$33.85 per hour, or $64,945.55 per year. The City of Chicago's Fair Workweek Notice, effective July 1, 2026, states that a Covered Employee earns "$64,945.55 per year (salary) or $33.85 per hour (hourly) or less"[1]. The City's one-pager on the July 2026 changes carries the same pair and calls them compensation ceilings[2]. Two older City documents are still live with two lower figures, $32.60 and $31.85 per hour, and neither has been withdrawn[3][4]. The wage line is one of several conditions for coverage, not the whole test: the worker also has to spend a majority of their working time in Chicago, and the employer has to meet a size test in one of seven named industries[1].
This article is for general information and is not legal advice. Confirm obligations with qualified counsel.
As of July 1, 2026, Chicago's Fair Workweek compensation ceiling for a Covered Employee is $33.85 per hour or $64,945.55 per year[1][2]. If you came here to check a number against a roster, that is the number the City's current notice carries, and the paragraph below tells you which document to trust when a colleague hands you a different one.
The figures adjust upward each July, which is why three of them are in circulation at once. This page is about the wage line and who it reaches. If your question is whether your industry is named at all, that is a different test, and the guide to which industries the Chicago ordinance covers works through it for plants and distribution centers.
What is the Chicago Fair Workweek salary threshold in 2026?
The City's Fair Workweek Notice, effective July 1, 2026 and last updated May 28, 2026, describes a covered worker in one sentence. It is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing:
"Employees who work a majority of time in Chicago, in a covered industry and earn $64,945.55 per year (salary) or $33.85 per hour (hourly) or less."City of Chicago, Fair Workweek Notice (MCC 6-110), effective July 1, 2026
Two details in that sentence do work that a bare number does not. The line is stated as "or less", so it is a ceiling and the figure itself is inside coverage rather than above it[1]. And the notice gives the pair as an either/or between an annual salary and an hourly rate, rather than converting one into the other, so an hourly roster is measured against $33.85 and a salaried roster against $64,945.55[1].
The City's own one-pager on the laws changing that month puts it the same way: "Fair Workweek compensation ceilings increase on July 1, 2026. Covered Employees who earn equal to or less than $64,945.55 (salary) or $33.85 (hourly) will be covered by the ordinance."[2]
| The wage line, as of July 1, 2026 | Figure |
|---|---|
| Hourly | $33.85 per hour or less[1][2] |
| Salaried | $64,945.55 per year or less[1][2] |
| Adjustment | The notice and the one-pager both date this pair to July 1, 2026. The City has not published the figure that applies after that date[1][2] |
Who does that wage line actually reach?
The wage line is a filter, not the whole gate. Read against the notice, a worker sits inside the definition of a Covered Employee when four things are true at once[1]:
- They work a majority of their time in Chicago. Rule FWW 1.02(f) of the June 2026 rules sets the method: the Department analyzes the total hours the employee worked in and out of the City over the previous 90 days[5].
- They earn at or below the wage line above[1].
- Their employer is primarily engaged in one of seven named industries: building services, healthcare, hotel, manufacturing, restaurant, retail, or warehouse services[1].
- Their employer meets the size test: 100 or more employees, 250 for not-for-profits, at least 50 of whom are covered by the ordinance[1].
Two clauses in the notice catch people out, and both are on the coverage side rather than the wage side. Temp workers are named explicitly. The notice states that the definition "includes temp workers on assignment for 420 hours within an 18-month period"[1]. And on the employer side, the notice adds that "Franchisees with more than 3 locations might be Employers"[1]. That sentence is the City's, including the word "might", and we are not going to firm it up on the City's behalf.
The size test has a stated arithmetic, which matters for an operation sitting near the line. Rule FWW 1.02 measures an existing employer as a 12-month average of global employees and a new employer as a 90-day average, counts covered employees on the same basis, and rounds any fractional result down: the rule's own example is that 53.8 covered employees counts as 53[5].
Notice what is not on that list. Job title is not a test. Neither is whether the work looks like a store or a kitchen. A worker paid above the ceiling sits outside it, and a worker paid below it in a named industry at a large enough employer sits inside it, and the two can be standing on the same floor. Whether any individual role clears all four conditions is a question for counsel, not for this page.
Why three City documents show three different thresholds
Because the ceiling adjusts each July and the City has not retired the documents that carried the older figures. All three of the following were live and downloadable from chicago.gov on 18 August 2026:
| City document | Its date | The figures it states |
|---|---|---|
| Fair Workweek Notice (MCC 6-110), and the Fair Workweek landing page | Effective July 1, 2026 | $33.85 / $64,945.55[1][6] |
| FAQ Fair Workweek, Version 3.2 | Updated December 2025 | $32.60 / $62,561.90[3] |
| FAQ Fair Workweek, earlier version | Updated July 2024 | $31.85 / $61,149.35[4] |
The dates resolve it, and nothing else does. The notice effective July 1, 2026 and the landing page are the most recent of the three, and they agree with each other[1][6]. The two FAQs are older and state figures consistent with their own dates[3][4].
What is open, said plainly: the City has published no note reconciling the three, and the December 2025 FAQ is still linked from the same landing page that carries the higher figure[6][3]. So an operator can arrive at a lower number in good faith, from a current City URL, on the same afternoon. The practical habit is the boring one: read the effective date on the document in front of you before you sort a roster against it, and take the discrepancy to counsel rather than resolving it yourself.
What the threshold does not decide
Clearing or missing the wage line settles who is covered. It settles nothing about what coverage then costs, and those are the two questions operators tend to collapse into one.
The obligations that attach to a covered worker are separate rules with their own arithmetic: 14 days of advance schedule notice, additional pay when a posted schedule changes late, and 1.25 times regular pay for a shift beginning less than 10 hours after the end of the previous day's shift[1]. What each of those actually costs is worked through in what a late schedule change costs across jurisdictions. For the wider picture of which jurisdictions carry a rule at all, the state-by-state map of who is covered where is the reference. And the fifteen exceptions that switch some of that off, one of which is written for manufacturing employers and nobody else, belong to the coverage guide linked above.
There is also an operational reading of the wage line that is easy to miss. Because the ceiling rises every July, the covered population inside a plant or a distribution center widens on its own, without a single hire or raise. A roster sorted against $32.60 last year and not re-sorted this year is quietly wrong for the workers who sit between the two figures. That is a data question before it is a legal one, and it is the kind of thing that belongs in the system rather than in a spreadsheet somebody remembers to open.
WorkAxle is an enterprise workforce management platform built for the most complex, multi-union, multi-jurisdiction operations, where your own team configures the labor rules generic tools cannot handle. A wage line, a notice window, and a rest premium are the kind of thing you codify once in the rule engine that enforces hard rules before a schedule is published, as a rule pack that belongs to your Chicago site. When a change would cross one of them, the rule and its cost surface while the scheduler can still weigh it. Plants and distribution centers carry the added wrinkle that their exposure is not identical, which is covered on the manufacturing and processing operations page.
What to do with the number
Sort your Chicago roster against both figures, hourly against $33.85 and salaried against $64,945.55, and note who moved into the covered group when the ceiling rose in July. Then check the date stamp on whichever City document your compliance file is built on, because if that file predates July 2026 it is measuring against a line the City has since raised. Both of those are an afternoon, and they tell you the size of the covered population before a single premium is ever owed.