Minimum-wage compliance
Vendors sell the table. We run the layer.
A citation-backed minimum-wage layer for every US jurisdiction — state, county, and city — that maintains itself. Each rule carries its source citation and effective date, refreshed on its own schedule, with conflict-detection across sources instead of silently averaging them.
The hard part was never the fifty states — payroll teams know those. It's the city ordinance in a metro you forgot you employ someone in, that changed on a schedule nobody was watching, that you can't cite when an auditor or an employee asks. Most “minimum wage by state” resources are a table someone typed once and a footer that says last updated: who knows.
Pick your level
Free lookup
$0
Look up any single jurisdiction — current rate, source citation, and effective date. The honest free tier.
Look up free →Snapshot
$258 one-time
The full cited, dated dataset — every US jurisdiction × variants — as a one-time download (CSV / JSON / Sheets). For when you need the whole picture once.
Buy the datasetMaintained feed
$79 / mo
The self-maintaining layer: the full dataset plus auto-refresh, conflict-detection, and change alerts — so it stays current and defensible the day you need it. Annual: $790/yr.
Start monthlyCheckout is secure via Stripe. The dataset is emailed on purchase; feed access is provisioned by email shortly after — questions any time at mike@peopleanalyst.com.
Why this exists
Wage-compliance data is a barbell with an empty middle: free but incomplete (state and federal tables, mostly historical, rarely city-granular or cited per rule) on one end, and expensive, quote-gated enterprise suiteson the other. Nobody owns the posted, self-serve, affordable, cited, city-level middle. That's this — paying people the legal minimum shouldn't require a research project every quarter.
Minimum-wage questions we answer
- How do I set salary ranges or pay bands?Build the job architecture first — levels and families — because the level, not the title, is the real key. Anchor each level to market data at a chosen percentile, set a range width and a midpoint-progression between levels, and decide your lead or lag posture deliberately. Ranges laid over a coherent leveling spine hold; ranges without one become a pile of negotiated exceptions that no equity or budget analysis can trust.
- How do I decide what to pay for a job?Match the role to a market benchmark by scope and level, not by title — titles are inconsistent across employers, so title-matching systematically mis-prices work. Choose a percentile posture (are you targeting the median, or leading at the 75th to win scarce talent?), adjust for the geography where the work is performed, and document the choice. What you pay is a deliberate position against a defensible benchmark, not a single number pulled from one survey.
- How do I know if our pay is competitive?Competitiveness is a distribution question, not a single average. Compute a compa-ratio — actual pay against the market benchmark midpoint — by level and function, because a healthy company-wide average routinely hides a lagging level or location that is driving your regrettable attrition. Watch for mix and geography confounds when you compare, and let the spread, not the mean, tell you where to spend the next compensation dollar.
- How do you tie executive pay to performance?The compensation literature converges on pay-for-performance with the amount at risk rising as responsibility rises — Ellig calls it the progressivity principle: the share of at-risk pay increases with the executive's level. Crystal's rule is to keep the reward commensurate with the risk and make it large enough to actually motivate. In practice that means choosing performance measures that track long-term value creation rather than quarterly earnings that invite manipulation (Giroux), setting short- and long-term incentive goals deliberately (Davis & Edge), and aligning the whole package to the business strategy rather than treating it as a benchmarking exercise (Graham). The failure mode is a plan that pays out on tenure, or on a market-median target that guarantees the payout.
- What are the components of an executive compensation package?Total remuneration is conventionally five elements — base salary, annual (short-term) incentives, long-term incentives, benefits, and perquisites (Overton & Stoffer). The design task is the mix, not the list: Graham frames it as Money, Mix, and Messages — how much, in what proportion of fixed to variable, signaling which behavior. Base pay rewards ongoing individual value while variable pay rewards results (Zingheim & Schuster), and the right balance shifts with the company's lifecycle stage and strategy (Ellig). Every element also carries distinct tax, accounting, and disclosure treatment, so the finance implications belong in the design, not after it (Biswas).
- How much of executive pay should be at risk?The governing idea is the progressivity principle: the proportion of pay that is at-risk through incentives should rise with the executive's level of responsibility (Ellig) — a CEO carries more variable pay than a division director. But more risk is only worth it if the reward is commensurate and meaningful (Crystal); at-risk pay that cannot materially move the executive's total, or that vests regardless of results, is fixed pay wearing a costume. Tie the at-risk portion to measures of long-term value rather than short-term earnings that invite manipulation (Giroux). The right number is a strategy question, not a market-median lookup (Graham).