- Current minimum wage: $16.90 an hour statewide, for all employers
- Tipped cash wage: $16.90. California allows no tip credit
- Next scheduled change: $17.40 an hour statewide
- Effective date of the next change: January 1, 2027 (current rate effective January 1, 2026)
California’s statewide minimum wage is $16.90 an hour in 2026, the same for every employer regardless of size. That number is only the floor of the floor. The state also sets a $20 rate for large fast-food chains and a separate schedule for health care workers, and dozens of cities set their own, higher minimums. A worker’s legal minimum in California depends on where they work and for whom.
California is the high-wage half of our signature comparison. Its opposite is Texas, still at the federal $7.25.
California minimum wage rates for 2026
| Category | Rate | Rule and source |
|---|---|---|
| Statewide minimum wage | $16.90 | All employers, since January 1, 2026. Indexed each year to CPI-W, with a 3.5 percent annual cap. |
| Tipped employees | $16.90 | No tip credit: tips cannot count toward the minimum. |
| Minors | $16.90 | California makes no distinction between adults and minors. |
| Learners | $14.35 | 85 percent of the minimum, rounded to the nearest nickel, for the first 160 hours in an occupation where the worker has no similar experience. Any age. |
| Fast-food restaurants | $20.00 | Since April 1, 2024, for limited-service chains with at least 60 establishments nationwide. The Fast Food Council may raise it by the lesser of 3.5 percent or CPI; state pages list no increase adopted. |
| Health care workers | $19.28–$25.00 | By facility type: $25 at large systems (10,000+ full-time staff) and dialysis clinics; $23 at most other covered facilities; $22 at certain clinics; $19.28 at safety-net hospitals and small-county facilities. |
| City of Los Angeles | $18.42 | Since July 1, 2026 (up $0.55), indexed to Los Angeles-area CPI-W. |
| San Francisco | $19.61 | Since July 1, 2026. |
| City of San Diego | $17.75 | Since January 1, 2026; tips do not count toward it. |
| Exempt (salaried) threshold | $70,304 a year | Twice the state minimum for full-time work: $16.90 × 2 × 2,080. |
| Next statewide change | $17.40 | January 1, 2027, certified by the Department of Finance on July 31, 2026. |
The health care schedule keeps stepping up. Safety-net hospitals and small-county facilities move to $19.95 on July 1, 2027; covered community and rural clinics move from $22 to $25 the same day; most other facilities reach $25 on July 1, 2028. The large systems already at $25 switch to annual inflation adjustments starting January 1, 2028. The Labor Commissioner’s FAQ that carries this schedule dates from June 2025, so check it before relying on a specific step.
Dozens of other California cities, including San Jose, Berkeley, Mountain View and West Hollywood, have their own rates. The UC Berkeley Labor Center keeps the most complete list.
Annual earnings at California’s rates
Those are earnings if the job is full time and the hours hold. That condition carries a lot of weight. When a wage floor binds, employers can adjust hours, scheduling, staffing and automation before they adjust headcount, which is why studies that track hours, such as the Seattle study, sometimes find costs that headcount studies miss.
The natural experiment: California vs. Texas
California’s $16.90 is 2.3 times Texas’s $7.25. On paper, a full-time minimum-wage worker in California earns about $20,000 more a year. If you wanted to know what high wage floors do, it seems you could just compare the two states.
You can’t, at least not cleanly. California and Texas differ in housing costs, taxes, regulation, energy prices and industry, and people and firms move between them for all of those reasons. Raw comparisons of state job growth tell you about all of it at once. The more careful designs look closer: neighboring counties across state lines (Dube, Lester and Reich found no job losses that way; Jha, Neumark and Rodriguez-Lopez found negative effects once local markets are drawn as commuting zones), or industry-specific changes within one state.
California supplies the best within-state test available: the $20 fast-food wage, which hit one industry and not its neighbors. The studies split on whether it cost jobs, and we score each of them in our review of the fast-food evidence. The ongoing fight is tracked on our research tracker.
The bite ratio is the other lesson. One statewide $16.90 means something different in San Francisco, where local wages are high and the city floor is already $19.61, than in inland counties where typical pay is lower. The same law that barely binds on the coast can bind hard in the Central Valley. Texas’s $7.25, by contrast, binds for under 2 percent of its hourly workers. If high floors cost hours or entry-level jobs, the inland California labor markets are where those costs should show up first.
The policy angle
California is the country’s most ambitious experiment in wage-setting by law: a statewide floor indexed to inflation, industry councils, sector-specific schedules, and local rates on top. Supporters see a model. We see a system that has to keep adding special cases because one price for labor does not fit a state that stretches from Silicon Valley to Imperial County.
The Friedman-style objection is not that California’s workers are paid too much. It is that a legal price floor protects workers who already have jobs while making it harder for the least experienced to get one, and that the people who miss out are invisible in the data. If the goal is higher incomes for low-wage households, tools like the EITC do it without closing the first rung. For every other state’s rate, see our state-by-state guide.
Sources and further reading
- California Department of Industrial Relations, Minimum Wage — statewide, fast-food and health care rates.
- California Labor Commissioner, Minimum Wage Frequently Asked Questions — tip credit, minors, learners, indexing.
- DIR News Release 2026-66: California’s minimum wage to increase to $17.40 on January 1, 2027 — August 13, 2026.
- California Labor Commissioner, Fast Food Minimum Wage FAQ.
- California Labor Commissioner, Health Care Worker Minimum Wage FAQ (June 2025 schedule).
- California Labor Commissioner, Overtime Exemptions FAQ — salary test of twice the state minimum.
- City of Los Angeles Office of Wage Standards, July 1, 2026 Minimum Wage Ordinance rate increase notice.
- San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, Historical San Francisco Minimum Wage Rates.
- City of San Diego, “Hourly Minimum Wage Will Increase to $17.75 Effective Jan. 1, 2026” — December 31, 2025.
- UC Berkeley Labor Center, Inventory of US City and County Minimum Wage Ordinances.
- Dube, Lester & Reich, “Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders: Estimates Using Contiguous Counties” — Review of Economics and Statistics (2010).
- Neumark, Salas & Wascher, “Revisiting the Minimum Wage-Employment Debate: Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater?” — NBER Working Paper 18681 (2013).
- Jha, Neumark & Rodriguez-Lopez, “What’s Across the Border? Re-Evaluating the Cross-Border Evidence on Minimum Wage Effects” — CESifo Working Paper 9746 (2022).