Local minimum wages and state preemption

Three layers of minimum wage can apply to one job: the federal rate, the state rate and, in some places, a city or county rate. The local minimum wage pages on this site cover the third layer. This page explains where that layer comes from and why it exists in some states and not others.

What federal law says about local rates

The Fair Labor Standards Act does not create local minimum wages, but it expressly makes room for them. Section 18(a) provides that nothing in the Act excuses an employer from complying with a federal or state law or a municipal ordinance that sets a higher minimum wage or a shorter maximum workweek. The same section says the Act never justifies cutting a wage that is above the federal minimum. The federal rate is a floor under every other rate, and the statute names “municipal ordinance” alongside state law as something that can sit above it.

DOL’s youth wage fact sheet applies the same principle to the $4.25 youth rate: where a state or local law requires a higher minimum and makes no exception for workers under 20, the higher state or local rate governs.

Why the state decides

Whether a city or county is allowed to adopt a minimum wage is a question of state law, not federal law. Cities and counties have only the powers their state constitution and statutes give them. Some states grant that power, by home-rule authority or by a specific minimum wage statute that leaves room for local rates; others withhold it or have withdrawn it, a practice usually called preemption. The result is a map on which local rates cluster in a few states and are absent from most.

This site does not catalog state preemption statutes, because they change and because reading them is legal work. What it does is list every jurisdiction whose own government publishes a rate above its state’s and whose page a scripted fetch can read. The distribution of those jurisdictions across states is itself a rough picture of where local rate-setting is permitted.

What DOL’s table does and does not show

DOL’s state minimum wage table, which the state pages here reproduce, carries a standing caveat: some local governments set minimum wage rates higher than their state’s, and those provisions are not displayed in the table. So a state page on this site shows the state rate only. A worker in Seattle, Chicago or Denver has to look at the local page as well, because the state figure is not the one that applies there.

What a local ordinance typically sets

Reading the ordinances in the registry, the common elements are a general hourly rate; sometimes separate tiers by employer size, with the largest employers reaching the top rate first; a schedule of future steps or an annual adjustment by a formula, usually tied to a consumer price index; and sometimes industry-specific rates, for example for hotel workers. The local pages here show the general rate for the largest employer tier in the table and list every tier on the jurisdiction’s page, in the ordinance’s words. Industry rates are noted but never listed as rows.

Local ordinances also decide for themselves whether a tip credit applies and how they treat young workers; those answers are in each ordinance and are not summarized here.

Counties and unincorporated areas

Where a county ordinance reaches only the county’s unincorporated territory, leaving cities inside it to their own rules or the state’s, the registry says so in the entry’s name, as with unincorporated Los Angeles County and unincorporated Boulder County, so a city address inside the county is not mistaken for a county-rate address.

Reading the three layers together

The rule for any one job is simple to state and sometimes hard to apply: the highest of the applicable federal, state and local rates is the one that must be paid, as section 18 makes clear. The hard part is “applicable,” which depends on where the work is performed, not where the employer is headquartered or the worker lives, and on each ordinance’s own coverage terms. The occupation tables on this site do not separate local-rate jurisdictions from the rest of a metro area, so a metro’s 10th percentile wage blends workers under different floors.

What this page does not decide

Whether a particular ordinance covers a particular job, and what happens when an ordinance and a state law conflict, are questions for the jurisdiction’s labor standards office or a lawyer.