Bills to mandate a near-universal $15-per-hour minimum wage, boost new housing development and enact stricter new rules for data centers aimed at their energy and water consumption are among the top priorities for Democrats in the North Carolina House of Representatives want to highlight during the 2026 legislative session.

Democrats in the chamber filed bills tackling those issues Monday, then held a press conference outlining their aspirations. Rep. Vernetta Alston, D-Durham, said the bills are meant to address an “affordability crisis” that she blamed largely on GOP-backed policies the legislature has passed into law in recent years.

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“We have to be honest about what’s driving these higher costs, this affordability crisis,” she said. “It's been driven by powerful interests and bad policy choices by this majority that has pushed costs down onto ordinary people. When corporations can shift energy costs onto ratepayers, when wages lag far behind the cost of living, and when housing supply is choked by delays and speculation, working people pay the price.”

North Carolina has repeatedly ranked as the No. 1 state in the nation for business in recent years, in an annual survey by CNBC. It also regularly ranks, in other publications, as among the worst for workers.

Proposals advocating for a minimum wage hike and a crackdown on data centers are unlikely to be received well by pro-business Republicans in the GOP-controlled state legislature, although housing affordability is an area where there is a possibility for bipartisan compromise. House Speaker Destin Hall didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the Democrats' proposals Monday.

Republicans control strong majorities in both chambers of the legislature and rarely allow bills backed by Democrats to receive a vote. So while the proposals Democrats announced Monday are unlikely to advance intact, they provide insight into the issues the party paying close attention to — as well as what they could seek to legislate if they win back control of either chamber in the near future.

“For too many North Carolinians, the basic necessities have become too hard to afford,” Alston said. “Housing costs more. Utility bills cost more. Food costs more. Working people across the state, their paychecks have not kept up.”

House Republicans have already identified some of their own priorities for the new 2026 session, including property tax reform and an effort to ban certain books from elementary school libraries.

Democrats called on Monday to raise the minimum wage to at least $11 per hour across the state. Most businesses would be required to pay a $15 minimum wage under the proposal. The law includes a carveout for small businesses, with gross annual receipts of less than $400,000, which would only be required to pay an $11 minimum wage.

The minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour, the same as it was nearly 20 years ago. North Carolina is one of 21 states or U.S. territories, including most of the Southeast, that has a $7.25 minimum wage. Among the other 34 states and territories with higher minimum wage laws, they range from $8.75 in West Virginia to $17.13 in Washington.

https://www.ncsl.org/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wages 

There are about 5 million people employed in North Carolina. On Monday Rep. Tim Longest, D-Wake, cited research from the pro-labor think tank Economic Policy Institute that found 1.2 million of them make less than $15 an hour.

The $11 and $15 wage limits proposed in the bill would also be required to increase each year after 2027, based on the rate of inflation. Additionally, the bill would allow individual cities and counties to raise their local minimum wage requirements above the statewide limit.

“I think we all know that the cost of living is greater in the urban areas of the state than in rural areas,” Longest told WRAL. “And municipalities should be able to adjust their minimum wage to reflect that.”

Another Democrat-sponsored bill appears aimed at building more and denser housing in North Carolina, as well as several housing affordability goals. It seeks to:

  • Ban city and county governments from requiring developers to set aside a certain amount of land for parking lots.
    • Ban any single company from owning more than 25 single-family homes in North Carolina to rent out, or for “speculative or other non-owner-occupancy purposes.”
      • Allow new homes to be built in land zoned for commercial use, in addition to residential use — although homes still couldn’t be built on land zoned for industrial uses.
        • Add $160 million to the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency to implement new loans aimed at moderate-income families, defined as those making between 60% and 120% of the median income. In Wake County, for example, the median household income is just shy of $106,000. In Durham County, it’s just above $82,000.

          A third bill takes aim at data centers. Recent polling shows North Carolinians are broadly opposed to the projects — even as the companies behind them promise to bring investments adding hundreds of millions of dollars to local counties’ tax bases. Some of the arguments against data centers are that they use up massive amounts of water and require large electrical loads, contributing to rising electrical bills for entire communities. 

          “Communities are understandably concerned about the prospect of data centers being built near their houses,” said Rep. Lindsay Prather, D-Buncombe. “The state has an obvious role to play here in protecting its citizens.”

          Her bill, House Bill 1063, proposes that role for the state to play. It would:

          • Require new data centers built in North Carolina to also build on-site electricity, particularly from clean energy sources such as solar or wind power.
            • Make data centers ineligible for taxpayer-funded incentives.
              • Require that if local water or energy rates rose due to usage by a data center, the company behind the data center would bear the costs, to prevent hikes on local residents and businesses.

                Many of the data centers being built around North Carolina are backed by some of the world’s wealthiest companies — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and others — to help their computing needs for the artificial intelligence arms race. North Carolina is an attractive state to build those data centers for a variety of factors, including energy rates, relatively inexpensive land and the weather.

                They also receive tax breaks, but Democratic Gov. Josh Stein recently called on the state legislature to repeal that law, saying it was written well before the AI boom and isn’t needed to recruit the businesses anymore.

                WRAL state government reporter Caroline Yaffa contributed to this report.