The federal contractor minimum wage rose for eight years. Then it was rescinded.

The federal government does not employ most of the people who clean its buildings, staff its call centers, or guard its warehouses.▸ It contracts for that labor, and for a decade the floor under that labor's pay has been set not by Congress but by executive order — two of them, in sequence, now pointed in opposite directions.

Executive Order 13658, signed by President Obama in 2014, set a $10.10-an-hour floor for federal contract workers starting in 2015, rising with inflation to $11.25 by January 2022.▸ Executive Order 14026, signed by President Biden in April 2021, superseded it for contracts signed or renewed from January 30, 2022 onward, opening at $15.00 and climbing each year the Wage and Hour Division published a new rate — reaching $17.75 an hour for 2025. On March 14, 2025, Executive Order 14236 revoked it. The Wage and Hour Division's own notice on the rule now says the agency is "no longer enforcing" EO 14026 or its implementing regulation and is moving to rescind it formally.

The rate itself traces a clean line: up every year from 2015 through 2025, under two different orders, then a cliff.▸ What's in force today isn't a new, lower number set by anyone — it's the old EO 13658 rate, reinstated by default because the order that superseded it is gone.

$13.65 an hour is the number WHD still administers, but its reach is narrow by design. The Wage and Hour Division's 2026 rate notice says it applies only to contracts "entered into between January 1, 2015, and January 29, 2022, that were not renewed or extended...on or after January 30, 2022" — a cohort that, four years on, is not renewing.▸ Federal contracts turn over; the ones still eligible for the old rate are the ones nobody has touched since early 2022. Employment lawyers tracking the rescission (e.g., Holland & Knight) note that most current federal contracts began after that date, which means most contract workers are covered by neither order today — only by whatever statutory wage determination or general labor-law floor applies to their specific contract.

Two organizations sized EO 14026's effect using different methods, before either could have known it would later be undone.▸ The Department of Labor published its estimate inside the rule itself; the Economic Policy Institute published its own the day the order was signed.

DOL's own regulatory impact analysis put the number of workers who'd see a raise at 327,000, worth $1.7 billion a year in wages.▸ The Economic Policy Institute, using a separate simulation built on federal contract-spending data, estimated up to 390,000 workers — with an "extreme lower bound" of 226,000 once construction workers already covered by Davis-Bacon rates are excluded — at an average of $3,100 more per year for each affected year-round worker. The two estimates disagree on both worker count and total dollars because they use different models, not because either contradicts the other; DOL cites the EPI figure in its own rule as a point of comparison. Both describe the same policy: a wage floor that, as of March 2025, no longer applies to the contracts it was built for.

The legal footing under EO 14026 was never settled.▸ In Nebraska v. Su, decided November 5, 2024, a divided Ninth Circuit panel held that the order exceeded the president's procurement authority and sent the case back for an injunction — a ruling that split from the Fifth Circuit, which had upheld the mandate months earlier. The Supreme Court declined to resolve the split in January 2025. Then the question changed: rather than litigate whether Biden could set the wage, Trump's March 2025 order simply withdrew it, and DOL stopped enforcing it while it works through the rulemaking needed to strike the regulation from the books. Litigants in the Ninth Circuit case have told the court that, technically, the rule still carries the force of law until that rulemaking is final — a dispute over paperwork now, not over the number itself.

The wage-rate figures come from Wage and Hour Division Federal Register notices and the FAR, all primary regulatory sources for what rate applied in a given year. The worker-count and total-dollar estimates come from two separate 2021 analyses (DOL's own rule and EPI's independent estimate) of EO 14026's projected impact — neither is a measured count of workers who actually received the rate at any point, and both predate the 2025 rescission.