What is a living wage in Hawaiʻi in 2020?
The current minimum wage in Hawaiʻi is $10.10 an hour, or $21,000 per year for full-time work. We all know that is not enough to make ends meet in the highest cost-of-living state in the nation.
That’s also far below the Hawai‘i Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism’s (DBEDT) self-sufficiency income standards, or “the amount of money that individuals and families require to meet their basic needs.”
DBEDT quietly released new self-sufficiency income standards at the end of 2019 without fanfare. According to these new calculations, Hawaiʻi’s own state department charged with governing our economic landscape found that a single adult with no keiki needed to earn $16.90 an hour in 2018 in Hawai‘i to be self-sufficient. After adjusting for inflation, that means $17.63 per hour in 2020 to meet their basic needs.
What is a living wage in Hawai‘i?
There’s no official standard, but there are several independent sources, in addition to DBEDT, that try to answer that question (see Figure below).
Living wage standards for Hawaiʻi using updated data and adjusted for inflation to 2020 levels.
Aloha United Way commissioned ALICE: A Study of Financial Hardship in Hawai‘i and found that a family of four in our state needed $72,336 in 2015 for a “bare-minimum household survival budget.” After adjusting for inflation, that means $80,381 in 2020. If that household has two earners, that means that each of them needs to make at least $19.32 an hour for their family to survive.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has a “family budget calculator” that measures “the income a family needs in order to attain a modest yet adequate standard of living.” A single person with no children in Honolulu County needed $24.78 per hour in 2017 according to that calculator, or $26.34 an hour in 2020.
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) has estimated the annual income needed for basic economic security in 2016. They find that a single working adult without keiki and with benefits needed to earn $21.85 per hour, or $23.82 in 2020 in Hawaii. Without benefits, that individual needed $25.22 per hour, or $27.48 in 2020, to be economically secure.
The National Low-Income Housing Coalition calculates a “housing wage” for each state. To afford a one-bedroom apartment in Hawaii, a worker needed to make $28.04 an hour in 2019, or $28.70 in 2020.
