Costco Teamsters deal sets wages, protections through 2028

Costco’s national Teamsters contract now runs through Jan. 31, 2028, giving more than 18,000 union workers a formal benchmark on pay, scheduling and enforcement after a tense bargaining round that nearly spilled into a strike. The agreement, entered into Feb. 1, 2025 between Costco Wholesale and Teamsters locals, came with large wage increases, a 22 percent boost in pension contributions and more than 40 language changes.

For warehouse employees, the value of the deal is in the details. The contract covers stronger seniority rights, vacation benefits, shop steward protections and new safeguards against surveillance, along with the sections on recognition, membership and deductions that define how the workplace relationship actually functions. That matters far beyond the bargaining table: it tells front-end assistants, stockers, forklift operators, meat and bakery workers and optical staff what Teamsters were able to turn into written rules inside Costco, rather than leaving those issues to local management discretion.

The stakes were clear before the contract landed. More than 18,000 Costco union members at 56 warehouse locations in six states voted on Jan. 19, 2025 to authorize a strike ahead of a Jan. 31 deadline. Teamsters said those workers made up about 8 percent of Costco’s 219,000 U.S. workforce, a reminder that the union’s leverage sat inside a company whose labor model already sat above much of retail. Costco responded on Jan. 31, 2025 by raising pay for nonunion workers, including a move that pushed top hourly pay to more than $30.

That split matters for nonunion employees, too. Costco’s 2025 sustainability report says the company raised starting wage and top-of-scale pay and reached an average hourly wage of more than $32 in 2025, showing how closely the company’s public wage story tracks the pressure created by the union side of the business. The Teamsters agreement gives workers a concrete way to judge whether Costco’s standards are just policy or terms management was willing to write into a contract.

Teamsters Local 174 said its Costco agreement mirrors the national master agreement in many ways but adds local protections. Its depot-driver deal was described as locking in wage increases, healthcare, pension gains and a just-cause standard, the kind of language that gives workers a firmer basis to challenge discipline and arbitrary treatment. In Costco’s 2025 labor environment, the national agreement now functions as a floor that both union and nonunion workers can measure against, at a company with more than 341,000 employees globally, more than 900 locations worldwide and 145.2 million members globally.