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The Federal Minimum Wage and Productivity Since 1968
Federal minimum wage in today's dollars, and the 1968 minimum grown with output per hour, $ per hour
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
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.
Two lines from the same 1968 starting point: the federal minimum wage after inflation, and what that 1968 wage would pay had it risen with output per hour of work. The gap is the arithmetic of a fixed dollar floor raised occasionally by Congress while productivity grew every year.
What this chart reads
- Federal Minimum Wage in Today's Dollars (U.S.)as “Federal minimum wage, today's dollars”latest 2026-09-01
- Minimum Wage If It Had Grown With Productivity Since 1968 (U.S.)as “If it had grown with productivity since 1968”latest 2026-04-01
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.
Minimum Wage If It Had Grown With Productivity Since 1968 (U.S.). Source: Palanor calculation from U.S. Department of Labor (FEDMINNFRWG) and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (CPIAUCSL, OPHNFB) 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.