Colorado voters approve Amendment 70, raising minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020

Story: 2016 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 2016

In November 2016 C.E., Colorado voters did something that would directly lift the paychecks of hundreds of thousands of workers: they passed Amendment 70, locking in a series of annual wage increases that would bring the state’s minimum wage to $12 per hour by 2020 C.E.

What the vote decided

• Colorado minimum wage: Amendment 70 raised the state’s hourly floor from $9.30 in 2016 C.E. by 90 cents per year, reaching $12.00 by 2020 C.E.
• Amendment 70: After the $12 threshold was reached, the amendment required ongoing cost-of-living adjustments, meaning the floor would continue rising with inflation rather than stagnating.
• Tipped workers: Employees who regularly receive tips also saw their mandatory base wages rise under the same schedule, with employers required to make up any shortfall if tips plus wages fell below the state minimum.

How the vote happened

Colorado’s minimum wage had sat at $9.30 per hour — one of the lower floors among western states. Advocates argued it had not kept pace with the state’s rising cost of living, particularly in cities like Denver and Boulder, where housing costs had climbed sharply through the early 2010s C.E.

Amendment 70 went to voters as a citizen initiative. It passed with roughly 55 percent of the vote, a margin that crossed partisan and geographic lines. Supporters argued that a predictable, phased schedule gave both workers and employers time to plan — a design intended to ease concerns from small business owners about absorbing sudden cost increases.

The gradual structure was deliberate. Rather than a single jump, the 90-cents-per-year pace gave payroll systems, business owners, and workers a clear, stable trajectory. By January 1, 2018 C.E. — the first increase after the vote — the minimum wage moved from $9.30 to $10.20 per hour.

Who it affected

Colorado’s low-wage workforce is disproportionately made up of women, workers of color, and workers without four-year college degrees. Research from the Economic Policy Institute and others has consistently found that minimum wage increases have an outsized positive effect on these groups, narrowing wage gaps that have persisted for decades.

Tipped workers — restaurant servers, hotel staff, and others — also stood to gain, though their floor remained lower than the standard minimum under Colorado’s tip credit system. The law still required employers to cover any gap when tips fell short.

Rural Colorado presented a more complicated picture. Some smaller employers and agricultural businesses expressed concern that wage floors set for a high-cost metro economy could strain operations in communities with lower prevailing wages and thinner margins. These tensions did not stop the amendment from passing, but they reflected a real divide in how the same policy lands differently across a geographically and economically varied state.

Lasting impact

Amendment 70 did more than raise wages in Colorado. It embedded wage growth into state law in a way that doesn’t require repeated legislative battles. The cost-of-living adjustment mechanism that kicks in after 2020 C.E. means the minimum wage continues to track inflation automatically — a structural shift that advocates had long argued was necessary to prevent future erosion of purchasing power.

The amendment also contributed to a broader national momentum. By 2016 C.E., more than two dozen states had minimum wages above the federal floor of $7.25 per hour, which had not been raised since 2009 C.E. Colorado’s voter-approved increase joined similar efforts in Arizona, Maine, and Washington that same election cycle, demonstrating that minimum wage increases could win at the ballot box even in politically divided states.

For workers at the bottom of the wage scale, the increases were tangible. A full-time worker earning Colorado’s 2016 C.E. minimum of $9.30 per hour earned roughly $19,300 per year before taxes — below the federal poverty line for a family of three. The path to $12 per hour added more than $5,500 annually to that baseline, a meaningful difference for households with little financial buffer.

Blindspots and limits

Amendment 70 set a statewide floor but did not address the significant variation in living costs across Colorado — a $12-per-hour wage goes much further in rural Alamosa than in central Denver, where cost-of-living estimates have placed a living wage considerably higher. The amendment also did not change rules around tipped workers, whose effective base wage remained substantially lower than the standard floor. Whether the pace of increases was fast enough to meaningfully close wage gaps — or slow enough to limit job losses — remains a subject of ongoing economic debate, and evidence from comparable states has produced mixed findings.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Employers Lawyers Blog

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