Gravity Payments' $70,000 Minimum Salary: Boise and Beyond

Originally published 2019-10-12.

In September 2019, Gravity Payments chief executive Dan Price announced that employees at the company's newly opened office in Boise, Idaho, would be brought up to the same $70,000 minimum salary he had introduced for staff in Seattle four years earlier. The Boise team received an immediate raise, with further increases each year until every employee there reached the $70,000 floor by 2023.

The announcement put Price back in the headlines as the CEO who had cut his own pay to fund higher wages. Here is how the policy began, what the company said it achieved, what the research behind it actually found, and what happened to Price and Gravity in the years that followed.

The Boise announcement

Gravity's Boise staff came from ChargeItPro, a local payments-software company that Gravity had acquired. On 23 September 2019, after a ribbon-cutting at the new office, Price shared the news on Twitter, writing that he was grateful for the team and wanted to pay them for the value they brought to the community.

This morning we cut the ribbon on the new @GravityPymts Boise office AND announced that all of our employees here will start earning our $70k min salary.

I’m so grateful to work with this amazing team and to be able to compensate them for the value they bring to our community. pic.twitter.com/stwwJgYCqQ

— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) September 23, 2019

The Boise plan was phased rather than instant. Reporting at the time described an initial raise of roughly $10,000 for many employees, followed by yearly steps until 2023. That matters because headlines often said the staff "would be given" $70,000 immediately. It is also worth remembering that a minimum salary is a floor: people above it did not all receive the same pay, and senior or specialist staff could earn more.

Idaho was a meaningful place to make the move. Wages there were generally lower than in Seattle, so the gap between the company's minimum and local norms was even larger than it had been in 2015.

How the $70,000 minimum started in 2015

Price founded the business that became Gravity Payments in 2004, aged 19, while studying at Seattle Pacific University, with seed money from his older brother Lucas. The firm processes card payments for small and independent businesses. It took the Gravity name in 2008.

On 13 April 2015, Price told his roughly 120 employees in Seattle that the company's minimum salary would rise to $70,000, phased in over about three years, and that he would cut his own pay from around $1.1 million to $70,000 to help pay for it. He said he had been moved by conversations with staff who were struggling with rent and debt, and by the loyalty of a team that had kept the business going through the 2008 financial crisis, when Gravity lost a large share of its business but avoided layoffs.

The decision made Price internationally famous almost overnight. It also drew criticism from commentators who predicted it would harm the company, and two long-serving employees reportedly left because they felt the flat pay structure was unfair to people who had worked their way up.

What the company reported afterwards

Gravity and Price later shared a string of positive figures. The company said it had its best week ever for winning new clients just after the announcement, that customer retention rose from about 91% to 95%, that staff turnover fell and that profits roughly doubled in the following years. The volume of payments it processed grew from about $3.4 billion in 2014 to more than $10 billion by 2018.

These numbers came from the company itself rather than independent audits, and they cannot show on their own that the pay policy caused the growth: Gravity was expanding in a strong economy and acquiring other firms. Still, the policy did not ruin the business, as several critics had predicted, and many employees told journalists it allowed them to buy homes, start families or pay off debt.

The happiness research behind the number

Price said the $70,000 figure was inspired by a 2010 study by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton of Princeton. Using Gallup survey data from about 450,000 Americans, they found that people's overall judgement of their lives kept improving as income rose, but day-to-day emotional well-being stopped improving at around $75,000 a year. Price chose a figure close to that threshold.

The research has since moved on. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Killingsworth published data suggesting that happiness kept rising well above $75,000. Rather than argue in print, he and Kahneman joined forces with Barbara Mellers in a so-called adversarial collaboration. Their 2023 paper in PNAS concluded that for most people, more income continues to go with more day-to-day happiness. The plateau appears mainly among the least happy fifth of people, for whom extra money stops helping beyond a certain point.

So the popular idea that "money stops buying happiness at $75,000" is a myth, or at least an oversimplification. What both studies agree on is that the gains are largest at lower incomes, where extra money relieves the stress of rent, bills and emergencies. That was the core of Price's argument.

What happened to Dan Price after 2019

Price's public image became far more complicated after 2019. His brother Lucas had sued him in 2015 over company pay and shareholder rights; a Seattle judge ruled in Dan's favour in 2016. Price also later admitted that some things he had said about how the raise was funded, including a claim that he had mortgaged property, were not accurate.

In 2022 he was charged in Seattle with misdemeanour offences after a woman accused him of trying to kiss her against her will; he pleaded not guilty, and the remaining charges were dismissed without prejudice in April 2023. In August 2022, after The New York Times reported allegations of abuse from several women, Price resigned as CEO, saying he would focus on fighting what he called false accusations. Chief operating officer Tammi Kroll took over. Price returned to the company in an advisory role in May 2024. Later in 2024 he was charged in California with rape over a 2021 incident, which he denied; in May 2025 The New York Times reported that prosecutors had dropped the charges.

The minimum salary policy itself remained part of Gravity's identity, and the company continued to promote it as a core value.

Lessons for employers and employees

Whatever one makes of Price personally, the Gravity experiment raised useful questions that apply far beyond one Seattle company:

• A pay floor is a business choice, not only a charity. Gravity argued that lower turnover and higher morale paid for much of the cost. Hiring and training replacements is expensive, especially in customer-facing roles.
• Policy and outcome are different things. When reading a company's success story, ask who measured the results and what else changed at the same time.
• Fairness is felt both ways. Lifting the bottom can upset people further up if pay differences shrink suddenly. Clear communication about how pay is set helps.
• Money matters most where it is scarce. The research is consistent that raising low incomes has the clearest effect on well-being.

Sources: CNN, September 2019; Wikipedia: Dan Price; Wikipedia: Gravity Payments; Princeton Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy: Kahneman and Killingsworth on income and well-being; BNN Bloomberg, August 2022.