US Hospitality Workers’ Pay Rising at the Highest Rate

According to data analysis and reporting website Stateline, over the past four years, the United States’ lowest-paid industry category—leisure and hospitality—has seen national wages increase, on average, 29%.

Between mid-2019 and mid-2023 in 40 states, including states that have not increased in its minimum wage beyond the federal rate of US$7.25, the 29% wage increase among hospitality workers outpaced earners in the highest-paid industries, whose wages increased, on average, 20%. Maine (41%), New Jersey (35%), and Florida (34%) saw the highest wage increases for hospitality workers.

The greater increasing rate of wages for the bottom 10% earners over the top 10% of earners since 2019 represents a 40% shift on pay inequality that, according to National Bureau of Economic Research, had been building since 1980.

Vincent Fusaro, an assistant professor at Boston College’s School of Social Work, told Stateline that the higher increasing pay rate among lower-wage earners versus higher-wage earners was surprising in light of the economic challenges experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Going back to what was expected in spring of 2020, that’s astonishing,” Fusaro wrote in an email to Stateline. “It was perfectly reasonable to assume the pandemic period would be a disaster for folks at the bottom of the economic distribution,” he said, but instead, “low-wage workers, who had been among the hardest-hit in the Great Recession, instead saw gains.”

To learn more about the minimum wage increases for this year, see Minimum Wage Increases in 25 States for 2024.