Prevailing Wage vs Minimum Wage

Both terms name a legal wage floor, and both are enforced by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, which is where the resemblance ends. A minimum wage is one figure for everyone a law covers. A prevailing wage is a figure found for a particular occupation in a particular place, and often for a particular contract, from what workers there are already paid. This page sets the two side by side; the pages on each program carry the detail.

Who sets them and for whom

The federal minimum wage is set by Congress in section 6 of the Fair Labor Standards Act and applies to the employees the Act covers, in every state; states and many cities set their own, and the highest applicable one governs. The minimum wage section of this site shows the federal, every state’s and the verified local rates from the Department of Labor’s tables and the ordinances themselves.

A prevailing wage applies only where a statute attaches it to a transaction. The Davis-Bacon Act attaches one to federal and federally assisted construction contracts; the Service Contract Act to federal service contracts; the immigration laws to the hiring of H-1B, H-1B1, E-3, H-2A, H-2B, CW-1 and PERM workers; and state “little Davis-Bacon” laws to state and local public works above the thresholds in the state table. A worker not on such a contract or visa has no prevailing wage, however skilled the trade.

How the figure is found

A minimum wage is legislated or indexed: a dollar figure in a statute or an annual adjustment by a formula the statute names. A prevailing wage is measured. Under Davis-Bacon, 29 CFR 1.2 defines it as the wage paid to a majority of workers in a classification on similar projects in the area, failing that the wage paid to at least 30 percent of them, failing that a weighted average, all from the Wage and Hour Division’s construction surveys. Under the immigration programs the measurement comes from the OEWS survey run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the source of this site’s occupation pages, read as a mean, as the median of an employer survey, or as a level built from the distribution; Service Contract Act rates rest on the statistical data available for the locality. The result is specific: a county and construction type, a locality and occupation, or a metropolitan area, occupation and wage level, and it changes when the survey does.

What is in the number

A minimum wage is a cash hourly figure, with rules on what may be credited toward it (a tip credit and the reasonable cost of board and lodging, under section 3(m) of the Fair Labor Standards Act). A Davis-Bacon or Service Contract Act prevailing wage has two parts, a base hourly rate and a fringe benefit amount, and the contractor owes the sum; the Davis-Bacon fringe benefits and SCA health and welfare pages explain the benefit side. The immigration prevailing wages are cash figures but come with their own conditions, such as the H-1B rule that the employer must pay the higher of the prevailing wage and its own actual wage for similar employees.

How they stack

The floors are cumulative, and the highest applicable one wins. The H-2B rule lists the federal, state and local minimum wages among the figures the employer must match or beat (20 CFR 655.10), and Fact Sheet 66 notes that a Davis-Bacon project may also carry state and local prevailing wage requirements. Executive Order 14026, which had set a minimum wage for federal contractors beneath the determinations, was revoked in March 2025, and the Wage and Hour Division states that it no longer enforces it. In the other direction, a prevailing wage never lowers anything: an employer on a covered contract still owes the ordinary minimum wage, overtime under the FLSA or the Contract Work Hours and Safety Standards Act, and any state rule.

What this site shows for each

The minimum-wage pages show legal rates, read from the Department of Labor’s tables and the statutes and ordinances, with the date each was verified. The prevailing-wage pages explain the rules and link the official sources: SAM.gov for Davis-Bacon and Service Contract Act determinations, the FLAG wage library for the immigration programs, the Department of Labor’s table for state thresholds. No determination is reproduced here, because a determination is revised continuously and only the version incorporated into a contract governs it. The one thing the two halves of the site share is the survey: the state profiles and occupation tables show the OEWS percentiles from which several prevailing wages are derived, and reading those tables is covered in the learn section. A percentile on an OEWS table is a statistic about what was paid; a minimum wage and a prevailing wage are rules about what must be paid, and neither can be read off the other.