The Trump administration will cut the pay of all farmworkers by reducing the minimum wages paid to workers filling seasonal agricultural jobs in the H-2A visa program. By lowering wage rates implemented by the Department of Labor (DOL), we estimate that over 350,000 H-2A farmworkers could see their annual wages cut by a total of $2 billion or more—between 26% to 32% of their wages. These significant wage cuts for H-2A workers will put downward pressure on the wages of U.S. farmworkers, reducing their total annual wages by about $3 billion—up to 9% of their total wages. Total losses in pay for all farmworkers will range from $4.4 to $5.4 billion—roughly 10% to 12% of their total wages—according to our estimates.
The farmworkers who toil in the fields do not deserve a pay cut—they deserve a raise. Instead of cutting wages, the Trump administration should restore the previous standards that required employers to pay H-2A workers no less than the average wage for field and livestock workers according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Introduction to the H-2A visa program and the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR)
The H-2A visa program is used to fill seasonal and temporary jobs in agriculture, after employers go through a (mostly pro-forma) process to prove that they could not find an available U.S. worker to hire. With no annual limit on the number of workers that can be hired, H-2A has been the fastest-growing U.S. work visa program—nearly tripling over the past decade to 352,682 workers in 2024, according to our estimates (see Figure A). The vast majority of H-2A workers are employed on crop farms—picking fruits and vegetables—and the average duration of an H-2A job is roughly six months.
Figure A
It is well documented that the H-2A program is rife with abuse and workers are not adequately protected, in part because H-2A farmworkers are indentured to their employers through their visa status and due to lax government oversight. As a result, there have been countless exposés from journalists and advocates that reveal how H-2A farmworkers are frequently robbed, exploited, victimized, and trafficked, and EPI has shown how most back wages stolen and employer penalties levied on farms come from employers breaking H-2A rules.
Some governance aspects of the H-2A program have long been a contentious policy fight, especially when it comes to worker rights and setting minimum wage rates for H-2A workers. The H-2A law requires that H-2A workers be paid the highest of the local, state, or federal minimum wage, unless there is an applicable local prevailing wage or collective bargaining agreement—or the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) if it is higher, which is calculated and set by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) based on survey data. In fact, the vast majority of H-2A farmworkers have been paid the AEWR, since until now it was almost always higher than any of the otherwise applicable minimum wages. The purpose of the AEWR is to ensure that H-2A workers are paid a wage that is consistent with U.S. wage standards on farms and to prevent adverse impacts of H-2A employment on U.S. farmworkers’ wages. But the agricultural industry has pushed lawmakers and federal agencies to modify the AEWR methodology to push H-2A wages as low as possible.
Since 2010, the AEWR in each state has been based on a survey of farm operators conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), commonly referred to as the Farm Labor Survey (FLS). While far from perfect, it is the best data set available on the wages of directly hired farmworkers in the United States. However, in August, the Trump administration’s USDA abruptly announced that it was discontinuing the FLS. A month later, DOL issued an interim final rule laying out a new AEWR based on data from a different data set, the Occupational Employment and Wages Statistics (OEWS) survey. OEWS is an inferior data set for agriculture and is not a valid survey for setting farmworkers’ wages, in part because it only surveys nonfarm employers—meaning farm labor contractors and other staffing firms. These nonfarm employers send farmworkers to different farms and pay them much less on average than the majority of workers who are hired directly by farm employers.
The Trump administration’s new regulation will drastically lower wages for migrant farmworkers hired through the H-2A visa program
The new Trump AEWR cuts wage rates dramatically and creates two artificial “skill levels” for each state which set H-2A wages at the 17th percentile of wages surveyed (skill level 1) and at the 50th percentile (skill level 2) based on five occupations DOL has determined are relevant in the OEWS. DOL estimates that 92% of H-2A workers will be paid at skill level 1 and 8% at skill level 2. The Trump DOL, in the preamble to its interim final rule, is fairly explicit about its desire to lower wages for H-2A farmworkers in order to benefit farm employers and increase H-2A hiring. And its move to eliminate the FLS and substitute it with the OEWS appears to be a key action taken to achieve that.
In addition, DOL has removed the previous requirement that employers pay for 100% of housing costs for H-2A workers. Currently, H-2A employers are required to provide housing for workers if they would not reasonably be able to return to their residences on a daily basis. This is important given that H-2A workers are so poorly paid that they cannot reasonably be expected to pay for their own housing. Further, H-2A workers are often employed on farms in remote areas that are not located close enough to a supply of affordable, accessible housing that still allows workers to report for duty for long hours in the fields. Reporter and worker advocates have documented many of the substandard conditions in employer-provided housing for farmworkers. However, instead of improving these problems, the AEWR lets farm owners take new deductions for housing out of H-2A workers’ paychecks—sometimes as much as 30% of their hourly pay.
Between wage cuts and housing deductions, DOL estimates that H-2A workers would lose over $1.7 billion under the new wage rule in 2026, amounting to $24 billion over the next 10 years as the program grows to over 500,000 jobs, as DOL predicts will occur. This would represent a shocking redistribution of income away from some of the country’s most essential and underpaid workers in order to line the pockets of farm employers.
However, we believe DOL’s estimates are incomplete because they fail to fully consider the new AEWR’s wage impacts, by not considering alternative methodologies and other scenarios that may result. For instance, DOL did not consider the impact on state minimum wage rates and whether the AEWR housing deduction may conflict with state laws, and DOL did not estimate the impact that a massive wage cut for H-2A farmworkers will have on U.S. farmworkers. In this post, we present new estimates that we hope will inform the public and DOL as to the true impact of the October 2025 AEWR. They should be considered low-end estimates because the interim final rule also permits farm operators to pay H-2A workers the AEWR for duties associated with higher-paying non-farm jobs for up to 50% of their work hours. This will put downward pressure on a number of occupations like construction and truck driving, but we have not attempted to calculate those losses to workers, and neither has DOL.
Trump’s H-2A wage rule will lead to a total pay cut of $4.4 to $5.4 billion for H-2A farmworkers and U.S. farmworkers
The proposed rule will significantly reduce H-2A workers’ wages. The average AEWR set for 2025 was $17.43 per hour, weighted by total weeks worked by state in 2024. The rule, however, proposes a two-tiered wage structure with far lower wages for 2026. The average skill level 1 and skill level 2 hourly wages would be $13.70 and $17.22, respectively, even without housing deductions. With housing deductions, the average level 1 and level 2 hourly wages would be $11.78 and $15.30, respectively.
In many cases, the new state AEWR wages are low enough to fall below state minimum wage laws, with the housing deduction lowering it even further. In some states, the AEWRs will fall below the state minimum wage only after housing deductions are subtracted. In all those cases, the state minimum wage supersedes the AEWR and sets the minimum H-2A wage. Currently, it is unclear how states will react to workers being paid below the state minimum after the housing deduction, and what guidance the federal government will provide with respect to it. For example, in Connecticut, the 2026 skill level 1 H-2A wage will be $15.93, but the 2026 state minimum wage will be $16.94. If the state fully enforces its minimum wage and prohibits pay rates from falling below the state minimum, then the lowest wage an H-2A worker could be paid legally is $16.94, and no housing deduction will be permitted. But if Connecticut or federal guidance allows the housing deduction to take the H-2A wage below the state minimum wage, then an H-2A worker in Connecticut could be paid as low as $14.88 per hour (i.e., the state minimum wage minus the $2.06 housing deduction).
It is possible that some states will take the position that the hourly wage rates paid to H-2A workers may not go below the state minimum after subtracting the housing deduction, while some states may allow the deduction, arguing that the federal AEWR regulation supersedes the state minimum wage law. The agricultural industry is likely to argue the latter, and the issue may end up in multiple state and federal courts. As a result of this uncertainty, our estimates consider both state minimum wage scenarios.
The first row of Table 1 estimates the annual pay losses for H-2A workers in 2026 under the interim final rule, assuming—as DOL does—that 92% of H-2A workers would be paid the skill level 1 wage. State minimum wage laws should not permit the hourly wage paid to H-2A workers to go below the state minimum wage; and in this scenario, H-2A annual wages would fall by $1.7 billion in 2026, or 25.8%. If state minimum wages are allowed to be undermined and the housing deduction drops the H-2A wage below the state minimum wage rates, the losses would be larger: a $2.1 billion or 31.5% annual pay loss. If some states prohibit and some permit the housing deduction to take the H-2A wage below the state minimum wage, then the total amount of annual pay losses would fall somewhere in between those two amounts.
Table 1
Reducing the AEWR for H-2A workers will also lower wages for U.S. farmworkers—one-third of whom are U.S-born citizens, according to the latest DOL survey. A fall in the H-2A wage will increase demand for H-2A workers, since employers can save significantly on labor costs if they hire them. As a result, it will become relatively more expensive to hire non-H-2A U.S. farmworkers. Employers will therefore reduce demand for U.S. farmworkers, putting downward pressure on their wages.
This is not hypothetical: Rutledge et al. found that a 10% increase in the AEWR caused an almost 2.8% increase in the wages of U.S. farmworkers. With those estimates, the authors estimated that a one-year AEWR wage freeze would reduce annual U.S. farmworker wages by $475 million. Using a similar methodology, we estimate the likely wage reductions for U.S. farmworkers due to the new rule (see the appendix for methodological details).
As we showed earlier, the H-2A wage reduction under a fully enforced minimum wage would be 25.8%. Based on the responsiveness of U.S farmworker wages to H-2A wage rates from Rutledge et al., the second row of Table 1 shows that the new rule could reduce U.S. farmworker annual wages by $2.7 billion, or 7.1%. The wage losses are again larger if states allow the housing deduction to push pay below the state minimum. In that case, U.S. farmworkers in 2026 would experience an annual pay cut of $3.3 billion, or 8.7%.
This means that farmworkers in total will see annual pay cuts of about $4.4 billion to $5.4 billion (9.9% to 12.1%), depending on the enforcement of state minimum wage laws. This amounts to a massive pay cut for farmworkers who are already some of the lowest-paid employees in the entire U.S. labor market, while working in one of the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the economy.
Conclusion and recommendations
Without question, the Trump DOL has established an AEWR that will lead to much lower pay for both U.S. farmworkers and those recruited from abroad through the H-2A program—and that appears to be its explicit intention. H-2A and U.S. farmworkers risk their lives and health in dangerous conditions like extreme heat in order to put food on the tables of U.S. households. These workers do not deserve a pay cut—they deserve a raise.
The Trump DOL is accepting input from the public through the Federal Register website on the AEWR interim final rule until December 1, 2025, which they are required by law to consider when crafting the final version of the rule. The Trump administration should reconsider its recent actions and listen to the many farmworker advocates and unions who have criticized the new AEWR for its negative impacts. However, the Trump administration has made clear it doesn’t care about the well-being of immigrant workers, or improving the quality of the jobs in which they’re overrepresented. In fact, Trump has expressed wanting to improve jobs and opportunities for native-born workers through the exclusion, deportation, or terrorizing of immigrant workers—something we know won’t work. The AEWR rule policy change, however, shows that the administration is still willing to help agribusiness more easily hire the most exploitable and underpaid labor possible—even if it decimates the jobs and wages of the one-third of farmworkers who are U.S.-born citizens.
Instead of taking money out of the pockets of U.S.-born and foreign-born farmworkers alike, the administration should at minimum:
- Reinstate the USDA Farm Labor Survey, which has been the best available source of government data on farmworkers’ wages and employment;
- Issue an updated AEWR rule with a methodology that reverts back to the previous rule that requires employers to pay H-2A workers no less than the average wage for field and livestock workers as reported in the FLS; and
- Prohibit farm employers from hiring H-2A workers for jobs where they will perform non-farm tasks like construction for more than a trivial portion of their work hours. Those workers should be hired through the H-2B program, or if they remain in the H-2A program, they should be paid the higher non-farm wage for the occupation for 100% of their work hours.
Appendix: Methodology
To calculate counterfactual H-2A wage rates in 2026, we estimate what the AEWR would be in 2026 if the new rule was not in effect and assume that the 2025 AEWR grows by 3.416%, which is the Employment Cost Index (ECI) projection from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for private-sector wage growth between 2025 and 2026.
For our estimate on the interim final rule, we assume that the 2026 H-2A wages are the wage rates at skill levels 1 and 2 as listed by DOL, subtracting the housing deduction. We also assume that H-2A labor is distributed across the two wage rates as DOL does (92% of workers in skill level 1, 8% in skill level 2), or we use another distribution as described in the text. We additionally examine the cases when state minimum wages are fully enforced so that H-2A wages can never fall below the state minimum, or the cases when state minimum wages are not fully enforced so that H-2A wages minus the housing deduction can fall below the state minimum wage.
To calculate the H-2A wage bill under the counterfactual and under the new rule, we use the H-2A wage rates described above, use H-2A cumulative weeks worked estimates by state from DOL disclosure data on labor certifications for H-2A jobs, and assume that H-2A workers were employed for 40.5 hours per week, which is the average amount of hours worked nationally by field and livestock workers according to the USDA’s Farm Labor Survey for 2024. Depending on the distribution of labor across wage rates and depending on the enforcement of state minimum wages, these assumptions generate an estimate of the percent fall in H-2A wage rates and the total dollar fall in the annual wage bill. The total counterfactual H-2A wage bill in 2026 is about $6.9 billion.
To estimate the total counterfactual non-H-2A U.S. farmworker wage bill, we start with the 2024 annual wages reported in the QCEW from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for U.S. farmworkers in crop production (NAICS 111) and crop support services (NAICS 1151). These industries were also used by Rutledge et al. in their analysis. We convert those 2024 values to 2026 dollars assuming that nominal wages grow at the same rate as CBO (2025) projections for ECI, by 3.501% in 2024–2025 and 3.416% in 2025–2026. Depending on state unemployment insurance coverage rules, some states may include H-2A wages in QCEW data, and some may not; Handwerker estimates that 35% of H-2A workers may have been included in QCEW payroll estimates. In the absence of better state-by-state data, we assume that 65% of the counterfactual H-2A wage bill is missing from QCEW data. The counterfactual total non-H-2A U.S. farmworker wage bill in those industries in 2026 is about $39.0 billion.
To calculate the effect of the new rule on non-H-2A U.S. farmworker wages, we rely on the estimates in Rutledge et al. showing that a 10% increase in the AEWR causes a 2.74% to 2.75% increase in domestic farm wage rates (see their Table 2, column 6, specifications A and B). Averaging these two estimates is our preferred elasticity of H-2A wages to non-H-2A wages. To estimate the percent fall in non-H-2A farmworker wages, we multiply the percent fall in H-2A wage rates by the preferred elasticity. We convert the 2026 dollar value estimates to 2025 dollars using CBO 2025 projections of the 2025–2026 CPI-U inflation rate. We multiply the percent fall in H-2A wage rates by the preferred elasticity.
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