U.S. Farm Wages: The Decomposition Nobody Has Run

The wage floor for American farmwork fell by a third. Two different things could have caused that, one defensible and one not, and no one has separated them. In late summer 2025 the USDA discontinued the Farm Labor Survey, the instrument that measured what American farmworkers earn and set the wage floor for the H-2A guest-worker program. On October 2 the Labor Department rebuilt that floor on a different dataset, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, and made two additional changes: it added a lower entry-level wage tier, and it began deducting the value of employer-provided housing from the hourly rate. The floor fell. Agricultural economists writing in Choices calculated the drop from Farm Labor Survey data and Labor Department figures: entry-level rates going from $15–20 an hour in 2025 to $8–14 in 2026. The Economic Policy Institute put the annual loss at $1.8 billion, or 26.8 percent, if state minimum wages are fully enforced. The…