Journal / Essay

The Math of the Minimum

A minimum wage is a policy statement about the least a country will let an hour of someone's life be sold for. The U.S. number hasn't moved in seventeen years. Here's what that number actually buys now, compared to what MIT calculates it should.

And Then You're Dead · August 2026 · 6 min read

$7.25 an hour, worked full-time with no time off, comes to $15,080 a year before taxes. That's the entire federal floor. It hasn't changed since July 24, 2009.

Seventeen Years

The Fair Labor Standards Act, which created the federal minimum wage, is 88 years old. The current stretch without an increase is the longest in its entire history.

What It Would Actually Take

MIT maintains a living wage calculator that estimates the hourly rate a full-time worker needs to cover basic costs — housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and taxes — without public assistance. The comparison isn't close anywhere.

In no U.S. state does the minimum wage meet MIT's living wage threshold. Not one.

In San Jose, California, MIT puts the number even higher: $37.93 an hour for a single adult with no children, just to cover the basics in a high-cost metro. The $7.25 federal floor was never designed with that kind of local cost variation in mind, and it hasn't been revisited since 2009 to account for it.

The Exceptions

Not every state left the number where Congress did. Missouri and Nebraska both raised their minimum wage to $15 through voter-approved ballot measures — not legislation, but the public voting directly to close a gap the standard political process wasn't closing.

And Then You're Dead

The floor Congress set for the value of an hour of your labor hasn't moved in seventeen years, while the cost of an hour's worth of rent, food, and gas kept moving the entire time. Twenty states are still using that number as-is. The gap didn't happen by accident — it happened by not acting, for longer than this law has ever gone without acting before. That's the plan. That's the math.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Read about wages broadly · or see every essay