Reference

Annual Refresh & Methodology

Wage law changes constantly. Minimum-wage tables update January 1 in many states; statutes get amended mid-year (e.g., CA AB1228 fast-food, CO PAY Act). Our refresh cadence is designed so the figures on this site stay current without sliding into stale-data risk.

December: full min-wage column

Every December, our researcher re-verifies the 2026/2027 minimum-wage figure for every US state plus DC against the current state DOL or state legislature primary page. Every row gets a fresh effective date and last-verified date. Pure-FLSA-floor states get a confirmation that the state DOL still defers to the federal $7.25 — we don't carry forward last year's figure without a confirmation page.

Quarterly: full statute review

Every three months, our researcher re-checks every state's final-paycheck deadline, waiting-time penalty formula, overtime threshold, PTO-payout rule, and statute of limitations against the underlying primary source. Anything that's changed gets re-cited; anything that hasn't gets a refreshed last-verified date.

Mid-cycle: amendment alerts

Major mid-cycle amendments (e.g., a state passes a new wage-claim penalty law) trigger an out-of-cycle update. We monitor:

State legislative tracking for wage-and-hour bills
DOL Wage & Hour Division Field Operations Handbook updates
State DOL press releases announcing new figures or rule changes
State-specific rule announcements (e.g., DLSE for CA, CDLE for CO)

Reviewer signoff

We are retaining a US-licensed employment-law attorney to review every state page before it leaves the dev preview. Until that reviewer is retained, legal review is pending— treat the statute citations on this site as informational, not legal advice. Once retained, the reviewer's name, bar number, and state of admission will appear on every state page, and the review will check:

Statute citations match the cited URLs verbatim (no paraphrase drift)
Per-state lawyer-advertising compliance for the lawyer-match disclosure copy
Loaded-language framing — "wage theft" phrasing is conditional, never an assertion of fact about a named employer
Math correctness on penalty formulas (especially CA-class waiting-time penalty)

When verification fails

Sometimes a state's DOL page is unreachable, or the figure on the page doesn't match the current statute. In those cases we mark the cell verification pending and surface that status on the state page. We never invent a figure to fill the gap. This is the load-bearing operating discipline of the site.

Last reviewed: May 8, 2026.