That's what a worker needs to earn per hour to afford a modest two-bedroom rental in the United States, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition's annual "Out of Reach" report.
The federal minimum wage has sat at $7.25 since 2009.
You don't need a calculator to see the gap.
Here's the part that trips people up: there is no single American minimum wage.
Thirty states have set their own floors above the federal number.
Washington sits at $16.66 an hour, California at $16.50, and a cluster of states in the Northeast and West Coast hover between $15 and $17.
Then there's the other map—the one with 20 states still parked at $7.25, mostly across the South and parts of the Midwest.
But a higher number on a state website doesn't automatically mean a fatter paycheck.
In cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, local ordinances push wages past $19 or even $20 an hour.
The catch is that rent, groceries, and child care in those same zip codes tend to climb just as fast.
A $20 wage in Manhattan and a $12 wage in rural Alabama can leave workers with surprisingly similar amounts of money left over at the end of the month—sometimes nothing at all.
Tipped workers in most states can legally be paid as little as $2.13 an hour, as long as tips make up the difference.
That rule assumes customers tip generously on every shift, which is not how slow Tuesday afternoons work.
Some states, including California and Oregon, scrapped the tip credit entirely and require the full minimum wage before tips.
Federal law does offer one weird carve-out: if a state minimum wage is lower than the federal one, the federal rate still applies.
So the true floor anywhere in the country is $7.25.
No state can legally pay less than that for most jobs, though several have tried to test the edges through subminimum wage certificates for workers with disabilities—a practice some states are now phasing out.
What does all this mean for your household budget?
If you're earning near the minimum, your paycheck is fighting three forces at once: grocery inflation that hasn't fully cooled, rent that keeps climbing in most metros, and credit card APRs that sit above 20% for many borrowers.
A raise from $12 to $13 an hour adds roughly $35 a week before taxes for a full-time worker.
One unexpected car repair can wipe that out.
The practical move for anyone near the bottom of the scale is to check their actual state and city rate, not the federal number.
Many workers don't realize their local floor is higher than what their employer is paying, and wage theft complaints are common in restaurants, nail salons, and home care.
State labor departments take these claims, and back pay is recoverable.
The minimum wage debate gets framed as red state versus blue state, but the real story is a patchwork that leaves millions of workers guessing what they're actually owed.
Final Thoughts
The second is making sure the deposit matches it.