There's a surprising upside to inflation: Workers in 8 states will get a raise

• In August, inflation cooled a little, but not as much as economists had forecast.
• However, there's a silver lining to prices staying elevated: Raises are on the way for many.

In August, Americans' wallets felt a little bit of relief — and some workers will even have a few extra dollars to spend when the new year rolls around.

The Consumer Price Index, which measures inflation, came in at 8.3% year-over-year in August, down from July's 8.5% annual rate. While that's good news for Americans, who have been contending with skyrocketing prices over the last year, that's still higher than the 8.1% that economists surveyed by Bloomberg forecast.

But there's one silver lining of inflation still lingering high in August: Minimum-wage workers in a handful of states are set to get raises. That's because many states peg their annual minimum wage increases to inflation, with hikes linked to how much prices have risen from August in one year to the next.

In total, 12 states link their minimum wage to inflation increases, and eight of those measure raises off of August's price growth specifically, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Those higher wages won't show up right away though, with increases automatically set for January 1, 2023.

Insider used EPI's guidelines on how states adjust minimum wages for inflation along with the August CPI figures released on Tuesday to estimate what the new wage could look like in those eight states:

"It's still a common misconception in some places that inflation is because workers are getting paid too much money or that their money's going up fast, and that's not what's happening here," Dave Kamper, a senior state policy coordinator at EPI, told Insider. "Worker wages are in fact declining in real value, and so indexing the minimum wage to inflation helps alleviate the challenges posed by inflation."

Vermont and Minnesota both link their minimum wages to August's CPI reading, but they cap how much the wage can go up. In Minnesota, wages can go up by at most 2.5%, and in Vermont, they can go up by 5%.

The minimum wage will remain $7.25 in many states, though

The inflation-linked increases will also only widen the chasm in pay for minimum wage workers in states that haven't touched their minimum wage in years. The federal minimum wage has lingered at $7.25 since 2009, and, because of high inflation, it's at its lowest value in decades. A recent study found that increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour would lift 7.6 million people out of poverty.

"It's a moral disgrace for a country like this to have a minimum wage that you can't even pretend that you can support yourself on," Kamper said.

One way for workers to see changes in their pay as inflation remains elevated is to throw in the towel and move on to a new job.

"Even though things are cooling down, this is still a good time to find a new job, especially as inflation eats up wage gains," Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, previously told Insider. "One of the best ways to get a raise that beats inflation is to switch jobs. That's often when workers have the most leverage."

However, that's not an option for everyone, which is one reason that inflation-indexed raises are a boon for workers.

"We can't count on every state to do the right thing, and they haven't, historically. We need to look out for the whole country, not just, not just those states that have raised their minimum wage," Kamper said. "There's a lot of states where that's still not the case and a lot of workers who are still suffering, and the federal minimum wage really needs to go up to $15 an hour, frankly, if not more."