Line
The Federal Minimum Wage in Today's Dollars
Federal minimum hourly wage adjusted for inflation to the newest month's prices, $ per hour
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Palanor Foresight™ comes with a free Palanor account. Create one · Continuation is open to everyone.
Palanor calculation from U.S. Department of Labor and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, via FRED. The federal minimum wage is put in the dollars of the newest month with the CPI-U. The productivity line starts from the 1968 average of that real minimum wage (1968 is the year it bought the most) and grows it with BLS output per hour in the nonfarm business sector. It is arithmetic, not an estimate of what a higher minimum would do. Many states and cities set higher minimums. October 2025 has no CPI-U reading.
Each step up is a law raising the federal minimum; each slope down is inflation eroding it until the next one.
What this chart reads
- Federal Minimum Wage in Today's Dollars (U.S.)as “Federal minimum wage, today's dollars”latest 2026-09-01
Sources
Federal Minimum Wage in Today's Dollars (U.S.). Source: Palanor calculation from U.S. Department of Labor (FEDMINNFRWG) and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (CPIAUCSL) data, via FRED. Public domain.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.