The party that never stops talking about the economy has a data problem.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest state wage estimates, the 10 states where working people earn the lowest median annual pay in the country are overwhelmingly run by Republicans. Eight of the ten have a Republican governor and a Republican legislature. The two exceptions are Kentucky, which has a Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, and a Republican legislature, and New Mexico, which Democrats control.
Here's the list, from bad to worst, with each state's median annual wage for May 2025:
- 10. New Mexico — $47,210
- 9. South Dakota — $47,080
- 8. Kentucky — $46,920
- 7. South Carolina — $46,490
- 6. Alabama — $45,670
- 5. Oklahoma — $45,600
- 4. Louisiana — $45,520
- 3. West Virginia — $45,300
- 2. Arkansas — $43,630
- 1. Mississippi — $40,120
These aren't cherry-picked. This is the federal government's own wage data. And it lands the same way a lot of these rankings do lately: the states at the very bottom keep turning out to be the ones Republicans have run for years.
The wage floor these states refuse to raise
Low pay isn't weather. It's a policy choice — and it's one these states keep making on purpose.
Six of the ten states on this list still pin their minimum wage to the federal floor of $7.25 an hour, a rate that hasn't budged since 2009. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina don't even have a state minimum wage law on the books — they simply default to the federal $7.25. Kentucky and Oklahoma sit at $7.25 too. That floor buys less every year that inflation goes up, and the Republican legislatures in these states have left it right where it is.
Now look at where the wage floor actually went up in the Republican-run states on this list. The two with the highest minimum wage — South Dakota at $11.85 and Arkansas at $11.00 — didn't get there because their Republican leaders decided to give workers a raise. They got there because voters went around them. South Dakotans passed Initiated Measure 18 at the ballot box in 2014; the wage has risen with inflation every year since 2016. Arkansans passed Issue 5 in 2018 with nearly 69% of the vote. In the reddest states in America, the biggest raises low-wage workers got were the ones they had to give themselves.
Low pay, and then they cut the safety net
Here's the part that turns a bad ranking into a broken promise.
The people earning these bottom-ten wages are exactly the families who lean on programs like Medicaid and food stamps to get by. And nearly every Republican these states send to Washington — senators and representatives from Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia and the rest — voted for Trump's budget law, which pairs $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts with $1 trillion in tax giveaways for the richest 1 percent and delivers the largest cut to SNAP food assistance in history — hitting the very constituents scraping by on the lowest wages in the country.
So the sequence, for a family in one of these states, is this: your state keeps your wages at the bottom of the national barrel, refuses to raise the minimum wage above $7.25, and then your representatives in Congress vote to cut the food and health assistance that low pay forces you to rely on. Three hits, all from the same party, all pointed at the same people.
That's not a coincidence you can spin away with a line about population growth. It's a record.
The bottom line
Republicans love to campaign as the party of the working man and the strong economy. But when the federal government tallies up where working people actually earn the least, the list is almost entirely theirs — eight of the ten lowest-paying states in America, run by GOP governors and GOP legislatures, several of them still paying a minimum wage frozen at $7.25 since 2009.
The next time one of these politicians tells you the other side doesn't understand the economy, remember which states landed at the very bottom of it.
Source
- "May 2025 State Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates," U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (all occupations, median annual wage).
- "State Partisan Composition," National Conference of State Legislatures.
Photo: Getty Images, via The Mirror US.
