Minimum Wage Basics: Local Minimum Wage Laws

NELP’s Minimum Wage Basics series sheds light on key issues related to the minimum wage, drawing on the latest research and campaign developments.

Introduction

Over the past decade, cities and counties have played a key role in leading the fight to raise wages for the nation’s lowest paid workers. To date, over five dozen localities have enacted local minimum wage ordinances higher than the state law. These local measures bring minimum wages more in line with local costs of living; and—in states where legislatures are unwilling to raise the wage floor, or during periods of time when the U.S. Congress fails to raise the federal wage—they serve as an alternative path to raising pay.

This fact sheet provides an overview of the history, research, and role of local minimum wages. Overall, the economic evidence indicates that local minimum wages have proven to be effective tools for raising pay and improving job quality without reducing employment or causing businesses to relocate.

Local Minimum Wages, 1993 to the Present

In 1993, the District of Columbia made history by enacting the nation’s first city minimum wage ordinance.[i] Although in the following two decades, only a handful of localities moved to adopt their own minimum wages, local momentum decisively took off around 2013 when voters in the city of SeaTac, Washington approved the nation’s first $15 minimum wage.[ii] Since then, an unprecedented five dozen cities and counties have moved to adopt higher local minimum wage laws (Table 3), including almost two dozen cities and counties since 2020 that approved ordinances to raise wages, eliminate the subminimum tipped wage, or index minimum wages to inflation.

Local minimum wages more closely reflect local costs of living than statewide measures. Where localities are not preempted from raising wages on the local level, these ordinances are also a key means for raising the wage floor in regions of the country where state legislatures are unwilling or unable to act; and can be precursors to state action. In California, for example, between November 2014 and January 2016 six local jurisdictions[iii] approved $15 minimum wage ordinances, and three others approved smaller increases.[iv] Following those local increases, in April 2016, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a state bill phasing in a $15 minimum wage.[v]

Illustrating the importance of the minimum wage to local legislative priorities, in August 2014 the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ “Cities of Opportunity Task Force” endorsed a higher city minimum wage as key tool for fighting income inequality at the local level.[vi]

The Important Role of Local Minimum Wages

Local minimum wages offer several distinct advantages that make them an important complement to state or federal minimum wage laws:

• They allow higher-cost cities to set minimum wage rates that better correspond to higher local living costs;
• They allow localities in states where the legislature is slow or unwilling to raise the minimum wage to address the problem on their own;
• They provide venues for demonstrating the feasibility of substantially higher minimum wages; and pursuing key reforms such as annual inflation indexing, and the gradual elimination of the tipped subminimum wage, which for political reasons can be harder to adopt at the state level. In the section above, we give the example of California localities adopting local wage ordinances prior to statewide action to raise the state minimum wage to $15. The state of Washington provides another example of local policy leading to statewide action. Prior to Washington voters’ approval of a statewide $13.50 minimum wage in 2016, voters in SeaTac had approved a $15 minimum wage for hospitality workers in 2013,[vii] and the city of Seattle had passed an ordinance[viii] raising the minimum wage to $15 and a sunset of the lower tipped wage in 2014,[ix] demonstrating the feasibility and reasonableness of a $13.50 statewide minimum wage policy.[x] In Maryland, Montgomery County (the state’s largest county, home to 17 percent of Maryland’s total population[xi]) adopted a $15 minimum wage in 2017[xii], prior to the state legislature approving a statewide $15 minimum wage in 2019.[xiii] And in Illinois, both Chicago and Cook County adopted $13 minimum wage ordinances in 2014[xiv] and 2016[xv], respectively, which led the state legislature to consider and finally pass a statewide $15 minimum wage in 2019.[xvi]

Endnotes

[i] Arindrajit Dube and Attila S. Lindner, “City Limits: What Do Local-Area Minimum Wages Do?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (35)1: 27–50 (Winter 2021), https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.35.1.27.

[ii] “SeaTac, Washington, Proposition 1, Minimum Wage Increase Measure (November 2013),” Ballotpedia, accessed March 31, 2025, https://ballotpedia.org/SeaTac,_Washington,_Proposition_1,_Minimum_Wage_Increase_Measure_(November_2013).

[iii] These six localities are San Francisco (November 2014), Los Angeles (May 2015), Emeryville (June 2015), Los Angeles County (September 2015), Mountain View (October 2015), and El Cerrito (November 2015).

[iv] The three localities are San Diego ($11.50 adopted by the city council in July 2014, and ratified by voters in June 2016); Oakland ($12.25 approved by voters in November 2014), and Long Beach ($13 with a path to $15 adopted by the city council in January 2016). The Long Beach minimum wage is no longer in effect, as it was superseded by the statewide wage floor.

[v] Christopher W. Olmsted and Hera S. Arsen, “Governor Brown Signs California’s $15 Minimum Wage Bill,” Ogletree Deakins, April 4, 2016, https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/governor-brown-signs-californias-15-minimum-wage-bill/.

[vi] City of New York, Office of the Mayor, Cities of Opportunity Task Force Commitment to Action, August 11, 2014, http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/397-14/cities-opportunity-task-force-commitment-action#/0.

[vii] “SeaTac, Washington, Proposition 1, Minimum Wage Increase Measure (November 2013),” Ballotpedia, accessed June 13, 2025, https://ballotpedia.org/SeaTac,_Washington,_Proposition_1,_Minimum_Wage_Increase_Measure_(November_2013).

[viii] Alexander Linares, “Seattle Passes $15 Minimum Wage: The Resurgence of Minimum Wage Debates,” Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago, June 9, 2014, https://greatcities.uic.edu/2014/06/09/seattle-passes-15-minimum-wage-ordinance-the-resurgence-of-minimum-wage-debates/.

[ix] “Seattle’s Minimum Wage,” Seattle Office of Labor Standards, accessed June 13, 2025, https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/LaborStandards/2025_OLS_MW_MultiyearChart_FINAL.pdf.

[x] “Washington Minimum Wage Increase, Initiative 1433 (2016),” Ballotpedia, accessed June 13, 2025, https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Minimum_Wage_Increase,_Initiative_1433_(2016).

[xi] “Maryland at a Glance,” Maryland Manual On-Line, accessed March 15, 2025, https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/mdmanual/01glance/html/pop.html.

[xii] “Statement by County Executive Ike Leggett on Council Action to Raise Montgomery’s Minimum Wage” [press release], Montgomery County, Maryland, November 7, 2017, https://www2.montgomerycountymd.gov/mcgportalapps/Press_Detail.aspx?Item_ID=21566.

[xiii] Kelsey Basten, “Maryland Approves $15 Minimum Wage,” GovDocs, April 2, 2019, https://www.govdocs.com/maryland-approves-15-minimum-wage/.

[xiv] Michael Winter, Jeff Ayres and Bill Laitner, “Protesters Nationwide Call for $15 Minimum Wage,” USA Today, December 4, 2014, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/04/minimum-wage-fast-food-protests/19908011/.

[xv] Adam Gabbatt, “’Tea Party of the Left’: Bernie Sanders’ Ethos Endures in Impending Trump Era,” The Guardian, November 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/15/bernie-sanders-progressive-activism-trump-protests.

[xvi] Vincent Caruso, “Pritzker Signs Statewide $15 Minimum Wage into Law,” Illinois Policy, February 19, 2019, https://www.illinoispolicy.org/pritzker-signs-statewide-15-minimum-wage-into-law/.