HMN 2025: How COVID-19 pandemic boosted wages for the lowest-earning health care workers

For the past several decades, the American economy has seen consistently widening wage gaps. Highly educated and specially trained workers have seen their salaries steadily rise, while less-educated workers in lower-wage positions have seen their pay remain stagnant. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, disrupted that trend as lower-wage workers across many industries saw earnings climb faster than those of higher earners.

A new study from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health examines how this trend played out in the context of the health care industry—a field critical to pandemic response yet marked by longstanding pay inequities. Using data from more than 158,000 health care workers between 2015 and 2024, the researchers tracked weekly earnings across six job categories—from advanced practice providers like nurses and technicians, to less skilled health care aides and assistants—and analyzed pay trends by education, race and ethnicity, and gender.

The study, published in Health Affairs, found:

• Workers with a high school diploma experienced the biggest percentage wage increase, whereas those with college degrees saw little or no growth.
• Health care aides and assistants saw the largest wage growth while registered nurses’ and technicians’ pay was nearly flat.
• Black and Hispanic workers earned less overall but had higher relative wage growth than white workers, and women’s pay rose faster than men’s—narrowing the gender wage gap among health care workers.

“The COVID-19 pandemic shook up the labor market in many ways that we are still coming to understand,” said Janette Dill, an associate professor in the School of Public Health and lead author.

“We saw this kind of ‘unexpected compression’ in other fields, but no one had looked closely at whether the same thing had occurred in the health care sector. Similar to the general labor market, we found that those in the lowest-earning occupations and lowest levels of education had the most earnings growth following the pandemic.”

Future research will assess the persistence of these wage trends in the health care workforce as labor market conditions continue to evolve.

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