$15 minimum wage inches closer to becoming law in Virginia

A bill to raise the state minimum wage to $15 passed out of the House of Delegates Labor and Commerce Committee on Tuesday.

One of Virginia Democrats’ top priorities to helping working people cleared an initial hurdle on Tuesday. 

The House Labor and Commerce Committee advanced a bill to raise Virginia’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2028. The bill will next be taken up by the House Appropriations committee. 

State Democrats have tried to raise Virginia’s minimum wage for years, but their efforts were blocked by former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s veto pen. 

New Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger has made clear her support for raising the state minimum wage and did so again Monday in an address to a joint session of the General Assembly

“If you work full time in Virginia, you should be able to afford to live in Virginia,” Spanberger told lawmakers in Richmond. 

The state’s current minimum wage rose to $12.77 this month in keeping with state law that ties it to the annual rate of inflation. 

State Del. Jeion Ward (D-Hampton) is carrying the bill to raise the minimum wage. Her bill would set the minimum hourly wage at $13.75 in 2027 and raise it to $15 an hour in 2028. 

Presenting her bill to the committee, Ward said that most of the low-wage workers who stand to benefit from a raise to the minimum wage are women and over half are people of color. Most of these workers clock in 20 hours a week and over a quarter live in families that are below the poverty line, Ward said. 

“Virginia workers need a raise now,” Ward said. 

Representatives from unions, anti-poverty groups, and progressive organizations spoke in favor of the bill during Tuesday’s public comment period. No members of the public showed up to speak against the bill. 

Among the labor groups that came out in support of raising the minimum wage was the Virginia Education Association (VEA), Virginia AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Virginia 512, Communication Workers of America, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 666, and National Coalition of Public Safety Officers of Virginia.

“This is overdue,” said Julia Newton, a low-wage worker and member of SEIU Virginia 512. 

Tom Intorcio with the Virginia Catholic Conference said his organization supports the bill because it moves wages in Virginia closer to a living wage. For a family with two children and two incomes, a living wage would be $23 an hour, Intorcio said. 

A Richmond resident who spoke out in support of the bill said it would be “disgusting” for any lawmaker to vote against a raise to the minimum wage when people are starving, getting evicted, and living on the street.

“Imagine the kind of person you have to be to vote against raising wages for people that are already making poverty wages,” he said. 

Such appeals fell on deaf ears when it came to Republican members of the committee, who cycled through familiar conservative arguments that raising the minimum wage  would drive businesses out of communities and contribute to inflation.

Virginia Republican House Minority Leader noted that most people in Virginia already make more than the current minimum wage, which is true: the average hourly wage in Virginia in November 2025 was $37.88, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Democrats countered that past warnings about the dire consequences of raising the minimum wage in 2020 never came to pass and that hundreds of thousands of people would benefit from raising it more. 

“The same people who voted against it then are saying some of the same things now,” Ward said. “So sometimes I want to know: how low is low enough?”