Cone Health raises minimum wage to $18 for 4,200 employees

Cone Health has pushed its minimum hourly wage to $18, a move that reached more than 4,200 employees earlier this month and raises the stakes in Guilford County’s fight for health-care workers. The new floor also lifts pay for employees earning less than $23 an hour, widening the impact beyond the lowest-paid jobs.

For a full-time worker, the change means a gross annual wage of about $37,440 before taxes, compared with $15,080 at North Carolina’s $7.25 minimum wage. That gap helps explain why the system’s latest move matters not just inside Cone Health, but across Greensboro and the broader Triad labor market, where hospitals, clinics and other employers are competing for the same pool of workers.

The raise builds on Cone Health’s December 2023 decision to set a $17 minimum, effective Jan. 14, 2024. This latest increase continues a compensation strategy the system says is aimed at staying competitive in the communities it serves. Cone Health serves people in Alamance, Forsyth, Guilford, Randolph, Rockingham and surrounding counties, and its fact sheet lists more than 13,000 employees, 1,650 physician partners and 1,000 volunteers.

The increase also reaches workers paid by flat rate if they were below $18 an hour, making it more than a simple floor adjustment. In practice, it can affect retention in hard-to-fill roles, shape morale among frontline staff and send a signal to prospective hires that Cone Health is still trying to stay ahead of labor pressure in a region where pay expectations keep moving upward.

The broader economic context is hard to miss. North Carolina’s minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25, while MIT’s Living Wage Calculator shows the Greensboro-High Point metro area requires far more than the federal minimum for a full-time worker to cover basic needs. Against that backdrop, Cone Health’s new minimum does not solve the region’s affordability problem, but it does set a stronger benchmark for one of Guilford County’s largest employers and may add pressure on other major health systems to follow.