Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 2646 on Sept. 30, the last day he had to act on bills from the 2025–26 session. The law sets a minimum hourly wage of $19.75 for temporary and seasonal agricultural workers hired from outside California, including workers on H-2A visas, and for California employees performing the same or substantially similar work for the same employer in the same county. It takes effect Jan. 1, 2027, and the floor rises each January by the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment. This post previously reported the bill as awaiting the governor’s signature and has been updated with the outcome.
The bill, by Assemblymember Maggy Krell, was sponsored by the United Farm Workers, which argued it keeps the H-2A program from depressing local wages, and was supported by the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. The prior H-2A rate in California was $16.90 an hour, making the new floor roughly a 14% increase.
Western Growers, which opposed the bill, described it as raising the wage for “H-2A and associated corresponding employees.” Jacob Villagomez, director of governmental affairs at California Citrus Mutual, said growers “compete in a global marketplace. Every additional cost makes it harder to keep producing fresh citrus here in California, supporting farm jobs and sustaining the rural communities that depend on agriculture.” The California Farm Bureau Federation, also opposed, cited a figure that 86% of farmers hold second jobs.
The reach of the law is contested. California employs roughly 35,000 workers under H-2A out of about 850,000 people doing farm work statewide, so the floor applies directly to a minority of the workforce — but it extends to domestic workers in corresponding employment at those same operations. Farm groups estimate added labor costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. No independent estimate of the total cost, or of any pass-through to retail prices, was available at the time of writing.
AB 2646 was one of several agriculture measures signed the same day, alongside a change to Williamson Act cancellation fees for farmland going to solar and the law replacing California’s 1925 cannery license. Labor is already the largest single expense in the region’s most recent county crop accounting, as the Ventura County 2025 crop report set out. Growers in the hand-harvested counties are listed on the Ventura County page, and what a cost like this does to a grocery bill is easier to see when you price food in hours instead of dollars.
Why this matters for SoCal: Ventura, Santa Barbara, Imperial and Kern all run labor-intensive hand-harvested crops, and January’s wage floor lands on the same winter vegetable and citrus harvests that stock the region’s markets.
Sources: Governor Newsom issues legislative update 9.30.2026 · California Sets $19.75 Farmworker Minimum Wage, DTN/Progressive Farmer, Oct. 2, 2026 · Gov. Newsom Signs UFW Minimum Wage Bill for H-2A, Western Growers, Oct. 1, 2026 · AB 2646 Raises Costs on California Citrus Growers, California Citrus Mutual, Oct. 1, 2026