The best minimum wage in America covers 43% of what it costs to raise a family. That's Washington, D.C. — $18.40 an hour, higher than any state in the country. Measure it against the MIT Living Wage Calculator's basket for a family of four with one earner — food, housing, childcare, healthcare, transportation — and it gets you less than halfway. In Indiana, $7.25 covers 19%. Even in Arkansas, the least expensive place in the country to raise a family of four, the state minimum wage covers 36%.

That's the ceiling and the floor of the American wage system, and neither works.

This Labor Day weekend, Oxfam will publish the 2026 Best States to Work Index: 37 labor policies scored across all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Two things are worth saying before it launches.

The affordability debate is missing half the ledger

Right now, the conversation is almost entirely about prices. Groceries, rent, and gas. Two-thirds of Americans told Washington Post/Ipsos this summer that groceries had become unaffordable — up from 45% in February. Gallup found the same two-thirds saying fuel costs had caused hardship at home, and among households earning under $50,000, it's 77%.

All true. But prices are one side of the equation. The other side is what you're paid and whether you have any leverage to change it — and that side barely comes up.

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. That's the longest stretch without an increase since Congress created the wage floor in 1938. Adjusted for inflation, it's worth less than at any point in the past 75 years. In the last year alone, CEO pay rose more than 20 times faster than worker pay.

Unemployment insurance (UI) tells the same story from another angle. In most states, weekly UI payments cover less than 20% of a family's cost of living. If you lose your job through no fault of your own,  the net catches you at a fifth of what you need.

Accordingly, we don't measure wages against inflation or against the federal floor. We measure them against what a working family actually has to pay.

What’s new in this year’s Best States index?

Three new policies made it into the Index, and all three exist because workers are getting squeezed in ways that the 1938 framework never contemplated.

Caregiver discrimination protections

There's no federal law explicitly geared toward stopping an employer from firing you because your mother has dementia. The sandwich generation is growing fast, and people are losing jobs over care responsibilities. We looked for three things in state law: a ban on discriminating by family status, a ban on asking about it, and a definition of family that goes beyond your own kids. Two states meet all three: Maine and Minnesota.

Bossware protections

Digital tools that surveil workers and automate management decisions — scheduling, task assignment, performance reviews, discipline — often with no human review and no obligation to tell you what data is being collected. Black and Latinx workers are disproportionately subject to automated task management, and these systems reproduce the bias in their training data. We surveyed states on disclosure requirements, bias audits, and human review rights. Eleven states meet at least some of the criteria. Colorado and Illinois meet all of them.

Sectoral bargaining for rideshare drivers

Most of US collective bargaining happens one workplace at a time, which is close to useless for workers classified as independent contractors. Sectoral bargaining sets terms across an entire industry. Two states allow it for rideshare drivers: California and Massachusetts. A third, Illinois, just recently signed their policy into law (Illinois’s effective data was too late for inclusion in this year’s index).

The part that should bother you

Every policy in the Index is either absent or inadequate at the federal level. Yet every single one of them already exists somewhere in the United States.

So, this isn't a question of whether the country knows how to make work pay. It knows.

It's a question of who happens to live in a state that figured it out — and who doesn't.

Your zip code decides whether your employer can fire you for taking care of your loved one. That's a policy choice. Someone made it.

Explore last year’s report