The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, exactly what it was in 2009. To buy what $7.25 bought back then, it would need to be $10.88 today, using the 2025 annual CPI average against 2009’s. Frozen in nominal terms for 17 years and counting, the longest stretch without an increase since the wage floor was created in 1938, the federal minimum has quietly become one of the clearest cases of inflation eroding a fixed dollar figure anywhere in U.S. policy.
What $7.25 has lost since 2009
The math is the same ratio this calculator applies to any two years: multiply the 2009 wage by the change in the CPI between 2009 and 2025. The CPI averaged 214.537 in 2009 and 321.943 in 2025, a cumulative 50.1% increase, so a wage that stood still in nominal terms fell by roughly a third in real terms. Put another way, in 2025 dollars, $7.25 bought about what $4.83 bought in 2009. Every year Congress doesn’t act, the gap between the nominal $7.25 and its 2009-equivalent value widens further, since prices keep moving and the wage doesn’t.
A history of the federal minimum wage, in today’s dollars
Congress has raised the federal minimum wage 22 times since the Fair Labor Standards Act created it in 1938, but always in discrete jumps, never automatically. That leaves long gaps where inflation quietly erodes the real value of the wage until the next increase resets it. Converting each milestone into 2025 dollars, using the same CPI series behind every page on this site, shows the pattern:
| Year set | Nominal wage | Value in 2025 dollars |
|---|---|---|
| 1938 | $0.25 | $5.71 |
| 1956 | $1.00 | $11.84 |
| 1968 | $1.60 | $14.80 |
| 1979 | $2.90 | $12.86 |
| 1981 | $3.35 | $11.87 |
| 1990 | $3.80 | $9.36 |
| 1997 | $5.15 | $10.33 |
| 2009 | $7.25 | $10.88 |
| Today | $7.25 | $7.25 |
Source: U.S. Department of Labor, history of federal minimum wage rates; CPI data via this site’s methodology.
Two things stand out. First, $1.60 in 1968 remains the high-water mark: no federal minimum wage before or since has bought as much. Second, today’s $7.25, unchanged since 2009, now sits below every milestone in the table except the original 1938 rate, roughly matching the real purchasing power the minimum wage carried in the mid-1940s, before almost every worker earning it today was born.
Why it hasn’t moved
Unlike Social Security benefits, which rise automatically through the annual COLA, the federal minimum wage has no built-in inflation adjustment. Raising it requires an act of Congress, and the 2007 to 2009 increases (from $5.15 to $7.25 in three steps) were the last such act to pass. The previous-longest gap without an increase ran ten years, 1997 to 2007; the current one has already run nearly twice that. In the absence of federal action, more than thirty states and dozens of cities have set their own minimums above the federal floor, some more than double it, which is why “minimum wage” now means very different things depending on where a worker lives, even though the federal number quoted in national statistics hasn’t changed at all.
The takeaway
A wage that stays fixed in dollar terms is not neutral: it’s a slow pay cut, identical in effect to the raises that fall short of inflation covered elsewhere on this site, just applied by inaction instead of an employer’s decision. Whatever a minimum-wage policy is meant to guarantee, a fixed nominal number can only guarantee it for as long as prices hold still, and prices haven’t held still since 2009.
For the full history back to the wage’s creation in 1938, including the real-terms peak and low across the entire series, see the data study The U.S. minimum wage in today’s dollars, 1938 to today.