Two years ago a coalition led by Kansas sued the Labor Department and won. One thing the injunction bought them is fourteen extra days before a new farm wage bites. Kansas just drew the largest entry-level raise in the United States. The delay moves the date. It does not move the number.

If you grow the plants, this is the number your season is priced against. If you install them, this is the number underneath every liner, shrub and tree you will quote next spring, about eight months before you feel it.

On Monday the Labor Department published the 2026–2027 Adverse Effect Wage Rates — the minimum an employer must offer, advertise and pay for H-2A work. Three pages in the Federal Register. And here is the first strange thing about them.

The notice contains no wage rates. Not one dollar figure for any state. It tells you the rates exist and gives you a link.

So I pulled both spreadsheets — the new one and the set it replaced, which ran from October 2, 2025 to August 2, 2026 — and subtracted one from the other, state by state, for entry-level work.

I expected the delay to look like a favour. It does not.

Kansas has the largest entry-level increase of any state or territory in the country. Nebraska is second. North Dakota is third. All three are covered by the injunction. Five of the top ten are.

Across the seventeen states the injunction covers, entry-level rates rose an average of about 75 cents. Across the other thirty-seven, about 31 cents. More than double, on the side that went to court. I did that subtraction myself this morning from D O L’s own two spreadsheets — the department publishes the new rates and archives the old ones, but it does not publish the change.

Fourteen days, on a raise of $2.49 an hour, is worth about $99.60 per worker — two forty-hour weeks. Over a thousand-hour season the raise itself is roughly $2,490 a head.

That is the whole of the reprieve. And then the rate arrives anyway, in the middle of contracts that are already running, because the regulation says it must.

Here is what I would do this week, and my position on it.

Go and get your own state’s number out of the spreadsheet rather than waiting for somebody to summarise it, because the summary does not contain numbers. Open DOL-OFLC_2026-2027_AEWRs_FINAL_valuesonly.xlsx and read the first sheet, Statewide 655.120(b)(1)(i). That is the sheet governing nursery and greenhouse job orders.

Then check which skill level your job order describes, because these are now two separate rates and the gap is not small — in Kansas it is $15.18 against $19.71. How the order is written decides which one you owe. And if you are an H-2A Labor Contractor, re-run your surety bond: the average AEWR is now $15.96, and bond amounts key off it.

For the contractors reading this who employ nobody on an H-2A visa — and that is most landscape crews — the honest framing is that your labour cost did not just change, your plant cost did. Nursery labour is an input. It shows up in your 2027 quotes, not your August payroll. I would rather you knew that in August than found it in a price list in February.

Kept honest, and there is a lot to keep honest here. The state-by-state increases are my arithmetic, not D O L’s. The department publishes the new rates and archives the previous set; it does not publish a change table. I subtracted the two primary spreadsheets myself this morning and verified the baseline is the immediately preceding set from D O L’s own archive label. Treat +$2.49 as a computed figure, not a quoted one. The seventeen-state list is inferred, and the notice names nobody. It says only “entities and states subject to the court order.” My list comes from asterisked rows in D O L’s own table — a table whose rate column is itself stale, still showing December 2024 effective dates on a page stamped August 3, 2026. The effective-date logic is self-consistent, but do not read that table’s rates as current. “Certain entities” is unverified. The injunction also covers named private plaintiffs. I did not fetch the court order and cannot list them, so a grower in a state not on that list could still be covered. This is H-2A, not H-2B. Nurseries, growers and greenhouses run on H-2A; most landscape maintenance and installation crews run on H-2B, which this notice does not touch. Nothing here changed a mowing crew’s wage. Not every state went up. Nine states and territories fell at entry level, including Oregon at −12 cents — a major nursery state — along with Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Virginia, Massachusetts, Indiana and the Virgin Islands. “Wages jumped” is not true everywhere and I am not going to write it that way. The underlying data is old. These rates are built on May 2025 O E W S estimates, released May 15, 2026. And the method is interim. 90 F R 47914 is an interim final rule, with a related rescission proceeding live at 90 F R 28919; I did not verify the current status of either, and the framework producing these numbers could move.

Sources, all primary, all fetched today, August 6, 2026. (1) Employment and Training Administration, D O L, Labor Certification Process for the Temporary Employment of Foreign Workers in Agriculture in the United States: Adverse Effect Wage Rate Updates for Non-Range Occupations, notice, 91 F R 48946–48948, F R Doc. 2026-15673, Vol. 91, No. 147, published August 3, 2026, signed by Marek Laco, Acting Assistant Secretary for Employment and Training — full text via the Federal Register plain-text service, 2026-15673.txt. Source of the DATES section quoted in full above, of the S O C 45-2092 footnote, of the 20 C F R 655.120(b)(5) and (b)(6) language, of the $15.96 average A E W R used for H-2A Labor Contractor surety bonds under 20 C F R 655.132(c)(2)(ii), and of the statement that the rates themselves are published only at flag.dol.gov. (2) D O L Office of Foreign Labor Certification, Adverse Effect Wage Rates, page stamped “Last Updated: August 3rd, 2026” — source of the asterisked injunction-state markings, of the footnote describing the fourteen-day effective-date split under Kansas, et al. v. U.S. Department of Labor, No. 2:24-cv-00076-LGW-BWC (S.D. Ga., Aug. 26, 2024), and of the $15.96 average confirmed a second time. (3) The two D O L rate files themselves: DOL-OFLC_2026-2027_AEWRs_FINAL_valuesonly.xlsx and the archived DOL-OFLC_2025-2026_AEWRs_FINAL.xlsx, labelled by D O L as effective October 2, 2025 through August 2, 2026. Every state figure in this edition — Kansas $12.69 to $15.18, Nebraska $14.20 to $16.25, North Dakota $12.31 to $14.29, the Skill II Kansas rate of $19.71, the Oregon decline, and the seventeen-state and thirty-seven-state averages — was computed today by differencing sheet Statewide 655.120(b)(1)(i) of those two files, 54 rows each. (4) The methodology rule behind the two skill levels, 90 F R 47914, published October 2, 2025, and the enjoined Farmworker Protection Rule, 89 F R 33898, April 29, 2024 — both confirmed through the Federal Register A P I. No trade press supplied any fact in this edition.

The Labor Department published the 2026–2027 H-2A wage rates on Monday. Three pages in the Federal Register, and they contain no wage rates. Not one dollar figure for any state.

The numbers live in a spreadsheet the notice links to. So I downloaded it, downloaded the set it replaced, and subtracted.

Here is what came out.

Two years ago a coalition led by Kansas sued DOL over the Farmworker Protection Rule and won a preliminary injunction. One thing that injunction buys those states is time — a new wage rate can't bite on publication day. It waits fourteen days.

So this year's rates went live August 3 for most of the country, and go live August 17 for the states under that order.

The injunction delays the date. It does not change the number.

Kansas, entry-level: $12.69 → $15.18. Up $2.49 an hour, 19.6% — the largest entry-level increase of any state or territory in the United States.

Nebraska: $14.20 → $16.25. Second.
North Dakota: $12.31 → $14.29. Third.

All three are injunction states. Five of the top ten are.

Across the seventeen states the order covers, entry-level rates rose an average of about 75 cents. Across the other thirty-seven, about 31 cents. More than double, on the side that went to court.

Fourteen days on a $2.49 raise is worth about $99.60 a worker. Then it arrives anyway — mid-contract, automatically. From the notice:

"when the AEWR is updated during a work contract, the employer must pay at least that updated AEWR upon the effective date of the new AEWR, if the updated AEWR is higher than the highest of the previous AEWRs"

You don't get to finish the season at the wage you signed. And it only ratchets one way: if the new rate lands lower than the job order guaranteed, you keep paying the guarantee.

The occupation code at the centre of all this is SOC 45-2092 — Farmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse. Nursery labour isn't adjacent to this rule. It's named in it.

What to do this week:

Get your own state's number out of the spreadsheet — DOL-OFLC_2026-2027_AEWRs_FINAL_valuesonly.xlsx, first sheet, Statewide 655.120(b)(1)(i). The summary won't tell you; it has no numbers in it.

Check which skill level your job order describes. These are two separate rates now and the gap is real — Kansas is $15.18 against $19.71.

H-2A Labor Contractors: re-run the surety bond. The average AEWR is now $15.96 and bonds key off it.

And if you're a landscape contractor employing nobody on an H-2A visa — most crews — your labour cost didn't change. Your plant cost did. Nursery labour is an input, and it shows up in your 2027 quotes, not your August payroll.

Kept honest: the state increases are my arithmetic from two DOL spreadsheets, not a DOL-published change table. The seventeen-state list is inferred from asterisks on DOL's own page — the notice names nobody, and "certain entities" also covers private plaintiffs I can't list without pulling the court order. This is H-2A, not H-2B, so no mowing crew's wage just moved. And not every state rose: nine fell at entry level, including Oregon at −12 cents, which is a major nursery state.

91 FR 48946. August 17 for the injunction states. August 3 — already past — for everyone else.

FIRST SOURCE · one verified original-source finding, composed for one reader · this edition: landscaping and nursery — written for the people whose customers ask why the plants cost more next spring