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To afford a two-bedroom apartment, a minimum-wage worker would need to work around 122 hours a week.
- Many minimum-wage workers can't afford a modest two-bedroom apartment, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition's $4.
- The national housing wage for a modest two-bedroom rental apartment is $22.10, while the federal $4 is $7.25.
- A low-income worker earning the federal minimum wage would need three jobs to afford a two-bedroom apartment - or 1.5 jobs and a roommate.
A minimum-wage worker $4 in most of the US, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition's $4.
But that's nothing compared to how many jobs they'd have to work to afford a two-bedroom rental apartment in most of the US - three.
However, that's only if they're living in a two-bedroom alone or are the only working spouse bringing home a check. It's likely they have a partner or roommate living there as well, in which case they would split the rent. If both residents are minimum-wage workers, they would need to work 1.5 jobs each to afford rent.
The report looked at the Housing Wage, an estimate of the hourly wage a full-time worker - working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year - needs to earn to afford a rental home at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's fair-market rent. That's defined as spending no more than 30% of their income on housing costs - experts' rule of thumb when budgeting for housing.
NLIHC found that the national housing wage for a two-bedroom rental apartment is $22.10. That's slightly more than three times the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
The map below shows the hourly wage needed to afford a fair-market rent, two-bedroom apartment by state, assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks a year, as calculated by the NLHIC. This is also known as the "housing wage."
Andy Kiersz
Every state's housing wage, or the hourly pay needed to afford a two-bedroom rental.
If a worker held three full-time minimum wage jobs, they'd be earning $21.75, just under the $22.10 needed to afford rent and have 70% of income left over for other expenses. They would have to work around 122 hours a week, 52 weeks a year just to cover rent, according to the report. To put that in perspective, there are 168 hours in the week - that leaves them with only 46 hours, less than two days, of non-work time.
Read more: $4
There is no state in which a minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom rental home by working a standard 40-hour work week, according to the report.
This is true even in $4, which has the lowest housing wage of $13.84. The state has a minimum wage of $8.50, which means workers would need to work a full-time job and a part-time job, or 65 hours a week, to afford a two-bedroom apartment.
Fourteen states have a housing wage exceeding the national housing wage of $22 - Washington, Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, plus Washington DC.
Of all these states, $4 is the most expensive with a $36.13 housing wage. Here, workers earn a minimum wage of $10.10. With three jobs, that's $30.30 - more than the national housing wage, but still not enough to afford a two-bedroom apartment in the state. A worker in Hawaii would need to work nearly four full-time jobs, or 143 hours a week, to afford a two-bedroom rental.