For many years, New York’s main airports were run by people who most travelers never thought about. The person at a JFK terminal who gave me a breakfast sandwich. The worker at LaGuardia who was loading cargo in the cold before dawn. The caterer was making food in a building many miles away from the gate. For a long time, these people kept the airports running, but they never had a real legal safety net put in place to protect them.
For real, that changed on January 1, 2026, when major changes to New York’s Healthy Terminals Act went into effect. The law had been around in some form since 2020, but the first version didn’t cover all types of workers. Employees of concessions. Handlers of cargo. Crews on ramps. People who work in food service at off-site catering facilities. The missing information wasn’t subtle. They were written into the law itself.
The 2026 amendments changed that math. A “covered airport worker” is now pretty much anyone who spends at least half of their work week at a covered airport location (like JFK or LaGuardia) or a facility that prepares food for flights leaving from those airports. Employers with 11 or more workers must follow wage and benefit standards that are in line with the federal Service Contract Act. They must also follow Port Authority minimum wage rules where those rates are higher. As of this year, that means at least $21.25 an hour, which is more than the $17.75 Queens County minimum wage set by the SCA.
Take a moment to think about that gap. The difference between the federal floor rate and the actual required rate is almost $3.50 an hour. That adds up to something real for someone who works full-time. The Port Authority rate will go up every year until 2032, and it will be linked to the Consumer Price Index. They are already behind if they think they can set a number and forget about it.
The benefits must be more than just wages. Employers are required to offer a health and welfare supplement, which is currently $5.55 per hour, up to 40 hours per week. This can be met by health insurance provided by the employer or other qualifying fringe benefits. Paid time off increases with length of service, from two weeks after one year to five weeks after twenty years. For example, from New Year’s Day to Juneteenth, there are 12 holidays that everyone has to work on. All of this is not fancy. But for people who didn’t have guaranteed access to these things before, it’s a whole new kind of work.
The law also makes people have an ongoing duty to follow it, which sounds boring but isn’t. The Service Contract Act’s wage determinations are updated from time to time. The Port Authority changes the minimum wage every year. JFK and LaGuardia employers can’t just check their payroll once and be done with it. Tracking and monitoring are built into this law, which will need a lot of administrative work, especially for companies with hybrid or mobile workers who split their time between the airport and off-site locations.
When you walk through a major airport, you get the sense that the cleaning, food service, and cargo handling that you can’t see have always been a little bit outside of the normal conversation about workers’ rights. People who work at airports were in a strange legal gray area for longer than seems reasonable now that we look back. Airports are high-traffic, high-visibility places.
It is still not clear if the Healthy Terminals Act, even in its changed form, fully solves the problem. Enforcement depends on people following the rules, and employers need to be serious about the new rules instead of just checking them off as a box. Now the required wage posters need to be put up in covered areas. This is a small thing that stands for something bigger. They need to be seen by someone.
