Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board outlines wage, holiday rules and waiver process to Minnesota House committee

Leah Solo, executive director of the Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board, told the Minnesota House Human Services Finance and Policy Committee on March 3 that the board completed extensive public engagement and data analysis and has adopted two sets of rules: initial wage standards (earliest effective Jan. 1, 2026, pending legislative appropriation and federal approval) and holiday pay, posting and certified worker-organization rules that took effect Jan. 1, 2025.

The board was created by the 2023 Legislature and began meeting in August 2023. Solo told the committee the nine-member board (three commissioner or commissioner-designee seats and six governor-appointed members, split evenly between employer and worker representatives) held roughly 25 full-board meetings and about 48 work-group meetings during its first 16 months and staged five public forums and three online questionnaires to solicit input.

The board’s statute directs it to research market conditions and adopt minimum nursing-home employment standards that “meet or exceed existing industry conditions for a majority of nursing home workers,” a threshold Solo described to the committee as a “majority benchmark.” The board used Department of Human Services (DHS) data and other agency datasets to model how various minimum-wage options would affect the workforce and whether proposed standards met that majority benchmark.

DHS budget director Alyce Bailey told the committee the agency used the statutory methodology to compare the board’s holiday-pay standard to the current rate forecast. Bailey said DHS’s forecasted average rate growth is about 4.78% per year and that, using the required statutory calculations, the estimated cost of the holiday-pay standard…