Among those paid by the hour, 434,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.3 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 1.7 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 2.1 percent of all hourly paid workers.The percentage of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less edged down from 2.3 percent in 2017 to 2.1 percent in 2018. This remains well below the percentage of 13.4 recorded in 1979, when data were first collected on a regular basis.