$7.25

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since July 2009. That is not a policy outcome. That is a policy decision — made over and over again, every session, by a Congress that votes itself cost-of-living adjustments while telling the lowest-paid workers in America to figure it out.

Work forty hours a week at $7.25. Every week. No vacation. No sick days. You will gross $15,080 a year. The federal poverty line for a single person in 2026 is $15,960. You did everything the bootstrap sermon demanded and you are still $880 short of what the government calls poor.

That is the deal Congress is offering: a full-time job that guarantees poverty.

This is not an oversight. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 longer than at any point since the minimum wage was created in 1938. Seventeen years. Through two presidencies. Through a pandemic that killed over a million Americans and burned through the savings of millions more. Through an inflation surge that ate roughly 30 percent of that $7.25's purchasing power.

In real dollars, the federal minimum wage is now worth less than it was in 1949. A worker today earning $7.25 buys what $5.07 bought in 2009. The raise they never got is a pay cut that compounds every year.

And Congress knows. The Raise the Wage Act has been introduced in some version every session since 2017. It dies every time — filibustered in the Senate, bottled up in committee, traded away for something else. In 2021, eight Senate Democrats voted against including a $15 minimum wage in the COVID relief package. In 2014, a Senate vote to raise the wage to $10.10 got 54 votes — a majority — but not the 60 needed to break the filibuster. The majority wanted it. The rules said no.

So nothing changed. Seventeen years of nothing.

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Congress won't act. So states did. Thirty states have set their own minimum wage above the federal floor. Twenty states and 65 cities and counties have hit or passed $15 an hour. Washington State pays $17.13. New York City pays $17. California pays $16.90. Federal contractors earn $17.75 — because even the government admits $7.25 is not a real wage.

The states that haven't moved? Alabama. Mississippi. Texas. Georgia. Louisiana. Tennessee. South Carolina. The same states that fought the last minimum wage increase. The same states with the highest poverty rates. The same states where Black and Latino workers are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage jobs. The pattern is not an accident.

If you work full-time in Jackson, Mississippi, the federal government says you deserve $7.25 an hour. Cross the state line into Arkansas and you get $11. Drive to Missouri and it's $15. Same work. Same skill. The difference is whether your state legislature decided your labor had value.

There is a second minimum wage most people forget about. The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. It has been $2.13 since 1991. That is 35 years. Your server, your bartender, your delivery driver — their employer is legally allowed to pay them two dollars and thirteen cents an hour and call it a wage.

The theory is that tips make up the difference. The reality is that tipped workers experience poverty at more than double the rate of non-tipped workers. The employer's share of the wage has been offloaded to the customer, and when the customer doesn't tip — or tips badly, or doesn't come in — the worker eats it.

Seven states have eliminated the tipped subminimum wage entirely: Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. Their restaurant industries did not collapse. Their servers make more money. The sky did not fall.

Here is the part that should make everyone pay attention, not just minimum-wage workers: the floor sets the gravity.

When the minimum wage stays frozen while prices rise, it doesn't just squeeze workers at $7.25. It suppresses wages for everyone near the bottom — the $10 workers, the $12 workers, the $15 workers. Employers benchmark against the floor. If the floor never moves, neither does the pressure to raise wages above it.

Inflation since 2009 has been roughly 40 percent. Rents in most metros have doubled. Grocery prices jumped 25 percent between 2020 and 2024 alone. Electricity costs are climbing as data centers eat into the grid. And the federal government's position is that $7.25 — set when gas was $2.60 a gallon and the iPhone 3GS was new — is still sufficient.

That is not a serious position. It is a subsidy. It subsidizes low-wage employers by letting the government pick up the tab through food stamps, Medicaid, and housing vouchers. The companies get cheap labor. The workers get poverty. The taxpayers get the bill. And Congress calls it a free market.

Seventeen years is not gridlock. It is a decision. Every Congress that fails to raise the minimum wage is making an affirmative choice to keep it where it is. The filibuster makes that choice easier to hide — you can want the raise and still let it die — but the result is the same.

A full-time job in America should not leave you below the poverty line. That used to be a bipartisan position. It was a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, who signed the last tipped wage increase in 1989. It was a Democratic Congress that pushed it. The question was never whether workers deserved a living wage. The question was how much.

Now the question is whether they deserve one at all.

Thirty states decided yes. Twenty states and the United States Congress said: not our problem.

$7.25. Seventeen years. Full-time poverty by design.

— Michael