Minimum-wage workers in 19 states saw their paychecks increase this year. But Wisconsin hasn’t changed its minimum wage — just $7.25 per hour — for 17 years, shrinking the buying power of the lowest-earning workers.
Wisconsin ties its minimum wage to the federal level, which hasn’t budged for its longest stretch in history. Had Congress indexed the wage to inflation in 2009, it would have risen to $10.88 in 2025. That’s a difference of $145.20 over a 40-hour workweek.
Elsewhere, 34 states, territories and districts have set minimum wages above $7.25.
Neighboring Minnesota raised its minimum wage from $11.13 to $11.41 this year, while Michigan’s leaped from $12.48 to $13.73. Illinois kept its threshold at $15, the highest level among noncoastal states.
In 2024, about 1% of the Wisconsin workforce earned at or below the state’s minimum wage. Those people generally worked as salespeople, automotive service technicians or food preparation workers, U.S. Census data show.
Wisconsin’s tipped workers have an even lower minimum wage of $2.33 per hour, slightly higher than the $2.13 federal minimum, which has not changed since 1991.
Meanwhile, the average living wage for a single adult with no children in Wisconsin in 2025 is $20.96, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, with higher costs in metropolitan areas — including $22.18 in Madison and $21.07 in Milwaukee and Waukesha. The living wage is significantly higher for adults who raise children and lower for people living with a working partner.
New York campaign sparked ‘Fight for $15’
Campaigns to raise the minimum wage have regularly drawn national headlines. In 2012, fast-food workers and their supporters began calling for a $15-per-hour minimum wage in New York City. Their victory inspired a broader ‘Fight for $15’ movement, including in Wisconsin, as Wisconsin Watch previously reported.
This year, The Living Wage Coalition — a group of labor and progressive organizations — launched a campaign to raise Wisconsin’s minimum wage to $20 per hour, calling the status quo far below a reasonable standard of living for the lowest-wage workers.
An increase to $15 per hour would be politically popular and directly or indirectly raise the wages of 231,800 (18%) women workers, 36,200 (25.6%) Black workers and 50,200 (26.6%) Hispanic workers in Wisconsin — narrowing gender and racial wealth and income gaps that are some of the largest in the nation, according to a 2025 High Road Strategy Center report. The University of Wisconsin-Madison-based “think-and-do tank” focuses on solutions to social problems — including those related to the environment, opportunity and democratic institutions.
Still, multiple bills to raise Wisconsin’s minimum wage — largely proposed by Democrats — have stalled in the Legislature. Republican lawmakers have cited concerns about burdening small businesses.
Higher wage ‘has to come from somewhere’
Minimum-wage hikes — depending on the size — can bring a mix of positive and negative economic consequences, according to Callie Freitag, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Social Work.
“The good thing is that earnings would go up for workers. Employers would raise wages and be able to pay workers more,” Freitag said. “But the money to pay workers more has to come from somewhere.”
Economists worry that dramatic minimum-wage hikes could lead to higher consumer costs — or prompt businesses to cut worker hours or eliminate their jobs entirely, Freitag added.
The key would be an increase that benefits the lowest-paid workers without significantly affecting the broader economy. But it’s unclear what that sweet spot is.
Conditions of the labor market — the supply and demand for workers — shape wages across most of the economy. Wages typically increase when there are more openings than workers, and they decrease when there are few openings for available workers.
Setting the minimum wage close to or below an equilibrium wage — where the demand for labor matches the supply — only minimally affects wages across the market, economists suggest.
States that hiked minimum wages saw slightly higher gains across the lowest-tier wages (the bottom 10%) between 2019 and 2024, but not enough to claim a correlation, an analysis by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found. A range of factors could have shaped the wage increases, which also played out in the Midwest.
Wisconsin has seen slightly faster growth in bottom-tier wages than its neighbors — even without increasing the minimum wage. The state’s bottom-tier wages increased from $10.92 hourly in 2009 to $14.58, Wisconsin Watch found by analyzing EPI’s data.
Bigger hikes strain employers
While basic economic principles suggest that a 10% increase in the minimum wage would decrease the hiring of unskilled workers by 1 to 2%, recent studies suggest an even smaller shift, or no effect at all.
Most minimum-wage studies published between 2004 and 2024 have shown little or no job loss, Ben Zipperer, an EPI senior economist, found.
Researchers tend to focus most on cities and states that have significantly increased their minimum wage. Seattle, Washington, which has hiked its threshold annually since 2015, has among the highest in the country at $21.30 this year.
In a 2022 study, University of Washington researchers found that Seattle’s minimum wage increase to $11 hourly in 2015 “had an insignificant effect on employment,” but a spike to $13 in 2016 “resulted in a large drop in employment.”
But the findings might not directly apply to other places, the researchers found, because industries and the makeup of the labor force might look and act differently elsewhere.
A separate University of Washington study found that a minimum-wage increase to $15 hourly affected most child care businesses, which commonly responded by raising tuition and reducing staff hours or total number of staff — potentially harming staff and lower-wage customers.
What work is worth
“Minimum wage legislation commonly has two stated objectives: the reduction of employer control of wages; and the abolition of poverty,” George Stiegler, a leader of the Chicago school of economics, wrote in 1946 — an era when Congress was debating bigger increases to the minimum wage in the policy’s early years.
But Stiegler was pessimistic about the prospect that minimum-wage hikes were the best way to eliminate poverty. He instead called for lawmakers to grant lower-income families other forms of relief, including tax cuts and credits.
That spirit was reflected in the “no tax on tips” bill, which the Wisconsin Assembly passed this month to benefit tipped workers.
Still, Laura Dresser, associate director of the High Road Strategy Center, views the minimum wage as an important floor to benefit workers at the margins and signal “work is worth this.”
“People who are working full time should be able to afford life,” she said. “At $7.25 per hour, there’s almost nothing you can afford, and it feels far below what a wage floor really should function as.”
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