What It Actually Costs to Show Up for Work

For a full-time worker at the 10th percentile of pay, the bare minimum it costs to show up for work takes 68 cents of every dollar earned, before taxes. For the median full-time worker, it takes 35 cents.

That bare minimum is a studio apartment, groceries cooked at home, one doctor visit and one maintenance medication a year, public transportation to get to work, a basic phone that can get on the internet, and enough power, heat, and water to keep the lights on, the home warm, and the water running. At current public prices it comes to about $22,700 a year. That is about $1,900 a month, or $10.91 an hour on a standard full-time year of 2,080 hours.

That total has a name: the Essential Economic Basket Value, or EEBV. It is one of the two inputs to the National Productivity Unit, or NPU, the proposal at the center of my book. It covers one adult and nothing else. This piece shows where the number sits on the pay ladder, what it means for people who are doing fine, and how it was built.

The Bare Minimum, Line by Line

Here is how the $22,700 breaks down.

Housing is the largest line at $14,000, about 62% of the total. Roughly three of every five dollars in the basket go to a roof. With utilities added, the roof takes $16,000, or 70%. The sections near the end of this piece show where each number comes from.

Where $10.91 an Hour Sits on the Pay Ladder

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes weekly pay for full-time wage and salary workers in tenths and quarters. Dividing weekly pay by 40 hours gives an hourly figure, and multiplying by 52 weeks gives a year, so the basket can be lined up against every rung.

Read the ladder from the top. One in ten full-time workers earns $73.10 an hour or more, and for them the bare minimum is about 15% of pay. The median full-time worker earns $31.28 an hour, 2.9 times the basket. At the bottom, one in ten earns $16.05 an hour or less, only $5.14 above the basket. Fewer than one in ten earns less than the basket itself, which is $437 a week. The published deciles do not say how many of those workers there are or how far below the basket they fall.

Subtract the basket and see what is left for everything else. The median full-time worker has about $42,400 a year, or $3,530 a month. A worker at the 10th percentile has about $10,700 a year, or about $890 a month, for income taxes, clothing, childcare, a car, debt, savings, and any bad month. These figures are before taxes, so the real amounts are smaller. The table covers full-time workers only. Part-time workers are not in it.

For scale, a full-time year at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour pays $15,080 before taxes. That is $3.66 an hour, or about $7,600 a year, below the basket. Thirty states and the District of Columbia set higher minimums, so many workers earn more than that. Whatever a worker earns, a gap between pay and the basket has to be covered somehow. Shared housing, help from family, credit, public programs, and going without are all ways households do it, and this piece does not measure how much comes from each.

When the Line Goes Down

Start with two numbers. In Vanguard’s 401(k) plan data, 6% of participants took a hardship withdrawal in 2025. That is a record, the sixth straight yearly increase, and about three times the pre-pandemic rate. The two leading reasons were foreclosure or eviction at 36% and medical costs at 31%. These are people with jobs and retirement accounts, pulling money out of their own future to cover a home and a doctor. And in the Census Bureau’s 2024 data, 46.1 million renters, or 51.8% of the total, spent 30% or more of their income on rent.

None of this means your own budget is in trouble. It means the people you sell to, buy from, rent to, hire, and work beside are running on the same six lines.

Now think about a production line. When a line goes down, the stoppage does not stay at one station. Every station on the line stops. So do the people who feed it parts and the people who ship what it makes. Then comes the part everyone in a plant knows by heart. Meetings get called. Someone asks what happened. Someone asks whose fault it was. Someone builds a workaround, and someone else starts planning for the next time. Hours go into managing the stoppage while the missing part is still missing, and nobody can say when it will arrive.

An economy has the same dependence. When enough households are short on the basics, spending pulls back, people leave jobs or move away, and savings get spent down. Everyone who sells to those households, rents to them, or works beside them feels it, and the same meetings start. People ask what happened, argue over whose fault it is, and plan around a fix that has no date. The effects reach households that were never short of anything.

A steadier floor works the other way. More people can hold a job, stay in a home, and keep buying, and everyone who sells to them sells into steadier demand. That is the case for a floor even if you have never worried about rent.

A published number could help in three more ways. First, it would give employers and lenders one shared reference, updated once a year, in place of guesses. Second, the output half of the NPU would rise when the economy produces more per person, so gains in national output would show up in the reference number too. Third, the basket sets a reference for the floor only. Skill, experience, and results would still set pay above it.

A floor has to be paid for somehow, and how is a separate question. The book lays out one proposal for it. This piece stays on the measuring, because the floor has to be measured correctly before anyone can sensibly argue about paying for it.

How Pay, Output, and Costs Fit Together

Three numbers matter here: what workers are paid, what the economy produces per person, and what it costs to take part. Each one is measured separately, on its own schedule. No published metric checks whether the three still move together.

For a long stretch they moved together without any help. From 1948 to 1979, productivity grew 2.5% a year and worker compensation grew 2.1% a year. From 1979 to 2025, productivity grew 1.4% a year and compensation grew 0.6% a year. Added up, productivity is up 90.2% since 1979, and the typical worker’s pay is up 33% after inflation.

Anyone who wants the longer history of how the prices behind these six categories have moved since 1979 can find it in the chart “The Cost of Staying In the Game” on this site, which runs through 2024.

The NPU is my proposal for tying those numbers to one reference. It takes half of its value from GDP per person, which is what the economy produces for each person, and half from the EEBV, which is what it costs to take part.

Each half covers a gap in the other. If the formula used only output, it would say nothing about what a person needs to live on. If it used only costs, it would say nothing about what the economy can afford as it grows.

The mechanics, including how the number would be phased in before it reached a paycheck, are laid out in the book and its Appendix, which present them as a proposal open to debate.

Averages can hide the bottom of the scale, which is where a floor number matters. The Census Bureau’s report released September 15, 2026 shows how. Real median household income reached $87,460, up 2.6% and the highest on record going back to 1967. In the same report, the 10th percentile showed no statistically significant change, while the 90th percentile rose 1.7%.

Both facts are true at once. The median describes the middle, and it says little about what happened to households at the bottom. A yearly EEBV adds a number that follows what the bottom costs, and set beside what the economy produces, it shows whether the two are still moving together.

The Same Kind of List Every Plant Keeps

If you have worked in manufacturing, you have used this kind of document. It is called a bill of materials. A bill of materials lists every part, material, and component needed to build one unit of a product, along with the quantity of each and its cost. Add the line costs together and you have the cost of one unit.

The EEBV works the same way, with one working adult as the unit. It has six lines, one quantity for each, and a cost for each line. The total is the cost of keeping one adult in the economy for a year.

A bill of materials only helps when it is complete and accurate, because planning gets built on it. Plants control changes to the list for that reason, and the basket needs the same control.

Where Each Number Comes From

Each line has a plain definition and a public benchmark. Here is where each number comes from.

Housing is $14,000. It covers rent on a one-person studio at about $1,167 a month. HUD sets Fair Market Rents near the 40th percentile of local rents, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition reports a 2026 national average of $1,518 a month for a one-bedroom at that level. A studio costs less, so about $1,333 a month is a fair national figure. Fair Market Rent is a gross figure that already includes the utilities a tenant pays, so the basket splits that $1,333 in two: $1,167 for rent here and $167 for utilities on their own line below. It leaves out home ownership and anything above a basic unit.

Food is $4,600. USDA prices its Thrifty Food Plan at $319.20 a month for a man aged 20 to 50 and $253.90 for a woman, in its July 2026 report, and those figures assume a four-person household. USDA says to add 20% for a one-person household, which gives about $383 and $305 a month. The basket uses the higher figure. Every meal is cooked at home, and restaurant meals are outside the plan.

Healthcare is $500. It covers one doctor visit a year and one maintenance medication renewed at that visit. A primary care visit paid out of pocket typically costs $100 to $300, with surveys putting the average near $160. Renewing a maintenance medication often comes with lab work, and common blood tests run $29 to $99 each, so the basket adds about $100 for one or two tests. A common generic such as atorvastatin costs under $3 a month at a low-cost mail-order pharmacy and about $23 a month at a chain pharmacy’s cash price. The basket uses the chain price, $23 a month, or about $276 a year. Together that is about $540, which the basket rounds to $500. The line has no insurance premium in it. A serious illness or injury can cost far more, and the basket does not try to price it.

The basket prices the cheapest case, a common generic such as a blood pressure pill. Other maintenance medications cost more, and the range is wide. A generic estradiol patch runs about $34 a month with a discount coupon and about $99 at the average retail price. Insulin costs $35 a month through manufacturer programs for uninsured patients who enroll. Brand-only drugs sit far above that. GoodRx puts the average cost of 30 tablets of Jardiance, a common diabetes and heart medication, at $564 without insurance. That is more than the basket allows for a month of food, which is $383. Even with a coupon it runs about $249, which is more than the basket allows for a month of utilities, which is $167.

Transportation is $1,200, or $100 a month for a transit pass. Monthly passes mostly fall between $50 and $150. A Boston MBTA subway pass was $90 in March 2026, and a San Francisco Muni monthly pass was $86 in August 2025. This is the line that depends most on where you live. Where no transit runs, a car is often the only way to work, and the basket leaves the car out.

Utilities are $2,000, enough to keep the lights on, heat in the home, and water running. The Energy Information Administration’s 2020 survey found that one-person households spent roughly $1,100 to $1,400 a year on home energy, depending on the region. Residential electricity prices have risen since then and are projected near 18 cents a kilowatt-hour in 2026. Water and sewer come on top of that. $2,000 falls within the range a one-person home pays. It is also the utilities share of the studio’s Fair Market Rent, described under Housing, so utilities are counted once.

Communication is $400. A basic prepaid phone plan with data costs $10 to $30 a month, and the basket uses $25, or $300 a year. A basic smartphone costs around $200 new, and replacing it every three years adds about $70 a year. That comes to about $370, which the basket rounds to $400.

Why the Basket Stops Where It Stops

Three rules decide whether something gets a line.

It can be priced from public data. If a line cannot be priced from a source anyone can look up, it does not go in. That keeps the math open to anyone who wants to check it, and it keeps the number from becoming a matter of opinion.

It is needed to take part in the economy. The test is the minimum cost of staying housed, fed, connected, and healthy enough to work. Comfort and choice come after that.

The list is fixed. In the proposal, the list is set in law, so no agency can add a line, drop one, or change how a line is built without following a set process. That way the number cannot be padded or trimmed to fit an argument.

Here is what those rules leave out: childcare, clothing, taxes, debt payments, student loan payments, retirement savings, entertainment, vacations, a car, health insurance premiums, and any buffer for a bad month.

Clothing is left out because there is no clear way to say what survival clothing is, and it can come from hand-me-downs or from free clothing programs run by churches and other community groups. Childcare is left out because not every adult has children to care for, and where they do, a family member may provide the care at no cost. Taxes are left out because they depend on the household. Credits such as the federal Earned Income Tax Credit reduce or erase income tax for many lower-wage workers, mostly those raising children. The 2025 credit for workers without children ends at $19,104 of income for a single filer. For a household that does pay for any of these, the cost sits on top of the basket. Keeping the list short also keeps the number easy to check.

People sometimes ask whether the EEBV is the poverty line under a new name. The two use different methods and answer different questions. The Census Bureau’s official poverty threshold for a family of two adults and two children was $32,649 in its report on 2025. The EEBV builds up one adult’s minimum costs from the bottom, line by line. Built for different jobs, the two numbers were never meant to match.

Where the Numbers Are Firm and Where They Are Open

The method is the part I hold fixed: six categories, a plain definition for each, a public benchmark for each line, and a yearly update using current data. The $22,700 is this year’s checked value, and the yearly update is how it would stay current. The starting values I used in the book added up to $36,000. For this piece I checked every line against current public prices, and the checked total came out lower, so this article uses the checked figures.

The dollar amounts are open. They are my best current estimate, and they are meant to be debated and refined. Two examples show why. The healthcare line depends on what one doctor visit and one maintenance medication cost, and those prices vary widely by provider and by drug, so it is the line most open to argument. And every amount is national, while costs differ from town to town, so no national number can follow every one of them.

If you disagree with a number, the design gives you something useful to do. Find the line, name the public source, and show a better price.

All the hourly figures here use the standard full-time year of 2,080 hours. In the book I use 1,500 hours a year in the examples, as a design choice that leaves room for family, school, and recovery from illness. Nothing in the basket depends on that choice, so this article uses the standard year.

Your Own Month

Now look at your own month. Set aside the six lines in the basket and look at what is left. The streaming subscriptions, the car, the dinners out, the gym, the vacation, the coffee on the way in. Imagine paying for none of it. How much of it could you do without? All of it? Which pieces would you fight to keep?

Then ask something most people never do. What does your whole month cost per hour of work? The essential cost calculator on this site will do the math. Enter your own monthly expenses and it shows what they cost per hour. The bare minimum costs $10.91 an hour. What does yours cost?