The floor has not moved in more than sixteen years
The Department of Labor still lists the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, effective July 24, 2009. That means the national floor has stayed unchanged across multiple administrations, inflation spikes, and a radically different labor market.
Whatever happens in state and local wage laws, the federal baseline still matters because it sets the minimum for workers in places that have not moved higher on their own.
A full-time minimum-wage year is $15,080
Using a standard 40-hour workweek across 52 weeks, a full-time schedule at the federal minimum works out to about $15,080 a year before taxes.
That is not a poverty model or a city-specific estimate. It is the direct annualized math of the current federal floor.
Median earnings are far above the federal floor
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports median weekly earnings of $1,204 for full-time wage and salary workers in 2025, which annualizes to $62,608.
Measured against that median, a full-time minimum-wage schedule is only about 24.1 percent of annualized full-time earnings.
What this story does and does not show
These figures do not prove anything about a specific employer, chain, or industry by themselves. They do establish a hard national baseline for how weak the federal floor remains.
Future labor stories on the site will need OSHA records, court filings, merger cases, or company disclosures before they make named claims about working conditions or concentration.
