difference of over $23,000 a year for the same 40-hour week. That gap is one reason cost-of-living and minimum wage tend to move together: high-minimum-wage states are disproportionately states with a high cost of living, while several federal-floor states also have a lower cost of living, though the wage gap is generally larger than the cost-of-living gap.

The trend line also matters. Nineteen states raising their minimum wage on January 1, 2026 — many through automatic inflation-indexing written into state law years ago — means the gap between indexed and non-indexed states widens every year without any new legislation required. States without indexing formulas, including all twenty states still at the $7.25 federal floor, only see an increase if their legislature acts, which is one reason the federal minimum has not moved since 2009 despite years of inflation.