Minimum wage to increase throughout the Bay Area in 2023

Thomas Gase

Dec 30

Starting in January, workers throughout the Bay Area will receive a higher minimum wage than they did last year.

For instance, come Jan. 1, workers in Santa Clara will earn $17.20 per hour, an increase from the city's previous minimum wage of $16.40 in 2022.

Other Bay Area cities that will see increases in their minimum wages in 2023, include Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Oakland and many others, due to local policies and ordinances that mandate that wages should go up to adjust for inflation.

In nearly all of those cities, the local minimum wage in exceeds both California's statewide minimum wage and the federal minimum wage.

California's minimum wage will increase — to $15.50 per hour, a 50-cent increase from the 2022 minimum wage. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage remains at $7.25 per hour — a number that was set in 2009 and has not changed for the last 13 years, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The increase in Santa Clara is due to a plan approved by the City Council in 2017, which determined that the city's local minimum wage would reach $15.00 an hour by 2019 and would be adjusted annually based on the regional Consumer Price Index afterward.

The regional Consumer Price Index is intended to reflect how wages should be adjusted for inflation and is determined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since 2020, the city of Santa Clara has used the CPI for urban wage workers and clerical workers in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area to determine how much wages should increase from year to year.

The minimum wage rules apply to anyone who performs at least two hours of work per week in Santa Clara. Employees are entitled to the city's minimum wage regardless of their immigration status, the city's website said.

But those increases still aren't necessarily enough to offset the notoriously high costs of living in the Bay Area – according to the National Low Income Housing Association, renters throughout California would need to earn at least $39.01 per hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment. In the South Bay, that number ranges from $52.88 per hour for a two-bedroom apartment in Campbell to as high as $76.54 for a two-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto.

Rachel Aichele, manager of the Palo Alto plant shop Leafy, said her store already paid above minimum wage before the increase and will likely increase wages even more in 2023.

"I think it'll be tighter for us … I'm sure that'll cost us quite a bit of money," she said. "But we'll probably raise our entrance wage to be more competitive. Because we sell plants, we have to have more knowledge-based employees, so we try to be more competitive than just minimum wage."

The store has five locations — four others in the Bay Area and one in Pasadena — and has around 50 employees total. Although the store will soon pay its employees even more, it's still not enough for most employees to live comfortably, Aichele said.

"The wage should be even higher than that," she said. "Living in this area is so difficult, even trying to live off the minimum wage if you live in Palo Alto is pretty impossible, unless you work an incredible amount of hours."

The store's employees get by in a variety of ways — some of them are high school students living with their parents, renters in lower-cost ADUs, people with spouses who have higher incomes and can support them, or workers who have multiple jobs, Aichele said.

"No one who works here is self-sufficient and paying their rent on their own just with this job," Aichele said. "It's definitely not a main-income job if you have an apartment anywhere in Palo Alto."

The Bay Area cities that will see minimum wage increases next year include:

Belmont: from $16.20 to $16.75
Burlingame: from $15.60 to $16.47
Cupertino: from $16.40 to $17.20
Daly City: from $15.53 to $16.07
East Palo Alto: from $15.60 to $16.50
El Cerrito: from $16.37 to $17.35
Foster City: from $15.75 to $16.50
Half Moon Bay: from $15.56 to $16.45
Hayward: from $14.52 to $15.50 for small employers; $15.56 to $16.34 for others
Los Altos: from $16.40 to $17.20
Menlo Park: from $15.75 to $16.20
Mountain View: from $17.10 to $18.15
Novato: from $15.00 to $15.53 for small employers, $15.53 to $16.07 for others, $15.77 to $16.32 for businesses with more than 100 employees
Oakland: from $15.06 to $15.97
Palo Alto: from $16.45 to $17.25
Petaluma: from $15.85 to $17.06
Redwood City: from $16.20 to $17.00
Richmond: from $15.54 to $16.17
San Carlos: from $15.77 to $16.32
San Jose: from $16.20 to $17.00
San Mateo: from $16.20 to $16.75
South San Francisco: from $15.80 to $16.70
Sunnyvale: from $17.10 to $17.95