ALIGN

Raising the Minimum Wage

Fighting for a living wages with the Raise Up NY coalition

THE CRISIS

Workers are facing a wage crisis. With prices rising at the fastest rate in 40 years—for everything from gas and rent to groceries—working New Yorkers are squeezed and families can’t make ends meet on $15 an hour. Meanwhile, wealthy corporations report record profits while continuing to exploit workers. This wage stagnation, combined with the impact of the pandemic and rapidly rising costs, has eroded the minimum wage’s value across the state. Families are living paycheck-to-paycheck, at or on the brink of poverty. This is a moral travesty. The current minimum wage is no longer enough; raising wages across the board and ensuring that they never fall behind the cost of living again will help protect and restore the dignity of New York’s working families.

THE MOVEMENT

Workers have been fighting against low pay and bad working conditions for decades. More than ten years ago, fast-food workers in New York led the way when they walked out of their jobs demanding a $15 minimum wage and a union—a demand that would gain momentum nationwide and become the movement known as the Fight for $15. The Raise Up NY coalition is continuing the fight for living wages and economic justice in New York. We are a broad coalition of workers, labor, community, and responsible businesses, and we are committed to ensuring that workers earn wages that cover the basics and help them thrive.

Raise Up NY Supporting Organizations

ALIGN, National Employment Law Project, Strong Economy for All, Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, For the Many, Make the Road NY, New York Communities for Change, Columbia County Sanctuary Movement, Churches United for Fair Housing, Worker Justice Center of New York, Tompkins County Workers Center, and Teamsters Union.

WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR

Supporting Local Fights: Workers upstate aren’t waiting for Albany to act. We’re supporting the fight to raise the minimum wage at a municipal and county level. In Rochester, we’re supporting fights to raise the minimum wage to $23 and in New York City, the movement for a $30 minimum wage is growing.

Wage Increases Statewide: we won an increase to NY’s minimum wage in 2023, raising the floor for over one million workers across our state. But that victory was just the beginning. We’re fighting to establish a statewide minimum wage of $17 by 2026, restoring upstate and downstate parity, and then move toward a living wage in future years.

Wages that Keep Up with the Cost of Living: Fighting to remove a state loophole that denies workers a cost-of-living raise in years when unemployment goes up. If the loophole had been in effect since 2000, inflation adjustments would have been suspended in six out of 23 years. That’s nearly one in four years.

Racial, Gender, and Worker Justice: A higher minimum wage benefits workers of all racial, ethnic, and gender categories. But women and workers of color stand to benefit the most as they have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and are recovering at a slower pace.

BARELY GETTING BY…THE NUMBERS

$30 an hour: The amount a worker needs to make in New York City, Hudson Valley, and Rockland County to afford basics such as food, child care, health care, housing, transportation, and more according to MIT’s living wage calculator
$17 an hour: Current minimum wage (as of Jan. 1, 2026) in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester
$16 an hour: 2026 Minimum wage for the rest of the state
25%: The official poverty rate in New York City
27%: The poverty rate in Rochester
$22,500: Average cost of childcare per year in New York City
$405: Average cost of groceries for a single adult for one month in Ithaca
$2,158: Average month of rent in Rockland County

LOCAL FIGHTS

Workers and communities aren’t waiting for state officials in Albany to decide how much they should get paid. In addition to our campaigns for statewide legislation to raise the wage, the Raise Up NY coalition is made up of organizations waging local fights across the state to build power to raise the wage in their local communities:’

Tompkins County: 40% of Tompkins County workers don’t make a living wage. Advocates are pushing for new minimum wages in Ithaca and Tompkins County.

Rochester: Over 40% of children in Rochester live below the poverty line. It’s time for a $23/hour living wage in Rochester.

New York City: In the richest city in the world, one in four New Yorkers are living in poverty. The call for a $30 an hour minimum wage is growing.

OUR WINS

In 2023, Raise Up NY won a minimum wage increase to $17 in downstate NY and $16 in upstate NY by 2026. After 2026, the minimum wage will be indexed to inflation.

This wage increase means over 1,100,000 New Yorkers will earn an extra $670 in their pockets every year.

Raise Up NY is also supporting organizing at a municipal and county level to raise the minimum wage. In 2024, local unions, worker centers, and community organizations successfully pushed legislators from the Ithaca area to vote 11-3 in favor of a resolution to evaluate gradually raising the local minimum wage.