Insights

This employer edit, curated specifically for compensation and benefits teams, offers deeper insights on five tactical lessons from Cheese Louise’s experience building and sustaining living wage jobs from the ground up.

The U.S. Pacific division spans remote Alaskan communities; dense metros in California, Oregon, and Washington; and the island economies of Hawai’i, and has experienced some of the fastest basic needs cost growth in the country over the last six years. In this second post in our regional analysis series, we examine how costs and wages have shifted across the Pacific division since 2021, and what those trends mean for families and the employers navigating them.

For restaurant operators who want to pay a stable, living wage year-round, the math requires more than goodwill.

America’s West South Central division spans sprawling Gulf Coast metros and vast rural stretches, and over the last six years has been one of the country's fastest-growing divisions. In this post, we examine how costs and wages have shifted across the division since 2021, and what those trends mean for families and the employers navigating them.

The challenge Most artists lack a reliable compensation framework for knowing what to charge for their work. Rate-setting for creatives has historically been a mix of peer benchmarking, gut feel, and client budgets—none of which account for what it actually costs to meet basic needs where they live and work. Artist-led tech startup ARTPOWER set out to change that by building tortoise, a financial platform with tools, resources, and support designed for artists. The tortoise

Turnover in frontline industries is nothing new, but some sectors like leisure and hospitality and retail trade experience more churn than others. Dayforce's Earning Enough report, powered by our living wage data, shows that women of color, who make up a large share of these industries, are also the least likely to earn a family-sustaining wage. For employers, a workforce that is both underpaid and cycling out carries real risk, and understanding who is falling behind and why

Powered by our county-level living wage data, Dayforce's new Earning Enough report finds that only half of full-time American workers earn enough to meet their family's basic needs, and fewer workers are earning family-sustaining wages than in 2021. In this blog, we dive into what the Dayforce data reveals and why the findings matter for employers today. The five-year trend: Hourly workers lost ground To capture changes in worker earnings between 2021 and 2025, the Dayforce r

Last week, the Living Wage Institute team visited San Antonio, Texas for WorldatWork’s annual Total Rewards conference. Total Rewards brings together compensation and benefits professionals from across the globe tackling the most pressing issues in HR. Of course, being data nerds in a room full of total rewards leaders, we came with a few questions of our own. We ran a very (un)official, live pom-pom poll at our booth on the Expo Floor across three days. Here's what we learne