Employer guideRead at source, 4 September 2026

The H-2A Program: Wage Rates by State, Housing, Transport and the Three-Quarters Guarantee (2026)

H-2A has no annual cap, which is the single largest difference between it and every other temporary work visa, and in FY2025 it certified 398,258 positions. What it has instead of a cap is a set of obligations that make the hourly rate the smallest part of the cost: free housing, inbound and outbound transport with subsistence, daily transport to the field, and a guarantee of work for three-quarters of the contract hours whether or not there is work to do. And the wage itself is currently unsettled in a way no summary reflects. On 26 August 2026 a federal court held the methodology behind the current Adverse Effect Wage Rates unlawful but did not vacate it, so the published rates stand until the Department writes a new methodology. Two days before this page was built, the Department gave public notice that employers may be required to make wage adjustment payments for a backpay period beginning 2 September 2026. Every figure below was read at the Federal Register, the eCFR or the Office of Foreign Labor Certification on 4 September 2026.

The wage: two skill levels, a housing deduction, and a court order

The Adverse Effect Wage Rate is the floor an H-2A employer must pay, and it is the highest of the AEWR, the prevailing wage, the agreed collective rate, or the federal or state minimum. Until 2025 it came from the USDA Farm Labor Survey. USDA discontinued that survey effective 31 August 2025, and the Department moved the AEWR onto the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational survey by interim final rule at 90 FR 47914, effective 2 October 2025. The current rates, at 91 FR 48946, took effect 3 August 2026, or 17 August 2026 for employers covered by the Georgia injunction described below.

That rule changed the shape of the number, not just its source. There are now two skill levels per state: Level I is the mean of the bottom third of the wage distribution, Level II the mean of the whole distribution. On top of that sits a downward housing compensation adjustment that applies only to the H-2A worker, not to a US worker doing the same job in corresponding employment. In Florida the entry rate is $13.17, and the same job filled by an H-2A worker given employer housing pays $10.87. The adjustment is largest in Hawaii at $3.20 an hour and smallest in Mississippi and West Virginia at $1.11.

Adverse Effect Wage Rates by state, field and livestock work

These are the rates for the five occupational codes the rule groups as field and livestock workers combined, which covers 82 percent of all H-2A positions certified. Every other occupation, including farm supervisors, construction labourers and tractor-trailer drivers, has its own two-level rate in the same workbook, and those are materially higher: in Florida a first-line agricultural supervisor is $18.92 at Level I against $13.17 for a field worker. The four columns below are the rate for a US worker in corresponding employment, and the reduced rate payable to an H-2A worker who is given free housing.

The spread is the thing to notice. Entry-level field work runs from $9.95 in Mississippi to $17.92 in the District of Columbia, and at the experienced level from $15.04 to $24.49. That is not a cost-of-living gradient; it is a wage-survey gradient, and it means the same crew moving between two states on consecutive contracts is owed materially different money for the same work. There are no multi-state groupings any more. The old Delta Region grouping ended with the Farm Labor Survey it depended on.

Two cautions before anybody budgets from this table. The first is the court order: these rates stand, but the methodology behind them has been held unlawful and the Department has been told to replace it, so the number you plan a season around may be superseded and may carry a retrospective adjustment. The second is that the 2023 methodology is gone. It was vacated on 25 August 2025 in Teche Vermilion Sugar Cane Growers Association v. Su, so any summary still describing separate occupational AEWRs created by that rule is describing a rule that no longer exists. Separate occupational rates do exist today, but they come from the 2025 interim rule and are built differently.

What the programme actually obliges an employer to do

The hourly rate is where the attention goes and it is not where the money is. An H-2A employer takes on a set of obligations that run for the whole contract whether or not the crop cooperates, and several of them attach to US workers in corresponding employment as well.

The three-quarters guarantee is the one that surprises people, and it is worth reading precisely because it is an hours guarantee, not a days guarantee. The regulation carries its own worked example: a ten-week contract at six days a week and eight hours a day is 480 hours, so the guarantee is 360 hours. If a federal holiday falls inside the period, its eight hours come out before the multiplication, giving 354. Offering work on three-quarters of the days does not satisfy it if those days were short. Hours offered and refused do count. And the housing and meal obligations run for every day of the contract regardless of the guarantee, until the worker departs, abandons the job or is terminated for cause.

The 50 percent rule is the one that most directly touches recruitment. From the moment the foreign workers depart for the worksite until half the contract has elapsed, any qualified US worker who applies must be given the job. That is a live obligation running into the season, not a box ticked before it, and the employer is not relieved of its return-transport liability to an H-2A worker displaced by it. The exception is narrow: fewer than 500 man-days of agricultural labour in every calendar quarter of the preceding year, no association membership, and no joint petitioning.

The 2024 rule is printed in the CFR and unenforceable in twenty-one states

This is the part that makes reading the regulations misleading on their own. The 2024 Farmworker Protection Rule, at 89 FR 33898 and effective 28 June 2024, is what the current CFR prints. It is also enjoined across most of the country where the programme is actually used.

In Kansas v. Department of Labor, the Southern District of Georgia enjoined enforcement on 26 August 2024 in seventeen states: Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, on the ground that the worker voice provisions conflict with the National Labor Relations Act. In Barton v. Department of Labor, the Eastern District of Kentucky enjoined specified provisions on 25 November 2024 in four more: Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia. On the same day, in International Fresh Produce Association v. Department of Labor, the Southern District of Mississippi stayed 20 CFR 655.135(h)(2) and (m) nationwide. A fourth court, the Eastern District of North Carolina, upheld the rule in May 2025.

Two of the five largest H-2A states, Florida and Georgia, are inside the Georgia injunction, and four of the ten largest. A rescission was proposed at 90 FR 28919 on 2 July 2025 and has not been finalised, so on the build date the position is genuinely a patchwork: the CFR text, minus two paragraphs stayed everywhere, minus a longer list of provisions unenforceable in twenty-one states and against certain named grower associations, with a rescission pending. Anyone quoting the regulation without saying where it applies is quoting something that may not govern their farm.

How big the programme is, and where it is

In FY2025 the Office of Foreign Labor Certification certified 398,258 positions across 23,424 applications, up 3.5 percent on FY2024, when it certified 384,900. Through the third quarter of FY2026 it had certified 349,867, with applications received down 3.3 percent year on year, the first softening in a long time. The full-year figure is not published yet and we will not estimate it.

The five largest states in FY2025 were Florida at 56,934 positions, Georgia at 42,723, California at 35,138, Washington at 34,560 and North Carolina at 26,123, which is 49 percent of the programme in five states. Through FY2026 Q3 Georgia has moved ahead of Florida. One thing you will see quoted that we cannot verify: there is no published crop breakdown. The disclosure data classifies jobs by occupational code, not by crop, so any list of top H-2A crops has been inferred from job titles rather than published, and this page does not carry one.

Check a state rate

Work out the three-quarters guarantee

Where this sits next to the domestic side

Two things follow for an employer weighing the programme. The guarantee and the housing turn a seasonal crew into a fixed cost that starts before the first day of need and does not stop if the weather does, which is a different risk profile from advertising for local labour. And the 50 percent rule means the domestic recruitment does not end when the visas are approved: a qualified applicant halfway through the season has to be hired. The wider picture on domestic supply is on the farm labor shortage, and the non-agricultural sibling programme, with its 66,000 cap and its two half-year allocations, is on H-2B for employers. Anyone under 18 on the crew is governed separately, by child labor laws by state.

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