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A ‘$30 BY 2030’ MINIMUM WAGE IN NEW YORK CITY IS A BOLD PROPOSAL
 
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Sebastian Martinez Hickey
August 28, 2025
Economic Policy Institute
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_ The first step is giving the city the freedom to set its own wage
floor _

Zohran Mamdani reveals all-female transition team at Queens press
conference, The Guardian

 

Last spring, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani proposed a
“$30 by 2030” minimum wage for New York City workers.1
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Ambitious strategies to raise wages and lower costs are needed given
that New York City’s current $16.50 minimum wage
[[link removed]] is inadequate compared
with any reasonable measure of a living wage in the city.

Without a policy change, we project there will be 1.68 million NYC
workers earning less than $30 an hour in 2030, or 36.7% of the
city’s wage-earning workforce. It is likely that the vast majority
of these workers would experience significant wage gains if a $30
minimum wage were implemented.

An enormous body of research on the effects of higher minimum wages
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has shown that past minimum wage increases have meaningfully raised
pay for low-wage workers without causing significant increases in
unemployment. However, the “$30 by 2030” proposal would go beyond
the levels of minimum wages studied in past research, making it more
difficult to precisely estimate the number of workers who would
benefit and any additional impacts of the measure, such as reductions
in hours or employment.

NEW YORK CITY’S CURRENT MINIMUM WAGE DOES NOT COME CLOSE TO A LIVING
WAGE

NYC workers face some of the highest living costs in the nation.
EPI’s Family Budget Calculator
[[link removed]] (FBC) measures the income a
family needs to attain a modest yet adequate standard of living in
every U.S. county. The FBC thresholds are conservative amounts: they
account for necessities like housing, food, transportation, health
care, and child care but do not provide any allowance for savings for
retirement, emergencies, or college. As FIGURE A shows, a family of
two adults and two children in the Bronx faces annual costs of nearly
$135,000.2
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In Manhattan, these costs are greater than $167,000 a year. For a
single adult with no children, annual costs range from $62,913 in the
Bronx to $87,038 in Manhattan.

Figure A

 

With the FBC cost data we can estimate a living wage that would allow
workers to support their families.3
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TABLE 1 shows that the living wage in 2025 is already above $30 an
hour in Manhattan ($33.89), Queens ($31.31), and Staten Island
($30.68). While Brooklyn and The Bronx do not exceed this threshold,
the costs facing these families will almost certainly continue to rise
between today and 2030. These figures make it clear that discussions
of a $30 minimum wage in New York City are not superfluous—they
reflect the very real needs of working people throughout the city.

With the FBC cost data we can estimate a living wage that would allow
workers to support their families.3
[[link removed]]
TABLE 1 shows that the living wage in 2025 is already above $30 an
hour in Manhattan ($33.89), Queens ($31.31), and Staten Island
($30.68). While Brooklyn and The Bronx do not exceed this threshold,
the costs facing these families will almost certainly continue to rise
between today and 2030. These figures make it clear that discussions
of a $30 minimum wage in New York City are not superfluous—they
reflect the very real needs of working people throughout the city.

Relative to the actual living wage, New York City’s minimum wage is
significantly lower than many other high-cost-of-living cities in the
country. NYC’s $16.50 minimum wage is around half of the living wage
in most of the city’s boroughs. By comparison, the minimum wage is
around three-quarters the estimated living wage in Seattle, Washington
D.C., and Los Angeles. Chicago’s and Denver’s minimum wages are
each more than 80% of a living wage, while the minimum wage is 69.3%
of the living wage in San Francisco. All these cities have room to
push for higher wages for their workers, but it is clear that New York
City’s minimum wage leaves workers further behind than many other
major cities in the country.

It is notable that among the cities in Table 1, those with local
control over minimum wage policy have been significantly more
successful at approaching living wage targets. While New York City’s
minimum wage is higher than the upstate region, the policy is
currently set by state lawmakers in Albany, not at the local level.
Boston (Suffolk County, MA) uses the Massachusetts state minimum wage
of $15.00, which is around half of the living wage in the city.
Portland, OR, also has its minimum wage set by state lawmakers and has
a slightly stronger minimum wage floor (69.8% of the living wage), but
every city with a wage floor of at least 70% of the living wage has
local control over the policy.4
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This pattern suggests that when given the power to do so, local
government officials are more responsive to the wage floor needs of
workers in their city.

WITHOUT A POLICY CHANGE, 1.68 MILLION NEW YORK CITY WORKERS WILL BE
PAID LESS THAN $30 AN HOUR BY 2030

Under the status quo minimum wage policy in New York City, we project
there will be 1.68 million workers earning less than $30 in 2030, a
little more than a third (36.7%) of the total wage-earning workforce
in the city. These workers would likely be directly affected by the
minimum wage increases in Mamdani’s policy proposal. In addition,
economic research shows that workers already earning above the new
minimum wage also typically benefit through spillover wage effects
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organizational wage ladders.

Most minimum wage research
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finds that increasing the wage floor significantly increases earnings
for affected workers, while causing little to no loss in employment.
That’s because businesses are able to adjust
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through modestly increasing prices, reductions in turnover, and the
movement of workers from less-productive firms to more-productive
firms.

Moreover, even if a minimum wage increase did result in reduced
employment, it’s important to understand what that actually means
for low-wage workers. The low-wage job market is characterized by high
levels of turnover and churn, as workers are typically always looking
for any new position that will offer them more livable pay. Many
low-wage workers also spend some portion of the year not
employed—due to care responsibilities, participating in education or
training programs, or seeking other work. In this context, what
researchers would describe as reduced employment does not mean that
some set of workers will now be permanently unemployed. Rather, it
likely would mean that some low-wage workers would work fewer hours
over the course of the year or spend more time between jobs. Of
course, these workers would now be earning more per hour when they do
work because of the higher minimum wage—what really matters is the
net outcome on their annual earnings.

We are cautious about extending the general conclusions of minimum
wage research on employment to a $30 minimum wage in New York City.
The proposal is more ambitious than the levels that economists have
studied extensively. One tool economists use to assess the “bite”
of a minimum wage is the minimum-to-median-wage ratio (sometimes
called the “Kaitz index”). When underlying wages in the labor
market are higher, as proxied by the median wage, the
minimum-to-median-wage ratio is lower, and a given minimum wage
affects a smaller share of employment. For example, a $17 minimum wage
will have a much smaller effect on workers and employers in a higher
wage place like New York City than it would have in places where wages
are generally much lower.

TABLE 2 estimates the minimum-to-median-wage ratio for a $30 NYC
minimum wage in 2030, as well as other wage thresholds. The ratio of a
$30 minimum wage in 2030 would be around 0.76, higher than most other
policies in the U.S.5
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In a 2021 paper
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Arindrajit Dube and Attila Lindner compared minimum-to-median-wage
ratios across the 10 most populous U.S cities with minimum wages above
the state level and found a population-weighted average
minimum-to-median-wage ratio of 0.64.6
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At the time, Los Angeles’s minimum wage had a Kaitz index of 0.75,
but this policy has not been studied enough to understand its
employment effects. According to Dube and Lindner, most state minimum
wage policies greater than the federal minimum sit at a
minimum-to-median-wage ratio of around 0.50. Among international
peers, it is notable that the United Kingdom officially targets
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a minimum wage policy that is two-thirds the median wage (ratio of
0.67). Other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) countries
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also have high minimum-to-median-wage ratios, including France (0.62),
New Zealand (0.69), Mexico (0.74), Chile (0.75), Costa Rica (0.87),
and Colombia (0.92).

The cost-of-living crisis in New York City requires bold steps forward
as part of a cohesive strategy to create a more equitable economy.
Increasing the minimum wage should be one key part of this strategy,
which must also include tackling the cost of housing, child care, and
health care. The experience of other high-cost cities also indicates
that local lawmakers are better positioned than state officials to set
appropriate and livable minimum wages for their jurisdiction’s
workers. New York state lawmakers can be much more ambitious in
setting high standards for New York City, but it likely would be
better to let the city set its own wage standards above the state
floor, much in the same way that states can set their own minimums
above the federal minimum [[link removed]].

Table 1

  

Table 2

 

NOTES

1.
[[link removed]]The
proposal also calls for indexing the minimum wage to inflation or
productivity increases, whichever is greater, thereafter. The tipped
minimum wage in New York is set at two-thirds the regular minimum
wage.

2.
[[link removed]]The
FBC data is organized by county, but for the purposes of this analysis
we refer to the corresponding New York City boroughs.

3.
[[link removed]]Gould,
Mokhiber, and deCourcy (2024) suggest living wages
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be approximated by 81% of the associated FBC thresholds because
middle-income families receive about 81% of their income through wages
and 19% from other non-wage sources, including government transfers
(such as refundable tax credits) and non-wage market income (such as
interest on savings).

4.
[[link removed]]Of
course, any state action is more beneficial than using the stagnant
federal minimum wage, which is still the effective wage floor in
Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston, and other cities in states where local
minimum wage increases are preempted
[[link removed]]. These localities all have
effective minimum wages that are less than half of the living wage.

5.
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projections assume a nominal annual wage growth of 3.3% based on
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections of the Employment Cost
Index. If we vary this assumption ±0.5%, the outcomes of a $30
minimum wage in 2030 vary as follows: Kaitz ratio: 0.73–0.79. Share
of workers under $30 an hour: 36.0%–40.0%.

6.
[[link removed]]At
the time New York City had a 0.66 Kaitz index, higher than it does
today (approximately 0.5).

Sebastian Martinez Hickey (he/him) is a State Economic Analyst on the
State Policy & Research team at EPI. Martinez Hickey’s research
studies state minimum wages, employment levels and pay in the public
sector and K-12 education, and state unemployment insurance. He is
passionate about centering race and gender in his research and
providing historical context for modern day inequalities. His research
on state minimum wage increases has been used in numerous debates
regarding state and local minimum wage ballot measures. He has made
numerous media appearances discussing the minimum wage and public
education workers. In addition, he provides technical support to the
state-level policy research and advocacy organizations that make up
the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN). He originally
joined EPI in 2021 as a research assistant.

Martinez Hickey has been quoted in Marketplace, CNN, FAIR radio, KFF
Health News, and News & Views with Joel Heitkamp, and his work has
been cited in the Washington Post, CBS News (Money Watch), NPR,
Politico, MarketWatch, the Hill, Business Insider, Mother Jones, and
the Associated Press.

Prior to joining EPI, Martinez Hickey worked as a Bill Emerson
National Hunger Fellow where he trained community advocates for
affordable housing at the Welcome Home Coalition in Portland, OR and
researched access to mental health services for young people with
low-incomes at CLASP.

THE ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE’S VISION IS AN ECONOMY THAT IS JUST
AND STRONG, SUSTAINABLE, AND EQUITABLE — WHERE EVERY JOB IS GOOD,
EVERY WORKER CAN JOIN A UNION, AND EVERY FAMILY AND COMMUNITY CAN
THRIVE.

ABOUT EPI. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a nonprofit,
nonpartisan think tank working for the last 30 years to counter rising
inequality, low wages and weak benefits for working people, slower
economic growth, unacceptable employment conditions, and a widening
racial wage gap. We intentionally center low- and middle-income
working families in economic policy discussions at the federal, state,
and local levels as we fight for a world where every worker has access
to a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, retirement
security, and a union.

We also know that research on its own is not enough—that’s why we
intentionally pair our research with effective outreach and advocacy
efforts as we fight to make concrete change in everyday people’s
lives.

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* Zohran Mamdani
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* Minimum Wage
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* New York City
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