Belize minimum wage
Single national hourly minimum wage covering all categories of workers, fixed by Order of the Minister of Labour under the Wages Council Act / Labour Act (Cap. 297) machinery on the recommendation of the Wages Councils. Belize has no regional or sectoral differentiation of the floor since 1 January 2023: the previously separate rates for shop assistants, domestic workers, agricultural/manual workers and export-industry workers were consolidated to a single rate.
| Current value | 5 BZD per hour (all categories of workers) |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2023-01-01 |
| Official source | Wages Council (Wages Regulation) (Consolidation) (Amendment) Order, 2022 — Statutory Instrument No. 169 of 2022; and Wages Regulation (Manual Workers) (Amendment) Order, 2022 — Statutory Instrument No. 170 of 2022, which together raised the minimum wage for all categories of workers to BZ$5.00 per hour with effect from 1 January 2023 (Government of Belize Press Office official notice, 23 December 2022) |
| Last verified | 2026-07-23 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
The instruments are the two 2022 Statutory Instruments named above, not a press summary — S.I. 169/2022 amends the consolidated Wages Regulation Order (shop assistants, domestic workers, general workers) and S.I. 170/2022 amends the Manual Workers Order (agricultural, export and manual workers); the pair is what produced a single uniform BZ$5.00/hour floor from 1 Jan 2023. The previous rate was BZ$3.30/hour, set in May 2012 and unchanged for over ten years, with lower category rates (BZ$3.10 for agricultural/export-industry workers and shop assistants selling alcohol) that the 2022 Orders abolished by levelling everyone up. STILL IN FORCE AT CONFIRMATION: no further Order has been made. The Government's Plan Belize 2.0 platform commits to raising the floor to BZ$6.00/hour, and that figure recurs in press and consultancy pages, but as at 23 July 2026 NO statutory instrument enacting BZ$6.00 has been issued — DO NOT SERVE BZ$6.00 AS FACT. Watch for a new Wages Regulation Order in the Statutory Instruments series on nationalassembly.gov.bz and in the Gazette. Access problem: the National Assembly's per-year Statutory Instruments index pages are unstable (the 2022 index returned HTTP 404 at confirmation; only the 2025 index resolved), and the S.I. 169/170 PDFs are not reachable by direct search. The citation above is the Government of Belize Press Office's own official notice, which names both instruments, the rate and the commencement date — an official government publication, not an aggregator. Re-verify the S.I. text when the National Assembly index is restored. Note also that BZ$5.00/hour is a per-hour floor only; Belize's Labour Act sets no statutory monthly minimum, so any monthly figure quoted elsewhere is an arithmetic derivation, not law.
Earlier values
| From | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2012-05-01 | 3.3 | Wages Regulation Orders in force from May 2012 until superse |
Get it programmatically
curl https://latamref.dev/v1/bz/minimum-wage
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://latamref.dev/v1/bz/minimum-wage/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://latamref.dev/provenance/bz/minimum-wageOther Belize series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates