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Virgin Islands Minimum Wage Changes

February 19th, 2007 Posted by Mark

The U.S. Virgin Islands, like Guam and Puerto Rico, are territories of the United States, and as such, employers in the Virgin Islands typically have to follow many of the same laws that the employers in the states have to follow, such as the minimum wage. In the case of the U.S. Virgin Islands, employers actually have a higher minimum wage than the current U.S. federal minimum wage.

It dates back to a law passed in the Virgin Islands Senate back in November 2005. Then the territory’s legislature decided on a new minimum wage bill that increased the minimum wage there in two increments. The first came on January 1, 2006, when the Virgin Islands minimum wage went from $5.15 per hour, the current federal minimum wage, to $5.65 per hour. A year later, on January 1, 2007, the minimum wage went up to $6.15 per hour.

That means that the Virgin Islands were really on the cutting edge of the minimum wage increase trend that seems to have taken hold in states across the country, as workers’ supporters have seemed to have convinced the legislatures in the states, as well as those lawmakers in Senate and the House in Washington DC, that a new minimum wage is necessary.

The Virgin Islands minimum wage, getting back to our topic, is also a bit different than other minimum wages that we have seen. For instance, that $6.15 per hour rate is for businesses with more than $150,000 in annual revenues on average. Employers who earn less than that can pay $4.30 per hour to their workers. The Virgin Islands also adopts the federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour, so that means that any employer who technically must follow the Fair Labor Standards Act must also pay the federal minimum wage at least, or the state minimum wage if they are liable for that.