Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit newsroom, is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Sign up for our newsletter for more stories straight to your inbox.
Yes.
The minimum wage in Wisconsin covers 29.9% of the living wage for a family with two working adults and two children — the lowest percentage in the nation, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator.
The highest percentage is in the state of Washington, where the minimum wage covers 59.8% of the living wage.
The calculator considers a “living wage” enough to cover basic needs, including food, housing and medical care. It does not include costs such as restaurants, vacations and saving for retirement.
Since 2009, Wisconsin’s minimum wage has been the same as the federal rate, $7.25/hour. For a two-adult, two-child Wisconsin family, the living wage is $24.28. For one adult with no children it is $16.40. In either case, the state’s minimum wage is much lower than its cost of living.
Thirty states and Washington, D.C. have minimum wages higher than the federal minimum.
Sources
MIT: A Calculation of the Living Wage
MIT: About the Living Wage Calculator
MIT: Living Wage Calculation for Wisconsin
National Conference of State Legislatures: State Minimum Wages
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Credit should be given, in this format: “By Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin Watch”
- If published online, you must include the links and link to wisconsinwatch.org
- If you share the story on social media, please mention @wisconsinwatch (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram)
- Don’t sell the story — it may not be marketed as an individual product.
- Don’t sell ads against the story. But you can publish it with pre-sold ads.
- Your website must include a prominent way to contact you.
- Additional elements that are packaged with our story must be labeled.
- Users can republish our photos, illustrations, graphics and multimedia elements ONLY with stories with which they originally appeared. You may not separate multimedia elements for standalone use.
- If we send you a request to change or remove Wisconsin Watch content from your site, you must agree to do so immediately.
For questions regarding republishing rules please contact Andy Hall, executive director, at ahall@wisconsinwatch.org