US minimum wage for esports players: federal floor and 2026 state rates

A professional player in the United States is usually talked about in terms of a salary, often an annual figure, and a contract may never mention an hourly rate at all. Yet the lowest pay the law allows is written per hour, and it is not the same everywhere: a federal minimum applies across the country, and most states set a rate of their own on top of it.

The question has become concrete in esports. According to Esports Insider, the Call of Duty League no longer sets a minimum annual salary of its own and relies on the minimums of each state instead. A league floor that points to state law is only as high as the state it lands in.

This guide sets out the rates themselves, from the Department of Labor's own tables as they stood on July 1, 2026: the federal minimum and who it covers, the state rates in the states tied to the league's teams and events, how each state ties its law to the federal one, how the rates have moved since 2015, how a salary is measured against an hourly floor, and what a floor tied to state law means for a league. Whether a player is an employee at all, the question that decides whether these rules apply, is covered in the magazine's guide on employees and contractors. This is general information, not legal advice: which law applies to a given player, and how, depends on the facts of the case.

Department of Labor, consolidated minimum wage table and state minimum wage page (both July 1, 2026); California Labor Commissioner (December 2025).

Two layers: the federal floor and the state rate

Minimum wage law in the United States works in layers. The federal layer is the Fair Labor Standards Act, known as the FLSA, which the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division enforces. The second layer is state law, and some cities and counties add a third.

The Department of Labor states the rule that joins the layers in its consolidated minimum wage table, revised on July 1, 2026: employers must pay the highest minimum wage that applies to them, whether it is federal, state or local. Where the federal minimum wage is greater than the state minimum wage, the table adds, the federal minimum wage must be paid.

The same table sorts the fifty states into three groups as of July 1, 2026. Thirty states have a minimum wage above the federal rate, along with the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Thirteen states, among them Texas and Pennsylvania, have a rate equal to the federal one. Seven states, among them Georgia, have no minimum wage law of their own or one below the federal rate.

The higher-of rule has a practical consequence for a team. The federal rate is the floor for the country, but in most of the states listed above it, it is not the figure that decides what a team owes. The state rate is.

The federal minimum: US$7.25

The federal rate is US$7.25 per hour, the figure against which the consolidated table measures every state on July 1, 2026. The department's history table of state minimum wages, revised in January 2025, shows the federal column at the same US$7.25 in every year from 2015 to 2024, and the July 2026 tables still use it.

The federal rule does not reach every job. The FLSA has its own coverage rules, and it has exemptions; whether a given job falls inside it depends on the employer and on the work. The state entries on the department's page show how much turns on that line: several state laws, Texas and Georgia among them, exclude from their own coverage any employment that is subject to the FLSA. The rates in this guide are the rates owed to covered workers who are not exempt. A worker paid as an independent contractor is outside these rules altogether, because the FLSA's minimum wage protects employees.

The department's overtime fact sheet, Fact Sheet 23, states the link between the two federal rules in one line: the regular rate of pay cannot be less than the minimum wage. The minimum is the floor under every hour, and overtime is computed on top of it.

State rates in force on July 1, 2026

The Department of Labor's page of state minimum wage laws, updated on July 1, 2026, lists each state's basic hourly rate. The chart below shows the rate in three states where Call of Duty League teams carry their names or host events, in California, and the federal floor. OpTic Texas hosted the league's first Major of 2026 in Dallas; FaZe Vegas hosted the championship in Las Vegas, Nevada; the Boston Breach carry the name of Boston, Massachusetts. California is the home state of Activision Blizzard, which the Justice Department's 2023 complaint describes as headquartered in Santa Monica.

The gap between the highest and lowest bar is more than double. A player paid at the floor in California earns US$16.90 for each hour worked; the same hour in Texas is owed at US$7.25.

Other states show how wide the spread is. The same page lists US$17.13 in Washington, US$14.00 in Florida and US$15.00 in Illinois, where the state rate applies to employers of four or more employees. New York has two rates: US$17.00 in New York City and the counties of Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester, and US$16.00 in the rest of the state. Pennsylvania sits at the federal US$7.25.

Some rates carry conditions for small businesses: Ohio lists US$11.00 for employers with annual gross receipts of US$405,000 or more, and US$7.25 for smaller ones, and Michigan's rate of US$13.73 applies to employers of two or more employees. New York adds a rule of its own: an extra hour at the minimum wage when the spread of an employee's hours in a day exceeds ten, or when the employee works a split shift.

How each state ties its law to the federal one

The basic rate is only half of what the department's page records. Each entry also says how the state law relates to the FLSA, and those links differ. The table below sets them out for the five states of the chart, with the hours after which each requires premium pay, the higher rate owed for overtime.

Texas and Georgia show two ways a state can stand behind the federal rate. The department records that Texas adopts the federal rate by reference, and that its law excludes from coverage any work that is subject to the FLSA. Georgia keeps a rate of its own, US$5.15 per hour for employers of six or more, but excludes from coverage FLSA-covered work whenever the federal rate is higher. For an employer covered by the FLSA in Georgia, the department's entry gives the figure owed as the federal US$7.25.

Massachusetts works the other way. Its law, as the department records it, sets a floor relative to the federal rate: the state minimum can never be less than 50 cents above the federal minimum in force. Delaware has a mirror rule, recorded on the same page: it adopts the federal rate by reference if that rate is ever higher than its own US$15.00.

California: an annual formula and local rates

California's rate is set by a formula, not by a new law each year. The state Labor Commissioner's page of questions on the minimum wage, revised in December 2025, gives the rate from January 1, 2026 as US$16.90 per hour for all employers. Size no longer changes the figure: the page lists the same rate for employers with 25 or fewer employees and for those with 26 or more, a distinction that ended in 2023.

The page explains the mechanism. Since the state rate reached US$15, it has been adjusted each year for inflation, using the national consumer price index for urban wage earners. The increase in any one year is capped at 3.5 percent.

The Labor Commissioner adds a point that matters in a state with many city rates: where a local minimum wage is higher than the state or federal rate, employees must be paid the local rate. A team that employs players in a California city with its own ordinance is measured against that city's figure, not only the state's.

California's overtime rules also go further than those of the other states in the table. The Department of Labor's entry records time and a half after eight hours in a workday, after 40 hours in a workweek and for the first eight hours on a seventh consecutive day of work. It records double the regular rate after twelve hours in a day and after eight hours on that seventh day. Unless an entry says otherwise, the premium rate on the page is one and a half times the employee's regular rate. On a long practice day, the daily lines are reached before the weekly one.

Nevada, Texas, Massachusetts and Georgia

Nevada's rate was simplified recently. The Department of Labor's history table shows the old split: a range of US$7.25 to US$8.25 through 2019, two rates, US$9.50 and US$10.50, in 2022, and US$10.25 and US$11.25 in 2023, then a single rate of US$12.00 in 2024. The July 2026 page lists the same US$12.00.

Nevada's overtime rule depends on pay. The department records that employees earning less than one and a half times the state minimum wage are owed premium pay for hours over eight in a day or 40 in a week. Employees earning at least one and a half times the minimum, which at the current rate is US$18.00 an hour, are owed premium pay only for hours over 40 in a week.

Texas has had the same figure for every year of the history table, US$7.25, because its law follows the federal rate. Its minimum changes only when the federal rate does.

Massachusetts reached US$15.00 in 2023, according to the history table, after rising from US$9.00 in 2015. Its premium pay rule, as the department lists it, is the weekly 40-hour line.

Georgia's US$5.15 has not moved in the history table since 2015, and the department notes that it applies to employers of six or more. Atlanta remains a city of the scene: FaZe Vegas played as Atlanta FaZe until the end of 2025, and the league's third Major of 2026 was held at DreamHack Atlanta. For FLSA-covered work there, the federal rate is the one that counts.

How the rates have moved since 2015

The federal rate has stood still while many state rates rose. The Department of Labor's history table, revised in January 2025, records each state's basic rate in selected years. The chart below follows California against the federal minimum from 2015 to 2024, the last year the table covers.

California's rate rose by US$7.00 over those ten years, from US$9.00 to US$16.00, and reached US$16.90 in 2026. The same table shows New York moving from US$8.75 in 2015 to US$15.00 in 2024 and Florida from US$8.05 to US$12.00. Texas, tied to the federal figure, stayed at US$7.25 throughout.

Further changes were already on the calendar in July 2026. The Department of Labor's state page records that Michigan's rate of US$13.73 is scheduled to rise to US$15.00 on January 1, 2027, and that Ohio, Minnesota, Virginia and Washington, like California, adjust their rates each year by a set formula. The same page lists US$11.41 in Minnesota, with premium pay after 48 hours a week, and US$12.77 in Virginia.

From an hourly rate to a player's salary

A salary does not escape an hourly floor: it is measured against it. The Department of Labor's Fact Sheet 23, revised in October 2019, explains the method under the FLSA. Pay may be set by the piece, by salary, by commission or on another basis, and the average hourly rate is found by dividing the total pay for the work by the total number of hours actually worked.

The unit is the workweek. The fact sheet defines it as a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours, seven consecutive periods of 24 hours, and says that averaging hours over two or more weeks is not permitted. A heavy week before a tournament cannot be offset by a light week after it.

The fact sheet's own example uses a weekly salary of US$405 for a 45-hour week: the regular rate is US$405 divided by 45, or US$9.00 an hour. It adds that a fixed salary for a regular workweek longer than 40 hours does not by itself meet the FLSA's obligations, because overtime is owed on top for covered nonexempt employees.

The same arithmetic can be applied to the state rates. The table below is a worked example, with assumptions stated: a player who works 40 hours in every one of the 52 weeks of a year, 2,080 hours in all, paid at exactly the basic state rate. It shows the annual pay that rate produces. It ignores overtime, local rates and any exemption, and it is not a figure any team has published.

On these assumptions, the former annual minimum was worth about US$26.44 an hour, above every basic state rate on the Department of Labor's page. The hours are the variable that changes the result: the same annual salary spread over more hours a week gives a lower hourly rate, and the comparison is made week by week.

What counts as working time for a player

The hours in that division are hours worked, and the FLSA has rules on what they include. The Department of Labor's Fact Sheet 22, revised in July 2008, sets them out as general information. Its examples come from other jobs, so how each rule meets a team's schedule depends on the facts.

Work an employer did not ask for but allowed is still work time that must be paid, the fact sheet says. An employee required to stay on call on the employer's premises is working; one who is on call at home, or who can leave word where to be reached, is in most cases not. Whether waiting counts depends on the facts: an employee engaged to wait is working, while one waiting to be engaged is not.

Breaks are split by length. Short rest periods, usually 20 minutes or less, are customarily paid as work time. Bona fide meal periods, typically 30 minutes or more, generally do not, provided the employee is completely relieved from duty.

Training and meetings count unless four conditions are all met: the session is outside normal hours, it is voluntary, it is not related to the job, and no other work is done at the same time. Travel follows its own rules. Ordinary travel from home to work before the workday and back at its end is not work time, but travel away from home is clearly work time when it cuts across the employee's workday, the fact sheet says.

A league floor tied to state law

The Call of Duty League is a franchise league: twelve teams hold permanent places, each carrying the name of a city. Esports Insider wrote on June 5, 2026 that the league had removed its minimum requirement of a US$55,000 annual salary in favor of the wage minimums set by each state. Sheep Esports had written in November 2025 that a player's minimum salary follows the legal minimum of the state concerned. Neither outlet gave the date of the change.

Read against the Department of Labor's tables, a floor of that kind does not produce one figure. It produces as many as there are states where the league's US teams employ players, and those figures move on different terms: each year in California under its formula, and in Texas only when the federal rate changes. On the worked example above, the gap between the Texas and California floors is US$20,072 a year for the same 2,080 hours.

The league's pay rules also sit under a federal court judgment. In 2023, in a case brought by the Department of Justice, the court entered a final judgment that bars Activision from imposing any rule that caps what players in its leagues are paid, directly or indirectly. The judgment sets no minimum salary: it removes a ceiling and puts no floor in its place. Counted from its entry on July 11, 2023, its five-year term runs into July 2028. Whatever floor applies to a player in the league therefore comes from the team's contract and from the law, not from a league figure.

Other leagues tie their floors to the law in other ways. Riot Games' League of Legends Esports Global Policies, in their 2026 edition, require teams in Article 104 to provide at least the health care and benefits that applicable law requires. The rule sets no figure of its own; the law of the place supplies it.

Where the floor does not reach

A floor tied to state law has edges, and the sources mark several of them.

The first is the border. The Call of Duty League's twelve places include teams in Canada: OverActive Media operates the Toronto franchise, and the Vancouver Surge is owned by Canucks Sports and Entertainment. The US federal and state rates in this guide are the rates of US law, and the Department of Labor's tables cover US states and territories only.

The second is the status of the player. The FLSA's minimum wage protects employees. A player engaged as an independent contractor is outside it, and the line between the two is drawn by the tests explained in the magazine's guide on that question.

The third is the kind of money. Under the 2023 judgment, compensation means wages, bonuses, other work-related payments and benefits, and it leaves out prize pools.

The fourth is the place of work. The Department of Labor's tables give state rates, and the California Labor Commissioner points to local rates that can be higher than the state's. Which state's or city's rate applies to a player who lives in one place, practices in another and travels to events in a third depends on the facts of the case and on each law's own terms.

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