Minnesota’s minimum wage floor for nursing home workers is again facing delay, with the Trump administration resetting the timeline for federal review of the funding needed to implement the law, Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board executive director Leah Solo told board members Thursday.
Solo said U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reset to “day one” its 90-day clock to review the wage floor—an action she described as effectively stalling the wage requirements that were supposed to begin Jan. 1. She told the board that the wage law, while still pending, would require nursing facility employees to earn at least $19 an hour this year and $20.50 in 2027, with nursing-license holders set to net substantially more under the law.
“I hate to bring bad news,” Solo said, as the board tried to understand what the federal reset means for the wage floor’s path forward.
The wage floor depends on federal approval because it ties to Medicaid funding, Solo said. She described the arrangement as requiring Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to provide $18 million to Minnesota’s Medicaid program to help nursing homes pay for the salary increases, alongside an additional $18 million from the state.
Under federal Medicaid law, CMS officials have 90 days at most to examine the funding request. But Solo said CMS can wind back the clock on the review if the agency asks the state for more information; she said CMS made such a request on Wednesday, which she described as day 89 in that review window, thus restarting the process.
Solo also described a breakdown in the flow of information between the federal agency and the board. She said CMS’s email on Wednesday was not sent directly to her or the workforce board, but instead to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, which in turn emailed Solo late Wednesday night. As of Thursday afternoon, the department told Solo it was working on a response about what information the CMS letter contained, while CMS did not respond to messages.
The wage floor already had been delayed previously, Solo said, because the Department of Human Services was months late in filing its request to CMS. Solo said Human Services officials apologized for the tardiness and sent the necessary paperwork in January, which she said triggered the initial 90-day review.
The board’s meeting also unfolded amid legal pressure from the industry the wage floor would regulate. Solo said nursing homes have filed a lawsuit last month arguing that the workforce board “inflicts irreparable harm on nursing home providers and business partners across Minnesota,” and she said the board spent the first 45 minutes of the meeting in a closed session to discuss the case. Solo declined to comment on the lawsuit.
A federal court hearing is scheduled next month for the nursing industry’s request for an injunction against the workforce board. The wage floor is part of what Solo described as a broader tradition of setting minimum wages for specific industries—an approach she said traces back to the New Deal and that labor unions have revived in some blue states over the past decade.