Tight Labor Market Leads to Higher Farmworker Wages

(WASHINGTON, DC) In recent years, farmers, growers, and ranchers throughout the United States have expressed concerns about the challenges of hiring an adequate number of qualified farmworkers at an economically viable wage. A prominent indicator of a tighter farm labor market in the United States is the rising real (inflation-adjusted) wage for farmworkers. Between 2014 and 2018, the average hourly real wage for farmworkers rose from $12.00 to $13.25, an increase of 10.4 percent. This increase in the real wage for farm labor is the fastest experienced over any four-year period during the past two decades and the growth was faster than in nonfarm wages. The hourly real wage for all production workers outside agriculture rose from $21.90 to $22.97, an increase of 3.5 percent.