The 1960 minimum wage was $1.00/hr, a rate set in 1956 that held steady until 1961. Going back further, the federal minimum wage started at just $0.25/hr in 1938. By the end of the 1960s, three decades of increases had brought it to $1.60/hr, a more than six-fold rise. The minimum wage in the 1950s and 1960s moved in a handful of large, spaced-out steps rather than the frequent small adjustments we'd expect today, and the story of how it got there is as much about who the law covered as what it paid.
Federal Minimum Wage From 1938 Through the 1960s
- 1938: $0.25/hr, established by the original Fair Labor Standards Act.
- 1939: raised to $0.30/hr.
- 1945: raised to $0.40/hr.
- 1950: raised to $0.75/hr, effective January 25, 1950.
- 1951-1955: $0.75/hr. No change for five years.
- 1956: raised to $1.00/hr, effective March 1, 1956.
- 1957-1960: $1.00/hr. No change for four years.
- 1961: raised to $1.15/hr, effective September 3, 1961.
- 1963: raised to $1.25/hr, effective September 3, 1963.
- 1967: raised to $1.40/hr, effective February 1, 1967.
- 1968: raised to $1.60/hr, effective February 1, 1968.
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was the first federal law in US history to establish a minimum wage, alongside overtime pay requirements and restrictions on child labor.
Why Did the FLSA Start at Just $0.25/hr?
The Fair Labor Standards Act, signed in 1938, was the first federal law to establish a minimum wage in the US at all. $0.25/hr was a genuinely new floor at the time, not a low starting point relative to an existing standard. The law also established overtime pay and restricted child labor for the first time nationally, making the minimum wage just one piece of a broader worker-protection law passed during the Great Depression.
What Was the 1960 Minimum Wage?
$1.00 per hour. This rate had been set in March 1956 and remained unchanged through 1960, until the next increase to $1.15/hr took effect in September 1961. The four-year gap between 1956 and 1961 was, at the time, one of the longer stretches without a federal increase.
The Post-War Economy Behind the 1950 and 1956 Increases
The jump from $0.40/hr to $0.75/hr in January 1950 came after a decade in which the minimum wage hadn't moved at all, even as the country went through wartime price controls, a postwar manufacturing boom, and a rising cost of living tied to the growth of the suburban, car-owning, consumer economy. Returning veterans, expanding labor unions, and a generally strong postwar job market all pushed wages upward across the private sector, and the 1950 increase brought the federal floor closer to what many workers were already earning in higher-demand industries. The 1956 increase to $1.00/hr followed the same pattern: six years of economic growth and inflation had again pulled typical wages ahead of the legal minimum, and Congress raised the floor to catch up. This rhythm, long stretches of an unchanged wage followed by a single large jump, is the defining feature of how the minimum wage in the 1950s and 1960s was set, and it stands in contrast to the more frequent, smaller state-level adjustments common today.
How the FLSA's Coverage Grew Over These Decades
The original 1938 law covered a much narrower set of industries than today's FLSA, and applied only to employees individually engaged in interstate commerce or the production of goods for interstate commerce. Large categories of workers, including most retail and service employees, agricultural workers, and domestic workers, fell outside the law entirely. Notably, agricultural and domestic labor, workforces that in many parts of the country were disproportionately Black, had been excluded from coverage in 1938 partly as a result of political compromises with lawmakers from the segregated South, a fact historians of the era point to when explaining why the law's reach expanded so unevenly over the following decades.
The 1961 FLSA amendments were the first major expansion, introducing what's known as "enterprise coverage": rather than checking whether each individual employee handled goods that crossed state lines, the law began covering all employees of an entire business if the business itself was engaged in interstate commerce above a certain size. This single change swept large numbers of retail and service trade workers, along with construction employees, under the minimum wage for the first time. The 1966 amendments went further still, extending coverage to many agricultural workers, along with employees of hospitals, nursing homes, laundries, hotels, motels, restaurants, and public schools. Newly covered groups were often phased in at rates below the standard federal minimum before reaching parity, but the direction was consistent: each amendment through the 1950s and 1960s pulled more of the workforce, including groups excluded at the law's founding, under federal wage protection. That expansion continued into the 1970s and helped establish the broad-based coverage the law provides today.
Why This Era Set the Pattern for Every Later Increase
The gap between the 1956 and 1961 increases, about five and a half years, was itself a preview of the longer freezes that would follow in later decades. Every federal minimum wage increase since 1938 has required a dedicated act of Congress, with no automatic adjustment mechanism, exactly the same structure that produced the 1980s freeze and the current gap since 2009. Understanding this earliest period of the law's history makes clear that long gaps between increases aren't a modern phenomenon; they've been a recurring feature of federal minimum wage law since its earliest years.
How the 1968 Minimum Wage Compares to Today's $7.25/hr
The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25/hr since 2009, the longest stretch without an increase since the FLSA was enacted in 1938. Comparing that to the minimum wage in the 1950s and 1960s puts the current freeze in perspective: in nominal dollars, $7.25/hr looks far higher than the $1.60/hr rate workers earned in 1968. But once you account for how much prices have risen since then, the picture flips. Economists and labor researchers who track the minimum wage's purchasing power generally find that the 1968 rate, adjusted for inflation, bought more than today's $7.25/hr does. In other words, a full-time minimum-wage worker at the end of the 1960s had more real buying power than a full-time minimum-wage worker does today, even though the number on the paycheck was so much smaller. It's a useful reminder that the dollar figures alone, without inflation adjustment, can be misleading when comparing eras.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the minimum wage in 1950?
$0.75 per hour, effective January 25, 1950, up from $0.40/hr set in 1945.
What was the minimum wage in 1960?
$1.00 per hour, a rate that had been set in 1956 and held through 1960.
When did the minimum wage first reach $1.00/hr?
March 1, 1956, more than 15 years after the Fair Labor Standards Act was first signed in 1938.
What was the minimum wage by the end of the 1960s?
$1.60 per hour, effective February 1, 1968, the rate that held until the first 1970s increase in 1974.
What was the minimum wage in 1965?
$1.25 per hour. That rate had been set in September 1963 and stayed in place until the next increase, to $1.40/hr, took effect in February 1967.
What did the 1961 and 1966 FLSA amendments actually change?
Beyond raising the dollar amount, both amendments expanded who the law covered. The 1961 amendments introduced "enterprise coverage," bringing large numbers of retail, service, and construction workers under the minimum wage for the first time. The 1966 amendments extended coverage further, to many agricultural workers as well as employees of hospitals, nursing homes, laundries, hotels, restaurants, and public schools.
Were all workers covered by the same minimum wage in the 1950s and 1960s?
No. Large groups, including most agricultural and domestic workers, weren't covered by the FLSA at all until the 1966 amendments began bringing them in, and even then many newly covered workers were phased in at lower rates before reaching the standard federal minimum.
What Came Next: The 1970s
The steady, spaced-out increases of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to a much more active 1970s, which saw five separate increases in a single decade as Congress responded to rising inflation. See our 1970s year-by-year breakdown for what happened next.
See the complete federal minimum wage history from 1938 to 2026, or read our plain-English guide to the FLSA. For official historical data, see the US Department of Labor's minimum wage history chart.
