El Paso City Council sets goal to raise city workers’ minimum wage to $15 by 2026

EL PASO, Texas (KVIA)- El Paso City Council approved a resolution Tuesday that sets a goal to reach a minimum hourly wage of $15 for City of El Paso employees by the end of Fiscal Year 2026.

The current minimum hourly wage for City of El Paso employees is $12.11, which includes a $1 per hour increase that took effect this year.

Chris Canales, District 8 representative behind the agenda item, said he came up with the $15/hr number after looking at the MIT Living Wage Calculator, which suggests that a single adult in El Paso in 2023 would need to earn at least $14.61 per hour to cover basic expenses.

"The other thing the resolution did was to task the city with monitoring the progress of this and looking to make adjustments. I'm hopeful that we can get higher than that faster, but we're also limited in the amount of revenue that the city can bring in," said Canales.

"This year's increase of $1 cost us $9.8 million in our budget. And so if we're looking to do that every year for the next few years, we have to phase that in over a little bit longer amount of time to make sure that we have the funds enabled in order to do it," he said