A fee schedule is the price list. It says what Medicaid will pay a provider agency for a service, and in what unit: often fifteen minutes, an hour, a day, or a month. Waiver services, procedure codes, and modifiers live here. When a department says updated rates are coming, the document to wait for is the schedule, not the press release.
The schedule is downstream of a rate study and an appropriation. The study recommends. The budget funds some amount. The department publishes the result as the fee an enrolled provider may bill. Until that publication, an announced percentage is a plan. Providers build payroll on the schedule they can actually bill.
The worker's wage is not a line on the fee schedule unless a separate rule puts it there. A wage floor or a wage pass-through is that separate rule. Absent either one, the agency turns the fee into a wage after benefits, unbillable time, and overhead. Two agencies on the same schedule can pay different hourly rates. That is legal unless the state has said otherwise.
Units change the math. An hourly rate and a fifteen-minute rate are the same money only if someone does the multiplication. A daily residential rate covers a house that has to be staffed overnight, which is a different structure from an hourly in-home code. Comparing them as if they were both "the rate" is how hearing testimony gets confusing on purpose.
Self-directed services may have their own rates, sometimes lower or higher than the agency rate for a similar task, because the fee is not carrying the same supervision. Read the row. The waiver name at the top of the schedule tells you which program you are even looking at.