President Goodluck Jonathan signed the National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Act 2011 on 22 March 2011, six weeks before the April 2011 election. It raised the statutory floor from ₦7,500 to ₦18,000/month — the first single national rate (no separate state floor) since 1981 — and lowered the employer threshold from 50 to any workplace employing 50 or more workers, with agriculture and part-time work still exempted. The political deal was brokered with the NLC under Abdulwahed Omar and the Trade Union Congress under Peter Esele after a 48-hour general-strike threat in November 2010.
Implementation immediately fractured along federal–state lines. Governors of Lagos, Rivers, Cross River and a handful of others paid the ₦18,000 within months; most northern and middle-belt states pleaded inability to pay and entered protracted negotiations with state-level NLC chapters. Some states (Osun, Imo, Zamfara) did not implement the full rate until 2014–2015, and several pegged it to junior-officer arithmetic that excluded local-government and primary-school teachers. The 2011 Act exposed the structural fault line that has dominated every subsequent review: a uniform federal wage in a federation where state internally-generated revenue ranges from under ₦5 billion to over ₦400 billion a year.
The ₦18,000 wage was meant to be reviewed in 2016 under the Act's five-year sunset clause. The 2014 oil-price collapse, the Buhari election and the 2016 recession delayed the review by three years, until the 2019 negotiations eventually produced ₦30,000. By the time ₦30,000 took effect in April 2019, the real value of the ₦18,000 had fallen by roughly 60 per cent.