Washington's minimum wage rises to $17.73 in 2027, and the overtime salary line jumps to $92,196

Washington's minimum wage goes from $17.13 to $17.73 an hour on January 1, 2027, a 3.5% raise the Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) announced on September 30, 2026. Workers aged 14 and 15 can be paid 85% of that, or $15.07. The bigger change hides in the same release: at employers with 51 or more employees, a salaried worker now has to earn at least $92,196 a year to be exempt from overtime, up from $80,168.40 this year.

That second number is the one to check if you're salaried. Anyone paid between those two figures at a large employer either gets a raise to the new floor or becomes eligible for overtime pay in January, assuming the employer follows the rule.

The new minimum: $17.73, with no tip credit

Washington adjusts its wage every September by the change in the CPI-W, the federal price index for urban wage earners, from August to August. Tips can't count toward it: L&I says employers may not use tips or service charges as part of an employee's hourly minimum wage, so a server is owed the full $17.73 before tips. Cities can set higher floors, and eight jurisdictions do, among them Seattle, SeaTac, Tukwila, Renton, Bellingham and Everett.

At 40 hours a week, $17.73 is $709.20 before taxes and $36,878.40 over the standard 2,080-hour year, $1,248 more than at this year's rate. Washington has no income tax on wages, so what comes off is federal tax, Social Security and Medicare plus two small state payroll premiums. Run through our take-home pay calculator with 2026 rules, a single filer keeps $31,300.23 a year, or $985.45 more than at $17.13. That's about 79 cents of each new dollar.

Overtime for hourly workers moves with the base. Washington requires time and a half for hours over 40 in a workweek, so the lowest legal overtime rate becomes $26.60 an hour.

The overtime salary threshold: two numbers now

Washington ties the salary test for exempt jobs to its own minimum wage, and since 2020 it has been raising the multiplier in steps. Executive, administrative and professional employees, and some computer professionals, only lose the right to overtime if they're paid a salary at least that high and their actual duties fit the exemption. For 2026 both employer sizes sat at 2.25 times the minimum wage. In 2027 they split.

Employer size	2026 threshold	2027 multiplier	2027 weekly	2027 yearly
51 or more employees	$80,168.40	2.5 × minimum wage	$1,773.00	$92,196.00
1 to 50 employees	$80,168.40	2.25 × minimum wage	$1,595.70	$82,976.40

For large employers that's a jump of $12,027.60, or 15%, in one year: the CPI raise and the higher multiplier land at the same time. Small employers only absorb the inflation part, $2,808. Their turn comes in 2028, when their multiplier also reaches 2.5. L&I's schedule projects $1,796 a week ($93,392 a year) for both sizes that year, but that is a forecast, not a figure, until next September's announcement. Under the rules, 2.5 is where the multiplier stops.

Compare that with federal law, where the salary test is still $684 a week, or $35,568 a year. When the two conflict, L&I says the employer has to meet the one more favorable to the worker, and in Washington that is always the state figure.

Computer professionals are the one group that can be exempt while paid by the hour. Their floor is 3.5 times the minimum wage at any employer size, which comes to $62.06 an hour in 2027, $2.10 more than this year.

What it means at $85,000 a year

Take a salaried analyst at a company with 200 employees, paid $85,000 and classified as exempt. In 2026 that's comfortably above the $80,168.40 line. In 2027 it's $7,196 a year short of $92,196, so from January 1 the employer has two legal choices: raise the salary to at least $1,773 a week, or treat the job as salaried nonexempt and pay overtime.

If the employer reclassifies, the overtime math follows L&I's policy ES.A.8.1. The regular rate is the weekly salary divided by the hours that salary is meant to cover, and when there's no clear agreement on those hours, L&I treats the salary as covering 40. Here's a week with 45 hours worked:

The break-even is the interesting part. The gap to the threshold is $138.38 a week, and at $61.30 an hour that buys about 2.26 hours of overtime. So if this analyst usually works more than about two and a quarter extra hours a week, raising the salary to $92,196 is cheaper for the employer than paying overtime. If the long weeks are rare, reclassifying is cheaper. Either way, the employer can't leave you at $85,000, exempt, after December 31.

One trap. Some employers will want to say the salary already covers 45 hours and pay only half the regular rate for the extra five. L&I allows that only if three things are all true: a clear mutual understanding that the salary is straight pay for every hour worked, a clear understanding that overtime is paid at half time, and overtime paid in the same pay period. If nobody agreed to that, the 40-hour reading applies. Ask for it in writing either way.

The same $85,000 at a company with 50 or fewer employees stays above the small-employer line of $82,976.40, so nothing changes in 2027. It does in 2028, when the projected $93,392 would leave it short too.

Seattle: $22.14 an hour

Seattle's Office of Labor Standards announced its own increase on September 28, 2026: the city minimum goes from $21.30 to $22.14 on January 1, 2027, about 3.9%, indexed to the CPI-W for the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area. Since January 2025 every employer in the city pays the same rate, whatever its size. Full time, $22.14 is $885.60 a week and $46,051.20 a year, $9,172.80 more than the state minimum.

Seattle's ordinance doesn't change the salary test. The exemption thresholds above are state rules and apply in Seattle as everywhere else in Washington.

What to check in January

January 1, 2027 is a Friday. Hourly workers whose pay period crosses New Year's should see hours through December 31 at the old rate and hours from January 1 at the new one. If a whole January pay period still shows $17.13, or $21.30 in Seattle, the payroll system wasn't updated.

Salaried workers at large employers should look at the weekly figure, not the annual one. A salary under $1,773 a week with your title still marked exempt means one of the two fixes above didn't happen, and L&I takes complaints at 1-866-219-7321.

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