Methodology & sources
How we source, validate, and cite minimum-wage rates
Minimum-wage figures are legal-compliance data. Most lookup sites hand-type a number and leave you to trust it. We don't: every rate is effective-dated, validated against a federal-floor sanity check, confidence-scored, and carries a citation trail back to its source of record. This page documents exactly how — so an auditor, an employee, or an agent can check our work.
This snapshot
- Jurisdictions
- 114
- States + DC
- 51
- City / county ordinances
- 62
- Retrieved
- 2026-06-30
Contract v0.20.0. The published page reads this static snapshot at build time — there is no live API dependency at request time, so the rate you see is exactly the rate we validated and committed.
What every rate carries
1. Source of record
Rates resolve from the wage-compliance dataset — a single, effective-dated registry of statutory rule versions, not a scraped table. Each jurisdiction inherits the most-specific applicable rule (city → county → state → federal), and we record which jurisdiction the applied rule actually came from. We never hand-type a figure into the site.
2. Effective dating
Every rate shows the date it took effect. Minimum wages step on a schedule — January 1 for most states, July 1 for many city ordinances — so a number without an effective date is a number you can't defend. The full dataset adds the forward-dated change feed; the free lookup shows the current effective rate.
3. Validation & the federal-floor gate
Before any snapshot publishes, an automated check refuses to ship it unless every rate is a positive number at or above the federal floor (a resolved rate below $7.25 is a data error — federal law preempts it), every entry is marked validated, and every effective date parses. A bad snapshot cannot deploy. This is the same gate you can run yourself: npm run wage:check.
4. Confidence scoring & citation
Each rule carries a source-confidence score, surfaced on every jurisdiction page alongside the effective date, validation status, and a link back to the dataset of record. When an auditor or an employee asks, “a website said so” is not an answer — the source and effective date are right there on the page.
Scope & honest limits
- ·The free lookup shows the general rate (standard non-tipped, non-exempt employees). Tipped, youth/training, and small-employer variants differ and change on their own schedules — those live in the full dataset.
- ·We include every US state and DC, plus the cities and counties that carry their owndistinct ordinance. A locality with no separate rule isn't omitted by accident — it inherits its state (or the federal) rate, and we say so.
- ·Upstream authorities are the US Department of Labor and each state's labor agency; city rates trace to municipal ordinances. The dataset normalizes and effective-dates those into one queryable registry.