Oregon’s minimum wage rises 50 cents per hour this week
Oregonians making minimum wage will get a 50-cent bump per hour beginning Wednesday, resulting in an average of $573 more per year for someone working full time.
In the Portland metro, the floor for hourly wages will rise to $16.80. In 15 counties and parts of three counties in the Willamette Valley, Northwest Coast and southern Oregon, the minimum wage rises to $15.55 per hour, and in 18 mostly rural eastern Oregon counties, the minimum hourly wage will be $14.55. The rural wage is always $1 less than the standard wage, and the Portland minimum wage is always $1.25 more due to the higher cost of living.
A 2016 Oregon law requires the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries to adjust statewide minimum wages annually for inflation. The bureau announced the 50-cent per hour increase in April, which reflects a 3.3% rate of inflation for the cost of food, energy, essential goods, housing and medical services between March 2025 and March 2026, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Inflation has since gone up, in large part due to the higher cost of fuels driven by the U.S. war in Iran. The most recent rate of inflation calculated between the end of May 2025 and the end of May 2026 was 4.2%, according to the federal labor statistics bureau.
Calculated at that rate, the average hourly minimum wage bump would be closer to 63 cents.
Oregon is one of more than three dozen states that pay higher minimum wages than the federal standard of $7.25, which has gone unchanged for 17 years. Over the past decade, Oregon’s standard minimum wage has gone up by $6.30 per hour, or about 63 cents per year.
About 4% of Oregon workers earn minimum wage, according to state data. Among them, slightly more than half are women, more than 40% are Black or Hispanic and most — nearly 90% — are adults at least 20 years old, according to recent analysis from the left-leaning Washington, D.C.-based think tank Economic Policy Institute.
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Alex Baumhardt has been a national radio producer focusing on education for American Public Media since 2017. She has reported from the Arctic to the Antarctic for national and international media, and from Minnesota and Oregon for The Washington Post. She previously worked in Iceland and Qatar and was a Fulbright scholar in Spain where she earned a master's degree in digital media. She's been a kayaking guide in Alaska, farmed on four continents and worked the night shift at several bakeries to support her reporting along the way.
