A $20 Minimum Wage? Researchers Say It Would Help

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A new report from a progressive think tank argues that hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin workers would benefit from raising the state’s minimum wage to $20 an hour by 2030.

For 17 years, Wisconsin’s minimum wage has sat at $7.25 an hour — the same as the federal minimum.

If that hourly wage had kept pace with inflation, it would have reached $10.60 in 2026, according to a recently released report from the High Road Strategy Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As of now, Wisconsin’s current $7.25 an hour minimum amounts to roughly $15,000 a year for someone working 40-hour weeks.

“It’s just not enough money to get by with the way rents and fuel prices and other costs are,” said report author Laura Dresser, a clinical associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The cost of living has moved so far away from that $7.25 an hour.”

The report relies on analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

It projects that, if Wisconsin raised its minimum hourly wage to $20 by 2030, 458,800 Wisconsin workers would see higher wages, representing 16 percent of the state’s workforce. It also estimates that some 277,700 Wisconsin workers would be “indirectly affected” because, as people earning just above the minimum wage, the report argues that they would see raises as pay scales adjust upwards.

The report says those wage increases would be more likely to benefit women, as well as Black and Hispanic Wisconsinites.

It also says that a minimum wage increase would be especially felt in the service industry.

“Nearly 40% of all Wisconsin workers who win with a $20 minimum wage are employed in just two sectors: Retail and Restaurants,” the report says. “The wage increase would bring higher wages to nearly half of retail workers in the state and raise wages for some 152,000 workers. Wage increases would reach most restaurant workers with earnings up for 4 of every 5 restaurant workers, accounting for another 134,000 workers who see wages rise.”

In addition to raising Wisconsin’s minimum hourly wage, the report also argues in favor of eliminating Wisconsin’s separate minimum wage for tipped workers. In Wisconsin, businesses have to pay tipped workers at least $2.33 an hour. However, if an employee doesn’t make at least $7.25 an hour from wages and tips combined, the employer is required to make up the difference.

In Wisconsin, state law prohibits local communities from setting a minimum wage that’s higher than the statewide minimum.

And proposals to raise that statewide minimum have stalled in Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled state Legislature. Conservatives have argued that a minimum wage increase would burden small businesses, and raise prices for consumers. They’ve also argued that it could lead to worse outcomes for workers, by decreasing the number of jobs employers are able to hire for.

But Dresser argues that higher minimum wages have come with benefits in other states.

“Thirty states now have higher minimum wages than Wisconsin,” Dreseser said. “And many of them, many large ones, have very substantially higher minimum wages, have pushed up to $15 (dollars an hour), and without real negative effects.”

In Wisconsin and throughout the country, “there aren’t a ton of workers” who earn as little as $7.25 an hour in 2026, Dresser acknowledged.

But she doesn’t see that fact as an argument against raising the legal minimum.

“That just means that the wage floor has become less relevant, and the workers who are at it are really in desperate need of a boost,” she said.

$20 by 2030? Progressive think tank explores raising Wisconsin’s minimum wage was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.