How many people in each state make minimum wage or less

Joe
Raedle/Getty Images

• Amazon
  announced on Tuesday that it
  plans to raise its minimum wage to $15 per hour for all of
  its US workers.
• The federal minimum wage in the US is $7.25 an hour.
• Minimum wage work has been on the decline in the US for
  several years, and the number of workers making the minimum wage
  or less varies widely across the states.
• Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we looked at
  how many hourly workers in each state earn the minimum wage or
  less.

Amazon announced on Tuesday that it
plans to raise its minimum wage to $15 per hour for all of
its US workers. That’s more than twice the federal minimum wage
of $7.25 per hour.

Minimum wage work has been on the decline in the US for several
years, and the number of workers making the minimum wage or less
varies widely across the states.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks how many people earned the
Federal minimum wage or less in each state in a given year,
releasing those results in an annual
report on minimum wage earners. 

The BLS bases its estimates on results from the Current
Population Survey, a monthly survey run by the BLS and the Census
Bureau that serves mainly as the basis for calculations of the
unemployment rate, as well as providing a useful monthly snapshot
of the US population.

That means that these estimates come from Americans’ own
self-reported earnings on the survey, rather than from employers
or government administrative sources.

Both the number and percentage of the hourly work force earning
the minimum wage or lower has declined in recent years as the
labor market continues to tighten. In
2015, about 2.6 million hourly workers in the US were paid at
or below the minimum wage — about 3.3% of the hourly workforce.
By 2017, that dropped to 1.8 million workers, or 2.3% of all
hourly paid workers.

Here’s the percentage of hourly paid workers in each state who
earned the federal minimum wage or less in 2017, according to the
BLS’ report. It’s worth noting that many states have their
own minimum wages that are set higher than the Federal minimum,
and that this is likely a big driver in the variation among the
states.

Business
Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Bureau of Labor
Statistics