Farm groups fret increase in California’s H-2A minimum wage
Published 10:45 am Thursday, July 23, 2026
Farm and business groups in California say a state bill that would raise the minimum wage for certain agricultural workers by nearly $3 an hour would lead to business closures, fewer jobs and more automation, and could also inspire similar legislation in other Western states.
Assembly Bill 2646 by Assemblywoman Maggy Krell, D-Sacramento, sets a new minimum wage of $19.75 an hour for non-California resident “authorized” agricultural workers and “corresponding” agricultural workers performing similar jobs in the same county. The bill would impose annual cost-of-living adjustments based on the rate of inflation.
The Unifed Farm Workers-sponsored bill is widely understood to target H-2A temporary workers whose hourly wage reverted from $19.97 to the statewide minimum of $16.90 when the Trump administration changed how it calculates the Adverse Effect Wage Rate last October, the California Farm Bureau explained.
The UFW argues the legislation “safeguards vulnerable California farmworkers against deepening wage depression in the middle of escalating prices for food and basic necessities,” according to a state Senate bill analysis. The union didn’t respond to messages from Capital Press seeking comment.
The Farm Bureau and other critics say the bill would further burden farms that already operate in extremely thin margins amid rising labor, regulatory, water and energy costs. Nearly three dozen ag and business organizations are listed as opponents, including the California Fresh Fruit Association, the California Cattlemen’s Association, the California Association of Winegrape Growers and Western Growers.
A significant cost
“Flat-out, it’s another significant inflationary cost that farms just really can’t absorb right now,” said Fresno County Farm Bureau CEO Ryan Jacobsen, who himself grows almonds and raisin grapes. American ag is facing its worst income crisis since the 1980s, particularly in California, and this bill “just becomes another nail in the coffin of so many farm operations in the state,” he told Capital Press.
Jacobsen acknowledged that H-2A participants represent a tiny percentage of the ag work force. Indeed, the roughly $18 billion in annual overall farm labor costs in California includes $655 million in wages paid to H-2A workers, according to federal data cited by the CFB.
But the percentage of workers who perform similar jobs alongside H-2A workers could be much higher, Jacobsen said. Further, opponents fear the bill is likely a “first step” toward future legislation that would set the higher wage for all employees — and could be adopted by other states, he said.
Oregon and Washington have a history of copying California’s agricultural laws, as one or both Pacific Northwest states did in requiring overtime pay, minimum pen sizes for livestock, worker safety standards and caps on carbon emissions.
AB 2646 breezed through the Democrat-dominated Assembly this spring and passed the Senate Labor, Public Employment and Retirement Committee by a 4-1 vote June 24. It faces an Aug. 3 hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, its last stop before going to the full floor for a vote.
Unintended consequences
The bill proceeds despite a University of California study in 2023 finding that the state’s 2016 ag overtime law led to a decrease in worker hours and wages. In the first two years of the law’s implementation, California’s farm laborers worked a total of 15,000 to 45,000 fewer hours and earned a total of $6 million to $9 million less on their weekly paychecks than they would otherwise have, according to the study.
However, that study’s author, UC Berkeley economist Alexandra Hill, asserts that overtime laws have more of an effect on worker income than do minimum wage increases, whose impact has been a matter of voluminous debate among researchers.
“Overtime pay is quite different because it introduces a very clear incentive to reduce working hours to below the overtime threshold to avoid paying the premium,” Hill told Capital Press. “The distinction for H-2A workers is important because $19.97 was the H-2A minimum wage last year … This was only reduced down to the state minimum wage this year due to a federal ruling and the cancellation of the data used to determine the Adverse Effect Wage Rate.”
The U.S. Department of Labor changed the H-2A wage rule in response to complaints from farmers that their labor costs were too high. The UFW filed a legal challenge, but a federal court in California denied the union’s request in May to temporarily block it while the case plays out.
California farmworkers are already earning above the proposed minimum in many cases, Hill noted. Field workers in the Golden State were already averaging about $20.35 an hour as of the latest federal Farm Labor Survey in April 2025.
But recent research led by Zachariah Rutledge of Michigan State University found that farmers in California could save up to $100 million this year if every employer were to reduce pay for H-2A workers to the state’s minimum wage. So far, about 70% have, according to the researchers.