City Council Considers Boosting Minimum Wage to $30 by 2030

A bill has been introduced in the City Council that would raise the minimum wage in New York City to $30 an hour by 2030, up from the current minimum wage of $17, which went into effect on Jan. 1.

The legislation is being sponsored by Council Member Sandy Nurse, who represents Brooklyn. At a rally held on the City Hall steps on Tuesday, March 10, Nurse called the current rate “a poverty wage” that “leaves over 1 million workers barely surviving on $500 a week.”

“The math ain’t mathing,” Nurse added.

The bill is getting pushback from business organizations, who claim that the higher wage costs could force smaller businesses to either make layoffs or shut down entirely.

“It’s just not affordable for small businesses,” Bronx Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Grech told Gothamist. “We’re going to see a lot of them close.”

Manhattan politicians who support the boost also showed at the rally. They include Harvey Epstein (who represents the East Village, Midtown East, and Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village), as well as Council Member Christopher Marte (who represents Lower Manhattan, including the restaurant-heavy neighborhoods of Chinatown and Little Italy).

“If we want to fight for a New York that’s for everyone, we have to start talking about wages,” said Epstein, who chairs the City Council’s Consumer & Worker Protection Committee.

The proposed $30 minimum wage mirrors a proposal floated by Mayor Zohran Mamdani when he was on the campaign trail. A spokesperson for his administration told the press that they the mayor was “reviewing [Nurse’s] legislation.”

The bill is getting outside support from Raise Up NYC (part of the group ALIGN), which describes itself as a “coalition of labor unions, community groups, workers’ rights organizations, and businesses that support underpaid workers.”

In a release on the rally, which was the formal kickoff of the “$30 for New York City” campaign, Raise UP NYC said that New York City’s wage policies are “now far behind high-cost-of-living cities like Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle.”

If the bill becomes law, it would alter that trend, giving NYC the highest minimum wage in the country. The federal minimum wage, $7.50, has remained unchanged since 2007. The City Council legislation, known as Int 0757-2026, would technically provide slightly different wage level for businesses with fewer employees.

“Employers with less than 500 employees would pay their employees $29 an hour by 2031,” the bill’s official description notes. “The bill would then require the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) to annually calculate increases to the pay standards following an analysis of measures of inflation.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, wrote a piece in February titled “Mamdani’s $30 Minimum Wage Spells Disaster for New Yorkers”; they argued that it “may create economically catastrophic consequences for the Big Apple.”

Gothamist also drew attention to some other scholarship on the subject, namely a compilation of 88 studies by the nonpartisan think tank Economic Policy Institute, that points to a rather different conclusion than Grech and Heritage.

“Older research found more sizable disemployment effects. But with improvements in research methodology over time, the conclusions of studies have shifted dramatically in the last 15 years,” the EPI report notes. “The median employment response to wage increases for studies published since 2010 is very close to zero,” meaning few businesses resorted to layoffs to accommodate the pay hike, according to the study.