Maine’s minimum wage workers will see a pay hike starting in January.
The minimum wage will increase from $14.15 to $14.65 an hour as of Jan. 1, 2025, according to the Maine Department of Labor.
That increase comes at the latest Consumer Price Index for the Northeast shows the cost to live has risen 3.6 percent between August 2023 and August 2024, the Department of Labor said Wednesday.
The wage for tipped workers also will increase from $7.08 to $7.33 an hour. Employers must show that tipped workers earned at least the new minimum wage between their direct wage and tips at the end of the week.
That wage hike will affect about 1 in 6 Maine workers, which James Myall, an analyst at the Maine Center for Economic Policy, called it “one of the smallest impacts of a minimum wage increase in the state in years.”
“This is because wage growth has been unusually strong for Mainers in low-income occupations in recent years, resulting in fewer Mainers than ever earning at or near the state minimum,” Myall wrote in a blog post.
As a result of the minimum wage hike, the minimum salary threshold for overtime exempt workers has risen to $1,128 a week, or $58,656 a year, according to the department. The minimum wage is one of the factors that determines where that threshold is set under state and federal law.
Maine voters approved hiking the state’s minimum wage in a 2016 referendum. That raised the minimum wage from $7.50 to $9 an hour in 2017 and by an additional dollar a year through 2020 after which it was indexed to inflation.
That referendum eliminated the “tipped wage” for servers and set their minimum wage at $12 an hour by 2020, but former Republican Gov. Paul LePage signed a bill into law in 2017 overturning that portion of the referendum and reimposing the lower minimum wage for tipped workers.
