The federal rule that cut farmworker wage floors across much of the country has been dismantled almost in full by a judge who found it arbitrary in its central design. What survived is the part the government could justify: an emergency switch of data sources. What fell is everything the rule did with that data, including a two-tier wage system and a housing-cost deduction that, together, made imported farm labor cheaper than the statutory purpose of the H-2A program allows.
The ruling, handed down August 26 by Judge Kirk Sherriff of the Eastern District of California in a suit brought by the United Farm Workers, its foundation, and eighteen farmworkers, comes as farm employers and labor advocates watch the same numbers through opposite ends of the telescope. The court's own arithmetic made the stakes explicit: the Labor Department's own estimate was that the rule shifted $2.46 billion a year from workers to employers.
The rule the court reviewed
The rewrite began with a real problem. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had discontinued the Farm Labor Survey that the Labor Department used to set the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, the minimum wage for H-2A guestworkers, which exists so that imported labor does not undercut pay for U.S. farmworkers. In October 2025, the department issued an interim final rule that switched the wage source to the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey and, in the same rule, redesigned how the rate would be set.
The redesign had three contested parts. First, a two-tier structure that would place roughly 92 percent of H-2A workers at a Level I wage set at the 17th percentile of the wage distribution, with only a sliver of higher-skilled classifications at the 50th percentile, replacing the previous average-wage methodology. Second, a deduction for housing costs from hourly wages, even though housing for H-2A workers is otherwise required to be provided free. Third, a classification rule that would have redefined which job categories got which rate.
The department skipped notice-and-comment rulemaking for most of this, claiming good cause. The judge accepted that claim only for the survey switch, which he called a genuine emergency after the farm survey's end. For the rest, he found no justification.
Three findings, one through line
Judge Sherriff held the tier system arbitrary and capricious because the 17th percentile rate sat "well below the relevant market wages," undermining the statute's anti-depression purpose. The housing deduction failed for a similar reason: it mischaracterized a free-housing policy and made H-2A workers cheaper than comparable U.S. workers, while exceeding what housing costs. The department's stated rationale, that rising wages had priced farms out of hiring, drew the court's sharpest response. There was no evidence of it. Program use had grown dramatically during the exact period the rule claimed wages were hurting employers.
The numbers in the record tell the story. H-2A positions certified by the department reached 398,258 in fiscal 2025, an increase of more than 13,000 over the prior year and roughly 185 percent growth over a decade. In Washington state, where the lawsuit's worker plaintiffs live, the rule cut the wage floor from $19.82 to $17.13 an hour, with a $2.49 housing deduction on top. The judge's conclusion was that the department had never shown "hiring more H-2A workers at then-current AEWRs was not feasible."
The remedy is unusual in its caution. The judge remanded the rule without vacating it, to avoid market disruption while the department writes a new methodology, and ordered a status report within two weeks. He explicitly reserved the question of back pay, telling employers they may owe wage adjustments if the eventual rates exceed what workers were paid under the struck provisions. That sentence is the one farm employers are reading most carefully, because it converts a paperwork defeat for the government into potential retroactive liability.
Both sides of the field
The litigation framed the dispute in language each side considers obvious. For the farmworker unions, the Adverse Effect Wage Rate is a statutory protection, and the rule was a "transfer of wealth from workers to employers" accomplished by skipping the process the law requires. Thirteen state attorneys general and former labor secretaries filed briefs supporting that view. UFW president Teresa Romero said after the ruling that "employers must be held accountable for paying back any difference."
Grower associations see the same rule from the other end of the ledger. The National Council of Agricultural Employers said the previous methodology drove rapidly rising labor costs, and its president, John Hollay, called the outcome a return of rural America "to a crisis situation." The farm groups are pressing for the Securing Agriculture's Workforce Act, which would cap annual wage-floor increases at 3.25 percent, and the ruling's uncertainty, back-pay exposure combined with an unwritten replacement methodology, has become their Exhibit A.
The court's answer to both sides is that the statute does not permit the shortcut the department took. Wage pressure is a policy problem the department can bring to Congress. A rule that makes the imported labor cheaper than the domestic labor it competes with is a problem the statute already solved, and the judge restored that solution rather than inventing a new one.
What happens next
The department now faces the task the rule was meant to avoid: writing a wage methodology against a deadline, in public, with comments. The interim rate structure from the struck provisions is gone, and the pre-rule average-wage approach returns as the operative floor until a lawful replacement arrives. For workers, that means the $2.46 billion shift reverses direction on paper, though actual pay depends on the replacement rates and on whether back-pay claims materialize. For growers, it means planning a planting season against wage floors that could move twice, once when the department acts and again if the back-pay question resolves against them.
The rule's one surviving piece, the survey switch, was its least controversial feature and its real emergency. The lesson the court drew from the rest is not that H-2A wages cannot be reformed. It is that the floor exists for a reason, and that reason is not a data source. It is the farmworker standing next to the guestworker, doing the same work for the same pay.
Primary sources
- Courthouse News for the summary judgment ruling and its scope.
- Yakima Herald for the Washington wage figures and the plaintiffs' position.
- UFW Foundation for the rule's dollar impact and the union's response.
- Capital Press for the back-pay posture and employer exposure.
- The Fencepost and Brownfield Ag News for the grower associations' arguments.
- Vitallaw for the rule's contested provisions and the good-cause analysis.