A $246 million 'win' that moves $2.46 billion out of farmworkers' paychecks

The H-2A visa is how American farms legally hire foreign labor when they say no domestic worker will take the job.▸ There's no cap on how many can be issued, and for two decades the number certified has only gone up. In October 2025, the Department of Labor rewrote the wage rule that governs every one of those hires — and published, in its own regulatory impact analysis, the dollar amount it expects to move from those workers' pay to their employers' ledgers.

For nearly forty years, H-2A employers paid one number per state: the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, meant to guarantee that importing foreign labor didn't drag down pay for domestic workers doing the same job.▸ The October 2025 interim final rule replaced that single rate with two skill tiers — entry-level and experienced — plus a separate deduction for employers who provide free housing. Ninety-two percent of H-2A jobs fall into the entry tier, per the Department's own rule text, so the entry-level rate is the one that governs almost the entire program.

That's a $3.97-an-hour cut to the wage floor — about 23% — applied to a workforce that, per the same rule, earned a national average AEWR that had already more than doubled over the prior twenty years, from $8.56 in 2005 to $17.74 in 2025.▸ In California, the state with the highest 2025 rate, the old AEWR was $19.97; the new entry-level rate for field and livestock work there is $16.45 — a nearly $3.52 cut before the separate housing deduction is even applied.

None of this happens in a shrinking labor market.▸ H-2A use has climbed almost every year since the mid-2000s, long before this rule existed, as farms leaned harder on the visa in place of an unauthorized workforce that became riskier to employ.

The program grew more than sevenfold between fiscal 2005 and fiscal 2024, per USDA's Economic Research Service, then kept climbing straight through the new wage rule: 398,258 positions certified in fiscal 2025, up from 317,619 in fiscal 2021, per the American Farm Bureau Federation's analysis of Department of Labor data.▸ The first half of fiscal 2026 — October 2025 through March 2026, the first six months the new, lower wage floor was in effect — had already certified 254,688 positions, putting the program on pace to blow past 500,000 for the first time.

The rule's regulatory impact analysis does something most wage rules don't: it puts a number on exactly who loses and who gains, and shows its work.▸ Lowering the AEWR, the Department wrote, would let farms hire roughly 119,000 more H-2A workers — projected employment rising from about 383,000 to 502,000 — because cheaper labor makes more hiring profitable. Valued at the efficiency gain from those new, previously-unprofitable hires, that's worth $246 million a year, the Department's own estimate.

But that same wage cut applies to every H-2A worker already being hired, not just the new ones — and for them it's not a gain, it's a straight pay cut.▸ Combining the wage-tier change with the new housing-cost deduction, the Department's Exhibit 10 projects the transfer from workers to employers growing every year: from $1.58 billion in 2025 to $3.47 billion by 2034, averaging $2.42 billion a year undiscounted — $2.46 billion a year once annualized at the standard 7% discount rate the Department uses for its headline figure, and $24.2 billion over the first ten years. Ten dollars move from farmworkers' pay for every one dollar of efficiency the rule claims to create.

All wage, transfer, and employment-projection figures are the Department of Labor's own modeled national averages from the rule's regulatory impact analysis, not independently verified market wage data; actual AEWRs vary by state and by skill level, as shown in the rule's full 50-state table.