New York’s minimum wage in 2026 isn’t a single number. The general minimum wage is $17.00 per hour in New York City and in Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties, while it is $16.00 per hour in the rest of New York State.
For executive and administrative employees who are classified as exempt from overtime under New York’s wage orders, the 2026 state salary threshold is also regional. It is $1,275.00 per week, or $66,300 annually, in New York City, Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester, and $1,199.10 per week, or $62,353.20 annually, in the rest of the state.
Those numbers are the latest chapter in a much longer New York story. More than a century before today’s regional wage rates and salary thresholds, garment workers, reformers, labor unions, legislators, and courts were fighting over a basic question: how far could government go in protecting workers from wages and working conditions that left them unable to support themselves?…