Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would lift the pay of 32 million workers : A demographic breakdown of affected workers and the impact on poverty, wages, and inequality

The Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would help eliminate poverty-level wages by raising the national minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025. This report finds that the raise is long overdue and would deliver broad benefits to workers and the economy.

• The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and has not been raised in over 10 years. A full-time federal minimum wage worker today earns 18% less than what her counterpart earned at the time of the last increase, after adjusting for rising costs of living ($15,080 annually in 2021 versus $18,458 in 2009).
• In 1968, a minimum wage worker earned $10.59 per hour in inflation-adjusted terms, 46% more than today’s $7.25 federal minimum wage. The minimum wage today would be over $22 per hour had it tracked productivity increases over the last five decades.
• The Raise the Wage Act of 2021, which phases in a $15 minimum wage by 2025, would raise the earnings of 32 million workers, or 21% of the workforce. Affected workers include those who would see their wages rise as the new minimum wage rate exceeds their current hourly pay and those who have a wage rate just above the new minimum wage who would receive a raise as employer pay scales are adjusted upward to reflect the new minimum wage.
• On average, an affected worker who works year round would see an annual pay increase of about $3,300. In total, a $15 minimum wage would provide over $108 billion in additional wages in 2025 to affected workers.
• A national minimum wage of $15 delivers ona core demand of the Civil Rights movement. The March on Washington in 1963 (the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom) demanded a $2.00 national minimum wage that would be equivalent to $15.00 today, after adjusting for inflation.
• Earnings would rise for nearly one in three Black workers (31%) and for one in four Hispanic workers (26%), compared with about one in five white workers. For Black and Hispanic workers who work year round, annual pay would increase by at least $3,500.
• $15 minimum wage by 2025 would raise the wages of at least 19 million essential and front-line workers. Essential and front-line workers constitute more than 60% of all workers who would see a pay increase.
• Workers who cannot work from home—who are more likely to be Black, Latinx, and Native American—are the overwhelming majority of workers (almost nine out of every 10) who would receive pay raises under the Raise the Wage Act of 2021.
• The Raise the Wage Act would help eliminate poverty wages. Raising the minimum wage to $15 in 2025 would lift up to 3.7 million—including an estimated 1.3 million children—out of poverty.
• Raising the minimum wage to $15 would help ensure that more low-wage workers are paid enough to cover basic living expenses, i.e., a wage providing a modest yet adequate standard of living. As of 2021, in virtually all urban and rural areas of the country, a single adult without children working full time must earn more than $15 per hour to have enough to pay for housing and other basic living expenses. For individuals with children, year-round work at a $15 wage in 2025 will still be inadequate to achieve basic economic security.
• Minimum wage increases have not led to significant job losses. Despite claims that raising the minimum wage would reduce job opportunities for vulnerable groups of workers, the best evidence shows little to no job losses in the wake of minimum wage increases and a net wage gain even if job losses have occurred. These benefits explain why surveys show that the people most likely to support a minimum wage increase are unemployed people, people of color, and women.
• Minimum wage increases affect adults in their career-building years who are helping to support their families—with women disproportionately benefiting from a pay boost. The average age of workers who would see a pay increase under the Raise the Wage Act is 35 years old. About 90% of those with increased wages would be adults age 20 or older. Most of the workers who would benefit are women (59%) even though men are a majority of the workforce. More than half of those who would have higher pay work full time (59%). Past research shows that these workers are often the primary earners for their families, producing the majority of their family’s total income.

Data by state and congressional district

Supplemental tables showing characteristics of workers who would be affected by increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 in each state and in the District of Columbia are available here.

Data by congressional district are viewable in an interactive map (EPI 2021b).

An increase in the national minimum wage is well overdue

The federal minimum wage has not been raised in over a decade; it has remained stuck at $7.25 per hour since 2009. Figure A compares the trajectory of the minimum wage at face value (known in economics as the nominal minimum wage) with the inflation-adjusted or “real” value of the minimum wage (representing its purchasing power) and with the real value of the minimum wage had it risen with productivity after 1948. As the figure shows, rising costs of living since the last increase in the nominal minimum wage in 2009 have diminished the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage (the middle line for most of the graph), which had declined by 17% as of 2020 and 18% as of 2021 (not shown), a devastating fall in the earnings of the lowest-wage workers.

The figure also shows that, with the exception of some important increases, the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage has mostly stagnated or declined since the 1970s. But that was not always the case: In the 1950s and 1960s, Congress raised the minimum wage more frequently such that it rose roughly in line with the pace of economywide productivity. At the peak purchasing power of the minimum wage in 1968, a minimum wage worker earned $10.59 per hour (in 2021 dollars), 46% more than a worker at the $7.25 federal minimum wage today. Had Congress continued to increase the minimum wage in line with productivity growth, the minimum wage today would be over $22 per hour. Despite the doubling of labor productivity, minimum wage workers today are paid substantially less in real terms than their counterparts earned five decades ago.

The economy can afford a much higher national minimum wage : Real and nominal federal minimum wages (historical and under the Raise the Wage of 2021) compared with productivity-tracking minimum wage

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The data underlying the figure.

Notes: Inflation is measured using the CPI-U-RS and CBO CPI-U projections.. Productivity is measured as total economy productivity net depreciation.

Sources: EPI analysis of the Fair Labor Standards Act and amendments and the Raise the Wage Act of 2021. Total economy productivity data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Labor Productivity and Costs program.

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Raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025, as called for in the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, is an important step toward reversing the erosion of the minimum wage’s buying power and—as detailed later in this report—achieving greater racial and gender pay equity, as well as fairer wages for those workers most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The act has three key components:

1. The national minimum wage increases in five steps over five years, beginning with an increase to $9.50 this year and ending with a $15 minimum wage in 2025.
2. Each year after 2025, the minimum wage would automatically increase in line with changes in the median hourly wage in the economy.
3. The subminimum wages employers are currently allowed to pay tipped workers, workers with disabilities, and workers under the age of 20 are gradually phased out, raising minimum wages for these workers to the same level as other workers.

These three components of the Raise the Wage Act would ensure that the lowest paid workers are sharing in the productivity gains of the economy. A level of $15 in 2025 would finally raise the living standards of the lowest-wage workers above levels those workers experienced 50 years ago. Automatically increasing or indexing the minimum wage to the median wage guarantees regular and predictable raises and prevents growing pay inequality between the lowest paid workers and the middle class. Finally, by phasing out subminimum wages, such as the meager $2.13 per hour wage for tipped workers, all workers would be paid at least the new, common federal floor. Tipped workers in particular would benefit from having a regular paycheck so that they would not need to rely exclusively on volatile tips that can be particularly susceptible to discrimination and wage theft (Lynn et al. 2008; Cooper and Kroeger 2017).1

In 2025, the Raise the Wage Act would raise the wages of 32.2 million workers (Figure B). Those affected workers represent 21% of the projected workforce of 151.7 million in 2025. Affected workers include 22.1 million directly affected workers who would otherwise earn less than $15 per hour in 2025 and 10.1 million indirectly affected workers who would otherwise earn just above $15 per hour in 2025. Specifically, we define indirectly affected workers as those with a wage rate between the new minimum wage and 115% of the new minimum wage. These workers will receive a pay boost as employers raise wages to recruit and retain them under the new higher wage standard. On average, an affected low-wage worker who works year round would see an annual pay increase of more than $3,300 (see Appendix Table 2).

The Raise the Wage Act would raise the pay of more than 32 million U.S. workers : Number of workers (in millions) who would benefit if the federal minimum wage were increased to $15 by 2025

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The data underlying the figure.

Note: Directly affected workers will see their wages rise to the new minimum wage; indirectly affected workers have wages just above the new minimum (up to 115% of the new minimum) and will receive a raise as employer pay scales are adjusted upward.

Source: Economic Policy Institute Wage Simulation Model; see Technical Methodology by Cooper, Mokhiber, and Zipperer (2019).

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As we describe below, a $15 minimum wage by 2025 would disproportionately benefit Black and Hispanic workers and women, raise the pay of essential and front-line workers, and reduce the number of people living in poverty. The appendix contains additional projections of benefits by detailed demographic groups and a summary of the methodology used to create these estimates.

An increase in the national minimum wage supports a more racially just economy

Due to occupational segregation, discrimination, and other impacts of systemic racism, racial pay disparities are one of the persistent, structural features of the U.S. labor market (Wilson and Rodgers 2016). Despite some historical progress, in 2019 Hispanic workers were being paid 10.8% less than white workers with similar ages and education levels, and Black workers were being paid 14.9% less than comparable white workers (Gould 2020).

Our analysis of shares of workers affected, combined with recent research on minimum wages and racial income and earnings gaps, indicates that raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would substantially reduce racial pay inequality. Figure C shows that while the raise would increase wages for less than one out of five (18.4%) white workers, about one in three (31.3%) Black workers and one in four (26.0%) Hispanic workers would receive a pay increase. Because they are particularly underpaid, women of color would disproportionately benefit from the Raise the Wage Act: 22.9% of those who would receive pay increases are Black or Hispanic women.

Ending the separate, tipped wage would especially benefit women of color, as they are more likely to work in tipped jobs and be paid subminimum wages. The National Women’s Law Center (2021) finds that nearly 70% of tipped workers are women, and that Latinas and Black, Native American, and Asian American/Pacific Islander women are all disproportionately represented among tipped workers.

Black and Hispanic workers would disproportionately benefit from a $15 minimum wage in 2025 : Share of workers in each race/ethnicity category who would get a direct or indirect pay raise under the Raise the Wage Act of 2021

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The data underlying the figure.

Note: Directly affected workers will see their wages rise to the new minimum wage; indirectly affected workers have wages just above the new minimum and (up to 115% of the new minimum) and will receive a raise as employer pay scales are adjusted upward.

Source: Economic Policy Institute Wage Simulation Model; see Technical Methodology by Cooper, Mokhiber, and Zipperer (2019).

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Civil rights leaders and advocates have long recognized the value of higher wage standards in reducing inequality. In 1963, the federal minimum wage was $1.15 an hour, and there was no minimum wage at all for agriculture, nursing homes, restaurants, and other service industries that disproportionately employed Black workers. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (the March on Washington) called for a $2.00 minimum wage (Pitts and Allegretto 2013). As Derenoncourt (2020) has observed, the 1963 March on Washington’s demand would be equivalent to about $15.00 today after adjusting for inflation (see Figure D).

The 1963 March on Washington’s minimum wage demand would be $15 today, adjusted for inflation : Historical and projected federal minimum wages under the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, and the 1963 March on Washington demand indexed to inflation

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The data underlying the figure.

Sources: EPI analysis of the Fair Labor Standards Act and amendments, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom minimum wage demand.

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The 1963 March on Washington demanded a $2.00 minimum wage that would “include all areas of employment which are presently excluded” and would “give all Americans a decent standard of living” (Derenoncourt 2020).

Several years later, Congress expanded the coverage of the minimum wage and eventually raised it to its historical high point of $1.60 in 1968, or $10.59 in 2021 dollars. Derenoncourt and Montialoux (2021) describe how the new standard raised wages overall but had its largest effects on Black workers. Just before the increase, 28.8% of Black workers earned at or below the 1967 minimum, compared with 13.9% of white workers. The authors convincingly demonstrate that these increases were responsible for more than 20% of the fall in the Black–white earnings gap during the Civil Rights Era. Since then, minimum wages have continued to play a substantial role in reducing racial earnings inequality. Wursten and Reich (2021) found that minimum wage increases between 1990 and 2019 reduced Black–white wage gaps by 12% overall, and by 60% for workers with only a high school diploma or less. The link between increases in the minimum wage and decreases in racial earnings gaps also means that the erosion of the federal minimum wage over this period increased racial earnings gaps.

Essential and front-line workers constitute a majority of those who would see pay raises by raising the minimum wage to $15

During the COVID-19 pandemic, essential and front-line workers have kept the economy running at great risk to their health and their families. The U.S. labor market, however, has not fairly rewarded that vital work. Very few essential workers receive hazard pay to compensate for their now-more dangerous work, and low pay among essential and front-line workers continues to be pervasive (Dorman and Mishel 2020; McNicholas and Poydock 2020, Table 3). Kinder and Stateler (2021) found that in 2018, essential workers made up nearly half (22.3 million) of the 47.7 million U.S. workers in occupations in which the median wage was less than $15 per hour. In our analysis, we find that a majority of workers who would benefit from the Raise the Wage Act are essential or front-line workers.

Definitions of essential workers vary because the U.S. has no single uniform guidance and because it is difficult to map a given set of job characteristics to coarse data on occupations. Nevertheless, using a variety of different occupation-based definitions we consistently find that most of the workers who would see a pay increase due to the Raise the Wage Act are essential or front-line workers.

Table 1 shows the projected total workforce in 2025 and affected workers under the Raise the Wage Act. The first row summarizes findings already discussed in this report: 32.2 million of 151.7 million workers would receive a direct or indirect pay increase in 2025 if the minimum wage were raised to $15 per hour. In the second row, we consider “critical infrastructure” occupations defined by the Labor Market Information Institute (LMI Institute 2020), where “infrastructure” includes a broad set of workers covering a majority of the workforce, including those in energy, health care, law enforcement, telecommunications, and other occupations. The institute’s count of essential workers includes Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) codes established by federal statistical agencies for the industries and job descriptions that the Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency considers “essential critical infrastructure workers.”

About 22.0 million critical infrastructure workers would receive pay increases due to the Raise the Wage Act, and they constitute about 68.3% of the total number of all affected workers. In other words, more than two-thirds of those who would benefit from a $15 minimum wage in 2025 are critical infrastructure workers.

Essential and front-line workers are a majority of those who would benefit from a $15 minimum wage in 2025 : Levels and shares of those affected by the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 who are essential and front-line workers

Source: Authors' calculations using the following occupation definitions : critical infrastructure occupations (LMI Institute 2020) ; p re-pandemic teleworkable occupations (Dingel and Neiman 2020) ; and during pandemic teleworking occupations (authors’ calculations from 2020 Current Population Survey data).

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We also look at essential and front-line work from another angle, considering occupations in which workers cannot do their jobs remotely by working from home. In the third and fourth rows of Table 1 we analyze workers who can’t telework using two different definitions. The first definition comes from a classification by Dingel and Neiman (2020) based on pre-pandemic survey information. The second definition comes from our classification based on Current Population Survey data collected during the pandemic, specifically the employment share of occupations that were not teleworking during the months of May through December 2021.

Under these definitions of essential and front-line work, the number of workers affected by raising the minimum wage grows. That is because workers in both the cannot-telework categories are paid less on average than workers in the critical infrastructure category. The Raise the Wage Act would benefit between 28.0 million and 28.2 million workers who cannot work from home—constituting between 87.1% and 87.6% of the total affected workforce. Other EPI research has found that Black, Latinx, and Native American workers are the least likely to be in jobs that allow them to work from home (Wilson 2020).

Even when we restrict our analysis to workers in both critical infrastructure and nontelework occupations, we find a significant impact.2 The Raise the Wage Act would lift the pay of between 19.4 million and 19.9 million such workers, or roughly six out of 10 of all affected workers.

Regardless of the specific definition, it is clear that tens of millions of essential and front-line workers are underpaid and would benefit from a much higher minimum wage.

Poverty would decrease and economic security would increase under a $15 minimum wage

The five-decade decline and stagnation of the minimum wage has prevented millions of people, often children, from maintaining an adequate standard of living. Notably among minimum wage workers struggling to get by are those whose incomes are so low they fall under the federal poverty threshold.

Poverty reduction

From its origins, the minimum wage has been an important policy tool in the fight against poverty. The Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted in 1938 “to protect this Nation from the evils and dangers resulting from wages too low to buy the bare necessities of life.”3 Thirty years later, higher wages were one of five key demands of the Economic Bill of Rights of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign (Johnson 2018).

Unfortunately, infrequent and inadequate increases in the national minimum have reduced it to a poverty wage. Figure E shows that a full-time minimum wage worker in 1968 would have earned roughly $22,000 a year (in 2021 dollars), but today their counterpart could earn only about $15,000 working full time. As a consequence, a single parent working full time would be in poverty if they earned the federal minimum wage and had no other source of income.

At $15 in 2025, the federal minimum wage would no longer be a poverty wage : Annual wage income for a full-time federal minimum wage worker compared with various poverty thresholds (2021$), 1968–2025

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The data underlying the figure.

Sources: Authors' calculations of federal minimum wage values (adjusted for inflation using the CPI-U-RS and inflation projections from the Congressional Budget Office 2020), and 2019 weighted average poverty thresholds from U.S. Census Bureau 2020, adjusted to 2021 dollars.

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In 2019, about 29.1 million children and nonelderly adults lived in poverty (Semega et al. 2020). By raising wages for some full-time workers above their respective poverty threshold, the Raise the Wage Act would play a meaningful role in reducing the extent of hardship among low-wage workers and their families.

A $15 minimum wage by 2025 would reduce the number of people living in poverty by up to 3.7 million (see Figure F). To calculate this poverty reduction, we apply poverty reduction estimates from Dube (2019b) to the average minimum wage increase expected under the Raise the Wage Act. Dube finds that a 10% increase in the minimum wage reduces nonelderly poverty by somewhere between 2% and 4%. After accounting for already scheduled state and local minimum wage increases, we find that the Raise the Wage Act would raise the average, effective minimum wage across the United States by 30% in 2025, thus reducing the number of nonelderly people in poverty by between 6% and 12%, or roughly 1.8 million to 3.7 million people. If we assume the age distribution of poverty reduction is similar to the actual poverty distribution, the Raise the Wage Act would raise 1.3 million children out of poverty.4

The Raise the Wage Act would significantly reduce poverty, especially for children : Range of estimates of the number of children and nonelderly adults who would no longer be in poverty in 2025 if the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 is passed

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The data underlying the figure.

Notes: Using already scheduled state and local minimum wage increases, we estimate the employment-weighted minimum wage would be $11.53 in 2025 without the Raise the Wage Act, or $15.19 with the Raise the Wage Act, a log difference of 0.276. We apply that difference to the range of long-run poverty rate elasticities in Table 7 of Dube (2019b), or -0.220 to -0.459, and to the nonelderly poverty rates in Table B-1 of Census (2020).

Source: Authors’ calculations from Census (2020), Dube (2019b), and projected state, local, and federal minimum wages in 2025.

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Providing wages adequate to cover the most basic family budget

A broader look at the needs of families reinforces the necessity of a substantial increase in the minimum wage. One well-known downside of the “official” poverty measures is that they are an incomplete measure of economic security for families. As a result, EPI has designed Family Budget thresholds to estimate area-specific incomes needed to cover basic expenses like housing, food, transportation, health care, taxes, and other necessities (Gould, Mokhiber, and Bryant 2018; EPI 2018).5

By any reasonable standard, the Family Budget thresholds are very conservative. For example, they do not account for savings of any kind, such as for emergencies or retirement, or for any entertainment—they are simple calculations of what it takes to cover basic necessities on a month-to-month basis. Yet to meet their Family Budget thresholds, today, in all but two of the 3,000+ counties in the U.S.—both urban and rural—a single adult without children must earn more than $15 per hour and work full-time, all year long (see Figure G).6

All across the country, workers need at least $15 an hour today : Full-time, full-year hourly wages and annual income required for a single adult to meet their family budget threshold in 2021, by county

Notes: County-specific annual family budget thresholds for a single adult are adjusted to 2021 dollars, and hourly wage thresholds calculated assuming 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year.

Source: Authors’ calculations using the Economic Policy Institute Family Budget Calculator.

Rising costs of living imply that, in 2025, workers all across the country will need even more to support themselves and their families. In the average rural area of Alabama or Mississippi, a single adult without children will need to work full time and earn at least $18.50 per hour in 2025. In cities like Chicago, Miami, and Phoenix, a single adult will need even more—at least $20 per hour in 2025.7 In some cities, like New York and San Francisco, that number will approach—or exceed—$30 per hour. And of course when a family includes children, the wage needed to just afford the basics increases dramatically.

A $15 minimum wage would advance gender justice

In addition to the disproportionate impact that it would have for workers of color and those in essential and front-line jobs, raising the federal minimum wage would broadly benefit women workers. As shown in Table 2, a $15 minimum wage in 2025 would provide a pay raise to nearly 19 million women—roughly one in four women workers in the United States. Women make up nearly 60% of all those who would benefit from the policy.

A $15 minimum wage in 2025 would raise pay for workers broadly across demographic categories : Demographic characteristics of workers who would be affected by the Raise the Wage Act of 2021

Source: Economic Policy Institute Wage Simulation Model; see Technical Methodology by Cooper, Mokhiber, and Zipperer (2019).

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A $15 minimum wage would benefit adults in their career-building years who help support their families

There is sometimes a perception that the workers who would benefit from a higher minimum wage are mostly teenagers in their first jobs. In fact, the data show that most of the workers who would benefit from a federal increase to $15 are older and full-time workers. Past research shows that many of these workers are likely supporting families (Cooper 2019). Table 2 shows that only 10% of affected workers are teenagers while 65.8% are 25 years old or older. The average age of affected workers is 35 years old. Fifty-nine percent of affected workers work 35 hours per week or more, and more than a quarter have children. In fact, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would provide a raise to nearly one in three working single parents.

Table 2 also shows that the majority of workers who would receive a raise come from families with limited means. Nearly 57% of affected workers are in families with total annual incomes less than $50,000. For these families, every additional dollar they receive has a meaningful impact on their ability to make ends meet. (More detailed demographic statistics are available in Appendix Table 3.)

A $15 minimum wage in 2025 would benefit the economy

The immediate benefits of a minimum wage increase are in the earnings boost for the lowest-paid workers, but increasing the minimum wage to $9.50 this year and the increases thereafter would deliver broader benefits to the economy, particularly now. The economy is still reeling from the stunning collapse of economic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Extra dollars in the pockets of millions of working families would help by boosting aggregate demand. Economists generally recognize that low-wage workers are more likely than any other income group to spend any extra earnings immediately on previously unaffordable basic needs or services. Indeed, research by Cooper, Luengo-Prado, and Parker (2019) finds that minimum wage increases are associated with higher consumer spending, particularly in places with higher concentrations of low-wage workers.

The perennial concern raised about minimum wage increases is their effects on the employment of low-wage workers. By raising the cost of labor, do minimum wage increases cause businesses to employ significantly fewer workers, threatening the incomes of the low-wage workforce overall? The answer from empirical research on previous minimum wage increases is a clear “no.” In his comprehensive review of minimum wage research, Dube (2019a) concludes that “the overall body of evidence suggests a rather muted effect of minimum wages to date on employment” and “the weight of the evidence suggests any job losses are quite small.” For every 10% change in the average wage of low-wage workers, the median employment effect across studies was essentially zero.

Some of these studies and more recent research show that there have been little to no employment losses for even the highest minimum wages enacted at state or local levels. Cengiz et al. (2019) found that both the typical minimum wage increases and also the highest state-level minimum wage increase significantly raised wages without reducing the employment of low-wage workers. Derenoncourt and Montialoux (2021) demonstrated that highest national minimum wage we’ve had—in 1968, the equivalent of $10.59 per hour in 2021 dollars—also raised wages and significantly reduced Black–white earnings inequality without employment losses. Using data from low-wage counties, where minimum wage increases have raised labor costs much more than in high-wage labor markets, Godoey and Reich (2021) found that the policies significantly reduced poverty and had essentially no employment impact. Dube and Lindner (2021) found that 21 city-level minimum wage increases raised wages in those cities with little effect on the number of low-wage jobs.

Economists typically measure how “high” a new minimum wage is by where it would cut into the existing wage distribution. One such measure is the ratio of the minimum-to-median wage, with the median of course representing the worker at the very middle of the wage distribution. The $15 minimum wage in 2025 under the Raise the Wage Act would be 66.8%, or approximately two-thirds, of the projected national median wage.8 Dube and Lindner (2021) and Godoey and Reich (2021) found little employment impacts from minimum wage increases, even though the counties and cities they studied had minimum-to-median wage ratios of up to roughly 80%.

Another measure of the “bite” of the minimum wage is the share of the workforce affected by the policy. According to this statistic, the highwater 1968 national minimum wage is remarkably similar to the Raise the Wage Act. Estimates from Derenoncourt and Montialoux (2021) suggest that the 1968 policy directly affected an estimated 16.1% of the overall workforce and 28.8% of Black workers.9 Above we estimate similar shares for a $15 minimum wage in 2025: 14.5% of all workers and 23.2% of Black workers would be directly affected. Given that the 1968 policy raised the incomes of the low-wage workforce without substantial job loss, we should feel confident that a phased-in $15 minimum wage in 2025 would do the same.

Despite such evidence, some still may maintain that concerns about job losses are warranted. To put these concerns in perspective, consider the predictions of CBO (2021), which estimated that a $15 minimum wage by 2025 would reduce low-wage employment by about 1.4 million. There are three reasons why this estimate is overstated. First, that particular employment reduction estimate is not well supported by the best research or even the typical minimum wage study; in Dube (2019a), the median estimate of the own-wage elasticity was –0.04, less than one-tenth the size of the employment response. Second, because CBO (2021) also estimated that a $15 minimum wage in 2025 would raise the earnings of 27 million workers, even accepting at face value the job loss estimate implies that about 95% of the low-wage workforce would benefit from the policy. Third, the focus on job loss gives the misleading impression that the policy would cause many workers to have no income over the course of a year; but because of the high degree of churn in the low-wage labor market, what is measured as job losses will actually be low-wage workers spending more time in between jobs, but earning more when they do work (Cooper, Mishel, and Zipperer 2018).

Minimum wage increases are extremely popular. Moreover, the highest approval of minimum wage increases comes from those groups who critics say are most likely to suffer job losses. An analysis of the 2016 American National Election Survey by Aaron Sojourner estimates that more than seven in 10 unemployed workers approved of raising the minimum wage (Sojourner 2021). Figure H also shows that the unemployed favor raising the minimum wage by an 11 percentage-point margin over those already employed. A stronger preference for minimum wage increases holds for other demographic groups who face greater obstacles in the labor market. Black and Hispanic adults are significantly more likely to approve of minimum wage increases than white adults. Women approve of minimum wage increases significantly more than men, with similar approval margins between those without and with a college degree.