Michigan pays direct care workers $17.13. Illinois pays $21.30.
Same labor market, same year, same job. A four dollar and seventeen cent gap that Michigan rebuilds by hand every single budget cycle, because it has never made the raise permanent.
Not whether they support direct care workers. Everybody supports direct care workers. Ask this instead: will you vote to make the direct care wage increase permanent in statute rather than an annual appropriation, and if not, why not? That question has exactly two answers and both are useful. Find your legislators at legislature.mi.gov, send it by email so there is a record, and ask for a written reply.
Michigan, 2026
The mandated direct care worker wage is $17.13 an hour effective January 1, 2026, built as a $13.73 base plus a $3.40 passthrough.
Illinois, 2026
The Illinois direct support professional wage floor is $21.30 an hour statewide effective January 1, 2026, and $24.50 in the Chicago metro area.
$4.17
The gap
Four dollars and seventeen cents an hour, statewide. Across a 40 hour week that is $166.80. Across a year it is roughly $8,674 per worker, in a field with turnover near 40%.
$18.40
Michigan, 2027
The required wage rises to $18.40 an hour effective January 1, 2027. That is real progress and it still lands below where Illinois already was a year earlier.
The unfunded gap
The FY27 wage increase carries a funding need of $182.2 million, against a proposal of $258.4 million toward an actual cost of $563.4 million. The difference is $305.0 million.
How it was built
The $3.40 came in pieces: $2.35 in FY22 at a gross cost of $414.5 million, $0.85 in FY24 at $120.2 million, and $0.20 in FY25 at $28.7 million.
Michigan against Illinois, January 1, 2026
$17.13 per hour
$13.73 plus $3.40
$21.30 per hour
$24.50 per hour
$4.17 per hour
$18.40 per hour
$182.2 million
$305.0 million
Marisa trained a direct support professional for four months. Good with her son, patient on hard days, showed up in February when nobody else did. He left for a job across the state line that paid four dollars more an hour to do a version of the same work. He apologized. Marisa told him not to. She said if she had been him she would have gone in October.
Turn the gap into a question a legislator has to answer
How to make the ask
- 1Print the two wage floors, Michigan and Illinois.
- 2Write two sentences about your adult child.
- 3Name the unfilled hours you had last month.
- 4Ask for permanent statute, not annual appropriation.
- 5Send it to your state rep and state senator.
- 6Ask for a written reply and keep it.
Documentation that makes the ask land
- Authorized service hours per week, from the plan
- Hours actually delivered last month
- Dates and duration of every unfilled shift
- What you did instead, including missed work
- How many workers turned over in the last year
- What each one said when they left
- Your provider’s current posted wage, if you can get it
- The published Michigan rate schedule
The wage is not a mystery and it is not a market accident. It is a line in an appropriations bill that gets rewritten every year by people whose names and email addresses are public.
A direct support professional in Niles, Michigan can drive twenty minutes southwest, cross into Indiana, or a couple of hours west into Illinois, and do a recognizably similar job for four dollars more an hour. That is not a scandal. It is arithmetic, and it is the arithmetic that decides whether anybody shows up at your house on Saturday.
The two numbers
As of January 1, 2026, Michigan’s mandated hourly wage for direct care workers is $17.13. It is assembled from a $13.73 base and a $3.40 passthrough.
As of the same date, the Illinois direct support professional wage floor is $21.30 an hour statewide, and $24.50 in the Chicago metro area.
Four dollars and seventeen cents. Over a forty hour week that is $166.80. Over a year of full-time work it is roughly $8,674 per person, in a workforce with turnover running near 40% nationally.
Michigan does rise to $18.40 an hour on January 1, 2027, and I want to give that its due. That is a real increase and people worked hard for it. It also lands, a full year later, more than two dollars below where Illinois already was.
The structural problem is not the number, it is the mechanism
Here is the thing that actually distinguishes Michigan, and it is not the dollar figure.
The $3.40 passthrough was not built once. It was assembled in pieces across fiscal years: $2.35 in FY22 at a gross cost of $414.5 million, $0.85 in FY24 at $120.2 million, and $0.20 in FY25 at $28.7 million.
And it is a passthrough, which means it lives in the appropriations process. Every year it has to be funded again. Every year it can be reduced, delayed, or left out. Every year the coalition that fought for it has to fight for it again to hold the same ground.
That is the difference between Michigan and a state that legislated a wage floor. Illinois families are arguing about the next increase. Michigan families are arguing about keeping the last one.
The gap that is not on any budget line
The FY27 wage increase carries a funding need of $182.2 million. The proposal on the table was $258.4 million against an actual cost of $563.4 million. The difference is $305.0 million.
That number is presented as a savings. I want to be precise about where it actually goes.
When the wage cannot attract a worker, the authorized hour does not disappear. Your adult child still needs a shower, still needs supervision, still needs somebody in the room. The hour gets delivered by a parent who cut back at work, or a sibling who drove over, or nobody at all.
The state books $305.0 million in unfunded need. Families absorb it in lost wages, lost promotions, lost retirement contributions, and the specific physical cost of doing transfers at sixty-three that you were doing at forty. It is not a savings. It is a transfer, and it is invisible because nobody bills for it.
What other states did instead
I am not going to pretend Illinois solved this. Illinois has its own service cuts and its own fights, and a wage floor does not conjure workers out of nothing.
But Illinois set a statewide floor at $21.30 with a higher metro rate, and did it in a way providers can post a job against. That is a different kind of policy instrument than an annual passthrough, and the difference shows up in the labor market whether or not anybody in Lansing likes it.
This is the part of the argument where I get accused of being unfair to Michigan. So let me be exact about the claim. Michigan legislators did not fail to care. They repeatedly chose a temporary mechanism over a permanent one, in budget after budget, and the workforce responded to the mechanism rather than the intention.
At every decision point, a permanent statutory floor was available. Other states chose it. Michigan chose the annual patch. That choice has a documented price and your family is paying part of it.
Your practical next steps
This week. Count your unfilled hours. Go back through last month and write down every authorized hour that nobody delivered, with the date and the reason you were given. That log is the only document in this entire fight that comes from your house and cannot be produced by anyone else.
Next week. Email your state representative and state senator with the two wage floors, the gap, your two sentences about your adult child, and one question: will you vote to make the direct care wage increase permanent in statute rather than an annual appropriation? Ask for a written answer.
Every budget cycle. Watch the passthrough line. The wage increase you already have is not safe. It has never been safe. It exists because a coalition shows up every spring and will keep existing exactly as long as that stays true.
Four dollars and seventeen cents. Say it out loud in a committee room and watch what happens to the conversation.