Germany Has The Highest Minimum Wage, Malta The Lowest

Any income or salary comparison is always rife with concerns around prices (how affordable things are) and inflation (how that affordability changes over time).

But when we adjust wages for both, what broad themes and insights can be seen?

The visualization below, via Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao, compares 2024 statutory minimum wages in 50 U.S. states and 35 OECD and emerging-market countries.

Figures are converted and expressed in 2021 U.S. dollars per hour using purchasing-power parity (PPP) to level out cost-of-living differences.

The data for this visualization comes from a blend of publicly available sources:

• Cross-country PPP figures from the OECD.

• State minimum wage rates from Labor Law Center.

• Regional price parities from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

• U.S. dollar amounts are shown in constant-2021 terms using the BLS Consumer Price Index.

⚠️ This comparison uses federal or national level data for the countries. However, their subnational jurisdictions may have higher statutory minimum wages. This is true for several cities within the U.S. states as well.

Ranked: Minimum Wages in All U.S. States & 35 Countries

After adjusting for inflation and price differences, Germany had the highest statutory minimum wage in 2024 at $17.15/hour.

Fellow Western European economies Luxembourg ($16.79), UK ($15.91), and France ($15.78) fill out the rest of the top five along with Australia ($16.49).

Notably, eleven OECD countries (eight of them European) have higher statutory minimum wages than all 50 U.S. states.

ℹ️ Related: Look at how just European incomes rank after adjusting for living costs.

States With Highest Minimum Wages, Adjusted for Living Costs

Washington, D.C. had the highest nominal wage ($17.50/hr), as well as the highest real (PPP-adjusted) minimum wage in 2024, at $12.43/hr.

Connecticut ($12.10), Washington State ($11.87), and Arizona ($11.78) follow in real wages, ranking higher than their nominal values due to inflation and living costs adjustments.

Yet none crack the top 10 in this dataset. In practice, a worker earning the wage floor in Washington or Connecticut still commands only about 70% of the purchasing power of a counterpart in Germany.

The Disparity in U.S. Minimum Wages

The real minimum wage gap between Washington, D.C.’s $12.43 floor and New Hampshire’s $5.60 highlights how state policy—not the unchanged $7.25 federal benchmark—ultimately shapes the real buying power of low-income workers.

In PPP-adjusted dollars, 26 states still sit below $10, and 18—including Texas and Pennsylvania—drop under $6.50.

After 15 years without a federal increase, inflation has steadily eroded those floors, leaving roughly 842,000 hourly workers—about 1% of the hourly-paid workforce—earning at or below the federal minimum in 2024.

Dataset Methodology Note

OECD 2024 minimum wage data was available at source in PPP-adjusted 2021 USD. See the source for their methodology.

To put these wages on an equal footing with U.S. states, nominal statutory minimum wages for 2024 were deflated to 2021 USD (using CPI-U from BLS), and then adjusted for local price differences using the BEA’s Implicit Regional Price Deflator (IRPD).

ℹ️ The BEA’s IRPD is a regional price index that can be used to adjust incomes and economic data so that comparisons across regions reflect true differences in purchasing power.

As a result, both datasets are broadly comparable, but differences in underlying assumptions and price baskets mean they’re best used for rough purposes rather than high-precision analysis.

ℹ️ State price-level adjustment uses 2023 IRPD as a stand-in for 2024 due to data unavailability.

This is because PPPs are meant for international comparison of living standards and price levels. Meanwhile, CPI-U/IRPD focuses on consistency over time within the U.S., and IRPD reflects U.S. regional consumption differences.

Finally, these figures are gross (pre-tax, pre-tips) statutory figures. European taxes tend to be higher than the U.S. states, and tipping culture is mostly absent, which may affect actual take-home income.

ℹ️ Related: For more tax insights, check out the Tax Revenue vs. GDP for Major Countries.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out The 25 Richest Countries in the World by Three Metrics on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.