Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2023
This report presents highlights and statistical tables describing workers whose earnings were at or below the federal minimum wage in 2023. In 2023, 80.5 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid hourly rates, representing 55.7 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among...
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Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2023
Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2023 image
In 2023, 80.5 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 55.7 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 81,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 789,000 workers had wages below the federal minimum. The percentage of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less edged down from 1.3 percent in 2022 to 1.1 percent in 2023. This remains well below the percentage of 13.4 recorded in 1979, when data were first collected on a regular basis. (See table 10.)
This report presents highlights and statistical tables describing workers whose earnings were at or below the federal minimum wage in 2023. The data are obtained from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a national monthly survey of approximately 60,000 eligible households conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Information on earnings is collected from one-fourth of the CPS sample each month. The CPS does not include questions on whether workers are covered by the minimum wage provisions of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) or by state or local minimum wage laws. The estimates of workers paid at or below the federal minimum wage are based solely on the hourly wage they report, which does not include overtime pay, tips, or commissions. For more information, see the technical notes section, including a description of the source of the data and an explanation of the concepts and definitions used in this report.
