The word translated "penny" in the King James Version of this parable is the denarius, a silver coin which was the usual day's wage for a laborer. The hours here are measured starting at about 6:00 AM, so that the eleventh hour is between about 4:00 and 5:00 PM. The workers are poor men working as temporary farmhands during the harvest season, and the employer realizes that they would all need a full day's pay to feed their families. The payment at evening follows guidelines in the Hebrew Bible: This parable stresses God's unmerited grace, rather than any sense of "earning" God's favour. In this way it resembles the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The parable has often been interpreted to mean that even those who are converted late in life earn equal rewards along with those converted early. The parable can also be interpreted as showing that the people hired early in the day felt envious and jealous of the other workers even though they would have been satisfied had they not known about the group hired later. An alternative interpretation identifies the early laborers as Jews, some of whom resent the late-comers being welcomed as equals in God's Kingdom. However, Arland J. Hultgren writes: , showing the workers being paid that evening
While interpreting and applying this parable, the question inevitably arises: Who are the eleventh-hour workers in our day? We might want to name them, such as deathbed converts or persons who are typically despised by those who are longtime veterans and more fervent in their religious commitment. But it is best not to narrow the field too quickly. At a deeper level, we are all the eleventh-hour workers; to change the metaphor, we are all honored guests of God in the kingdom. It is not really necessary to decide who the eleventh-hour workers are. The point of the parable—both at the level of Jesus and the level of Matthew's Gospel—is that God saves by grace, not by our worthiness. That applies to all of us.
Some commentators have used the parable to justify the principle of a "living wage", though generally conceding that this is not the main point of the parable. An example is John Ruskin, who quotes the parable in the title of his book Unto This Last. Ruskin does not discuss the religious meaning of the parable but rather its social and economic implications.
