California’s School Meals for All program and other school nutrition initiatives help millions of students experiencing food insecurity access free, healthy food. But to offer universal freshly prepared meals, California needs a skilled and stable food workforce.
California public school districts are experiencing high turnover and vacancy rates in their food service workforce (PDF) that could affect districts’ ability to support all students in need. Many of these workers do not earn enough to live near where they work, which can lead these workers to leave for other jobs.
This worker shortage is expected to worsen. In April 2024, California raised minimum wages to $20 per hour for all fast food workers and $25 per hour for health care workers. By comparison, entry-level jobs in public school food service in California typically pay less than $20 and hour. Half of school cafeteria workers earn below $19 hourly, or $19,900 annually based on a typical schedule.
To reduce hunger among students, decrease food waste, and improve access to more nutritional, freshly prepared meals, state and local policymakers and school districts should consider improving job quality to increase food worker retention and reduce vacancy rates. This could include improving available hours and schedules, health and retirement benefits, autonomy, and on-the-job training to reduce injury rates. One method for improving job quality and reducing turnover and vacancy is increasing public school food workers’ compensation, including hourly wages.
This fact sheet explores how increasing these workers’ wages to $23 and $25 per hour would affect the state’s budget and spending on public assistance programs.
What We Found
We estimate California currently spends $1.20 billion in state and federal dollars on school food worker salaries per year. Increasing these workers’ minimum wage to $23 per hour would cost an additional $170 million in state funds (a 14 percent increase), for a total of $1.37 billion. A $25-per-hour minimum wage would cost the state $230 million (a 19 percent increase), increasing food worker salary costs to $1.43 billion.
But we estimate that some of the cost of increasing school food workers’ wages could be offset by reduced state spending on some public assistance programs. In other words, if workers made a $23 or $25 minimum wage, we estimate that fewer of these workers would have to apply for public benefits such as CalFresh and Medi-Cal to help make ends meet.
If California increased the minimum wage to $23 per hour, we estimate it would cost the state an additional $146 million overall, given the $170 million in added spending and the $24 million the state would save on public assistance spending and added income tax revenue. A $25-per-hour minimum wage would cost an additional $191 million, because the state would add $230 million in spending but could save $39 million on public benefit spending and added income tax revenue.
For example, we estimate that the share of households with school food workers enrolled in Medi-Cal would see the largest decrease—from 24.3 percent to 21.6 percent—if school food workers made $25 per hour. Enrollment in CalFresh would decrease from 17.5 percent to 15.0 percent. The shares of households using housing subsidies and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) would also drop by more than 1 percentage point.
School food worker pay varies by position and district, and some workers already earn above the hypothetical minimum thresholds we examined. Among workers who would not experience a pay increase, benefit participation is not expected to change.
Still, we estimate that 77 percent of the estimated 62,800 school food workers in California would see a wage increase if the minimum wage increased to $23 per hour. About 86 percent would see an increase with a $25-per-hour minimum wage. This is mostly because the most common occupation, cafeteria worker, typically pays below these thresholds.
Across most public benefits programs, we project changes to the minimum wage would result in savings. The largest savings would be from reductions in Medi-Cal, SSI, and housing subsidies spending.
In addition to reducing enrollment in public assistance programs, California could also collect higher tax revenues when workers earn more (as represented in the savings above). With a $23 minimum wage, the state could collect $4.1 million more in income taxes, whereas a $25 minimum wage would bring in $6.5 million.
We project a slight increase in CalEITC spending, which is likely attributable to the hypothetical minimum wages still being well below the CalEITC eligibility threshold of $30,950 annually. We interpret the projected change in CalEITC spending to be close to zero.
Accounting for reduced public benefits usage and increased taxes, California could save $24.3 million in public spending if it raised wages to $23 per hour and could save $39.3 million if it raised wages to $25 per hour.
There are other possible downstream benefits to increasing job quality. For example, California school food worker annual employee turnover rates range from 7.6 to 26.2 percent (PDF) depending on the position. This could cost districts more than 16 percent of workers’ annual salaries (PDF), which would put school food worker turnover costs at $38.1 million. A 25 percent reduction in the turnover rate would save schools $9.5 million per year and a 50 percent reduction would save $19.1 million.
How We Did It
To understand how much it would cost the state to increase public school food workers’ wages, we used district-level survey data on workers’ wages. In each district, any position paying below $23 and $25 per hour was raised to the hypothetical new minimum. These wages were chosen for being slightly below or equal to California’s new minimum wage for health care workers.
We also applied compression adjustments to preserve pay hierarchies. For example, if cashiers in a district were paid $17 per hour and cafeteria workers were paid $19 per hour, we adjusted their wages to $23 per hour and $25 per hour, respectively, to preserve the $2 pay gap.
We then calculated how the state’s spending on school food workers’ salaries would change based on the number of workers in each position and their adjusted salaries. Finally, we extrapolated this spending across all California districts based on annual enrollment in each district.
Eligibility and enrollment trends in public assistance programs are often complex, and not all of those who are eligible enroll. To estimate how many school food workers would likely enroll in public assistance programs, we used pooled data from the 2022 and 2023 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) with 11,550 observations representing 39.14 million people in California. Our sample is based on prior analyses (PDF) showing that most school food workers are female (93 percent) and have less than a bachelor’s degree (93 percent).
We examined household public benefit enrollment trends for 2,990 observations of adult females with less than a bachelor’s degree (representing 9.31 million people). We looked at the trends among people in the sample whose individual annual earnings were within the 5th and 95th percentiles of the hypothetical range of salaries if school food worker wages were increased to $23 or $25 per hour. This analysis was carried out for each of the seven school-level jobs. One limitation of this approach is that we cannot model incremental changes to projected benefit receipt, only changes across a distribution. This may help control for a wide range of worker scenarios, but the true change in benefit receipt could be higher or lower depending on whether more workers than expected cross particular benefit thresholds and whether benefits eligibility policies change in the future.
We examined both whether a benefit was received and how many months per year it was received. To estimate total costs, we used the following monthly costs with their associated sources and the average duration received per year in our SIPP analysis: $189 per month for CalFresh (10.4 months); $629 per month for SSI (11.7 months); $667 per month for Medi-Cal (11.8 months); $79 per month for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (8.4 months); $402 per year for CalEITC; $1,021 per month for CalWorks (9.4 months), and $625 per month for housing subsidies (12.0 months).
For California income tax estimations, we applied the California Schedule Y brackets from 2023 to the individual annual earnings calculated in the SIPP.
Acknowledgments: This research is funded by the Chef Ann Foundation through a grant provided by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Further information on the Urban Institute’s funding principles is available at urban.org/fundingprinciples. Copyright © November 2025. Urban Institute. Permission is granted for reproduction of this file, with attribution to the Urban Institute.
