Lawmakers voted 94 to three Thursday to raise the wages rate by 2.10 dollars per hour -- from 5.15 dollars an hour to 7.25 dollars.

That means the annual salary for a full-time minimum-wage worker would rise from about 11,000 dollars a year to about 15,000.

The House approved a similar measure on January 10, and the two bills will now have to be reconciled before going to the desk of President George W. Bush, to be signed into law.

"We haven't resolved anything," cautioned Charles Rangel of New York, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

One major difference to iron out is that the Senate's version provides 8.3 billion dollars in Republican-backed tax breaks to help small businesses compensate for the impact of the wage hikes.

Senate's new majority leader Harry Reid said after the vote that the bill's passage was a long-deferred victory for the common worker.

"Democrats in both the House and Senate have kept yet another one of their promises to move America in a new direction, and we will continue to do so," Reid said.

"For the first time in 10 years, Congress voted in a bipartisan fashion to increase the minimum wage. In the time since the last minimum wage increase, household costs have risen -- including the price of gas, the price of food and the price of health care," the Democratic lawmaker said.