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The 10 Lowest-Paying States in America Are Nearly All Run by Republicans

Federal wage data shows the 10 states where people earn the least are almost entirely Republican-led — and the 'low cost of living' excuse doesn't hold up.

MAGA Report Cards · Jul 20, 2026

The 10 Lowest-Paying States in America Are Nearly All Run by Republicans

The party that never stops talking about the economy has a data problem.

According to new numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 10 states where working people earn the lowest annual pay in the country are, with a single exception, all led by Republicans. Every one of them has a Republican governor except Kentucky, which has a Democratic governor, Andy Beshear. Nine of the bottom ten are run top to bottom by the GOP.

Here's the list, from bad to worst:

10. Oklahoma — median annual wage $75,360
9. Indiana — $75,280
8. Idaho — $74,440
7. Montana — $74,110
6. Nebraska — $71,850
5. Kentucky — $71,410
4. West Virginia — $69,910
3. Louisiana — $69,240
2. Mississippi — $66,540
1. Arkansas — $65,100

These aren't cherry-picked. This is the federal government's own wage data. And it lands the same way a lot of these rankings do lately: the states at the very bottom keep turning out to be the ones Republicans have run for years.

"But everything's cheaper there"

Whenever a list like this comes out, the defense is always the same — sure, wages are lower, but so is the cost of living, so it all evens out.

For some of these states, there's a grain of truth to that. Three of the four cheapest housing markets in the country — West Virginia, Oklahoma and Louisiana — show up on this low-wage list, so a smaller paycheck does stretch a little further on a mortgage.

But look closer and the excuse falls apart fast. Take Idaho: the median worker earns $74,440, yet the median home now costs $476,300. Or Montana, where people earn $74,110 while the typical home runs $505,600 — more than the national average. In those states you get the worst of both worlds: some of the lowest pay in the country and home prices that would make a Californian wince. The "your dollar goes further" story doesn't survive contact with a Montana real estate listing.

For comparison, the national median home price in May 2026 was about $387,400. A worker in Idaho or Montana is earning bottom-ten wages while paying well above the national price to put a roof over their head.

The wage floor these states refuse to raise

Low pay isn't weather. It's a policy choice — and it's one these states keep making on purpose.

Six of the ten states on this list still pin their minimum wage to the federal floor of $7.25 an hour, a rate that hasn't budged since 2009. Louisiana and Mississippi don't even have a state minimum wage law on the books — they simply default to the federal $7.25. Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky and Oklahoma all sit at $7.25 too. That floor buys less every year that inflation goes up, and the Republican legislatures in these states have left it right where it is.

Now look at where the wage floor actually went up. The two states on this list with the highest minimum wage — Nebraska at $15.00 and Arkansas at $11.00 — didn't get there because their Republican leaders decided to give workers a raise. They got there because voters went around them. Nebraskans passed Initiative 433 at the ballot box in 2022. Arkansans passed Issue 5 in 2018 with nearly 69% of the vote. In the reddest states in America, the only time low-wage workers got a raise, they had to give it to themselves.

Low pay, and then they cut the safety net

Here's the part that turns a bad ranking into a broken promise.

The people earning these bottom-ten wages are exactly the families who lean on programs like Medicaid and food stamps to get by. And the members of Congress these states send to Washington — the senators and representatives from Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia and the rest — voted for Trump's budget law, which pairs $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts with $1 trillion in tax giveaways for the richest 1 percent and delivers the largest cut to SNAP food assistance in history — hitting the very constituents scraping by on the lowest wages in the country.

So the sequence, for a family in one of these states, is this: your state keeps your wages at the bottom of the national barrel, refuses to raise the minimum wage above $7.25, and then your representatives in Congress vote to cut the food and health assistance that low pay forces you to rely on. Three hits, all from the same party, all pointed at the same people.

That's not a coincidence you can spin away with a line about population growth. It's a record.

The bottom line

Republicans love to campaign as the party of the working man and the strong economy. But when the federal government tallies up where working people actually earn the least, the list is almost entirely theirs — nine of the ten lowest-paying states in America, run by GOP governors and GOP legislatures, several of them still paying a minimum wage frozen at $7.25 since 2009.

The next time one of these politicians tells you the other side doesn't understand the economy, remember which states landed at the very bottom of it.