Dive Brief:
- Bank of America is raising its minimum hourly wage to $24, effective next month, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender said Tuesday.
- The move brings the bank presumably one step away from its long-held goal of lifting its pay floor to $25 per hour by 2025.
- “Providing a competitive minimum wage is core to being a great place to work — and I am proud that Bank of America is leading by example,” Sheri Bronstein, Bank of America’s chief human resources officer, said in a statement Tuesday.
Dive Insight:
The Bank of America pay bump has become something of an annual tradition over the past few years. The bank raised its pay floor to $21 per hour in October 2021, $22 in May 2022 and then $23 last October. Altogether, the lender’s bottom hourly wage has climbed gradually from $15 in 2017. It first aimed to pay $20 per hour to its lowest-earning full-time employees by 2021. The bank hit that benchmark a year early, then proposed its $25-per-hour timeline.
The move to $24 per hour would boost the bank’s lowest annual salaries to about $50,000, the bank said. If Bank of America hits its $25-per-hour goal next year, its minimum hourly wage will have climbed more than 121% since 2010, the bank said.
Bank of America has made a habit, too, of offering other perks to its rank and file. The bank in January said it would offer restricted stock bonuses worth a collective $800 million to roughly 97% of its staff. It’s the seventh straight year the bank has offered that benefit to employees earning $500,000 or less. Workers making $100,000 or less have been included in each of the past three years.