State Minimum Wage and Food Insecurity Among US Households With Children

Abstract

Importance: Food insecurity among households with children and economic hardship is a persistent US challenge. Federal food assistance programs have been unable to fully address food insecurity, leading to interest in the role other labor and economic policies could play. One relevant state-level policy that has received limited attention is the state minimum wage.

Objective: To assess whether state minimum wage generosity was associated with change in food insecurity among households with children and explore differential policy impacts across sociodemographic groups.

Design, setting, and participants: This cross-sectional study of a national sample of US households from the Current Population Survey used a 2-way fixed effects modeling approach to test whether increases in state minimum wage from 2005 to 2022 were associated with improvements in food insecurity controlling for household- and state-level time-varying covariates. Working households with children who were most likely to be affected by policy changes (ie, limited educational attainment) were included. Analyses were conducted in July through September 2024.

Exposure: The 2022 inflation-adjusted effective minimum wage for each state in December which was derived from legal sources.

Main outcomes and measures: Past-month household food insecurity assessed in December 2022.

Results: The sample of 97 944 working households with children and limited educational attainment were mostly female headed (54 077 [55.2%]) with a mean (SD) 1.8 (1.1) children in the home; 22 130 households (22.6%) reported Hispanic identity, 10 545 non-Hispanic Black (10.8%), and 59 500 non-Hispanic White (60.8%). Inflation-adjusted state minimum wage ranged from $7.15 to $16.85 over the 18-year study period. We observed that a 10% increase in the state minimum wage was significantly associated with a 0.39 percentage point reduction (95% CI, -0.74 to -0.04 percentage points; P = .03) in food insecurity. There was limited evidence of differences in the association across race and ethnicity, participation in the US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or household composition.

Conclusions and relevance: In this pooled cross-sectional study, findings suggest that state legislatures that elected to increase their state minimum wage may have also improved state food security rates among households with children at risk for economic hardship. Findings provide policymakers with actionable evidence to consider in setting minimum wages that could reduce the burden of food insecurity among US children and families.

Figure 1.. State Minimum Wage Across 50 States by US Census Region, 2005-2022

Values are inflation adjusted to 2022 real US dollars.

Figure 2.. Effects of State Minimum Wage on Past-Month Food Insecurity Across Subgroups, 2005-2022

Estimated effect of the natural log of state minimum wage on food insecurity rates. Models are stratified by each characteristic and use robust standard errors clustered by states. All models are among working households with at most some college education (85 154 households total). Models control for self-reported age, sex, race and ethnicity of the head of household; household educational attainment; household marital or partner status; the number of children living in the household; household Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children and/or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit recipiency; state unemployment rate; state real income per capita; state percentage of residents experiencing poverty; state participation in Medicaid expansion; the combined state monthly maximum benefit for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and SNAP for a 3-person family; state Earned Income Tax Credit; as well as state and year effects. Black and blue lines represent 95% and 90% confidence intervals (CIs), respectively. The state minimum wage is the logged 2022-inflation adjusted effective minimum wage for each state at the end of the year. All coefficients have been multiplied by 10 to facilitate interpretation. We did not perform analyses on subgroups with <3000 household observations, which included non-Hispanic Asian American or Pacific Islander, non-Hispanic Native American, and Non-Hispanic multiple racial identities.