Just in time for its busiest season, Amazon has raised wages for its frontline workers, bringing their starting pay to $20 an hour. The boost amounts to a $1 increase in minimum hourly wages for the hundreds of thousands of workers who staff the company’s warehouses.
The new pay increase raises wages just as Amazon is gearing up for the holidays, when the tech giant sees a massive boost in orders. Amazon has historically staffed up in anticipation of this period, hiring an estimated 250,000 additional workers last year—accounting for about half of seasonal hires across the entire retail sector.
Amazon claims that its minimum pay has ticked up by about 17% in the last three years, and that average pay across its hourly workforce is actually higher at nearly $24 an hour. The company is also giving its workers access to a new banking benefit and grocery discount; when employee benefits are taken into account, average total compensation is more like $32 an hour, according to Amazon.
This puts Amazon pay above the minimum wage in many parts of the country, as legislation has raised hourly wages across countless states and localities. By the end of 2026, the minimum wage will have crossed $15 in 14 states and 65 cities and counties, according to the National Employment Law Project; across many of those states and localities, the hourly wage will cross $17. In Seattle, where Amazon itself is headquartered, the minimum wage now exceeds $21.
But Amazon’s wages are hardly out of the ordinary among other retailers.
While hourly pay at Walmart starts at $14, the company says average pay for frontline workers is over $18.50 an hour; those who work in fulfillment and distribution centers can earn anywhere from $17.85 to $40.40 an hour. At Target, hourly wages can be between $15 and $24 depending on location; average pay for frontline staff is $18.50. And as of last year, Costco has raised starting wages for entry level workers to $20 an hour, while average hourly pay has crossed $31.
Even as Amazon increases wages for its hourly workers, however, the company’s investments in automation appear to be simultaneously culling its warehouse staff.
As Fast Company has reported, Amazon has started trimming headcount across certain teams, outsourcing parts of its HR process to an AI chatbot; these changes have already reduced the number of HR workers who are on the floor in warehouses. In the last two years, Amazon has also slashed tens of thousands of jobs to eliminate management layers and increase efficiency, though the company has denied those layoffs are driven by AI.
Amazon also now has over a million robots operating across its warehouses, and a New York Times report last year suggested the company would be able to avoid hiring nearly 600,000 people in the coming years due to that automation—which means fewer workers may stand to benefit from the company’s pay bumps in the years to come.
