An early version of President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan called for raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour. The proposal was cut from the final law.
But raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would still fall short of covering the average US family’s annual expenses.
It would take one $15 an hour employee 506 eight-hour shifts — just under two years if working every weekday — to earn what the average US family spends in a year, according to a USAFacts analysis of data from the Internal Revenue Service, Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
