Florida minimum wage rises to $15 an hour on September 30, up from $14, and tipped workers move from $10.98 to $11.98 an hour in cash pay.
It is the last of six yearly raises voters approved in November 2020 through Amendment 2, a change to the state constitution. The measure passed with 60.82 percent of the vote in a state that requires 60 percent for constitutional changes, so it cleared the bar with less than a point to spare. The Florida minimum wage was $8.56 an hour at the time. It jumped to $10 in September 2021 and has gone up a dollar every September 30 since. Florida became the eighth state to commit to $15 and the first in the South to do it by ballot measure. The federal minimum wage is still $7.25.
Florida voters have been here before. In 2004, they approved Amendment 5, which set a $6.15 minimum wage and tied it to inflation, by a vote of 71 percent to 28 percent.
Getting here was not a straight line. Miami Beach passed its own local minimum wage in 2016, a gradual one set to reach $13.31, and business groups, including the Florida Chamber of Commerce, sued the city, citing a 2003 state ban on cities setting their own wage rules. Amendment 2 settled the question statewide, and because it sits in the state constitution, it is harder to unwind than a regular law.
Here is how the Florida minimum wage works for tipped workers. Florida lets employers claim a tip credit, which is the amount they can subtract from a worker’s hourly pay because the worker also earns tips. That credit is fixed at $3.02. Take $3.02 off of $15, and you get $11.98, the least a server or bartender can be paid in cash before tips. Tips plus that cash wage still have to reach the full minimum wage, and if a slow shift leaves a worker short, the employer has to make up the gap. For someone working 40 hours a week, the extra dollar adds up to about $2,080 more a year before taxes.
Not everyone paying that dollar is celebrating. Collier Merrill, president of Great Southern Restaurants, owns several restaurants in Pensacola and told WEAR the cost lands on owners.
“What happens, who’s paying that?” Merrill said. “It’s not the government paying that, it’s the individual owners, the restaurant owners or shop owners.”
Merrill has 400 employees. Not all of them earn minimum wage, but he says a raise at the bottom pushes everyone above it up too, because “somebody can make an 18 and you got to put into 19.” By his math, “400 employees average 2,000 hours a year, that’s $800,000 increase in my payroll.” He says every day is a balance between paying more and keeping menu prices affordable.
Bruce Camacho owns the Cycle Joint on Palafox Street and sees it from the other side. He says higher pay helps a business keep its people.
“I think also as a small business owner, we should look after our own business, which includes our team members and pay them what’s a fair wage for their work effort, because without them you wouldn’t have a business,” Camacho said.
Economist Rick Harper warns that the workers the raise is meant to help could be the ones who feel the squeeze. He says businesses will cut hours and hire fewer people once the Florida minimum wage climbs again.
It’s young people, often minorities who are working at minimum wage to get the valuable job training that they need to move to higher-wage occupations,” Harper said.
Harper points to owners who worry about losing customers to online sales as the reason they will trim costs. In his words, “they’re going to hire fewer of those entry-level positions.”
The flat dollar raises end here. Starting in 2027, the Florida minimum wage is tied to inflation, which means it will follow the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, a federal measure of how prices are changing for working households. The first calculation comes on September 30, 2027. From then on, the wage will move with those numbers each year instead of jumping a set dollar.
That $15 an hour will still face some expensive realities in Florida. As of September 2026, Zillow puts the statewide average rent across all property types at about $2,333 a month, while RentCafe estimates the average Florida apartment at $1,998. A one-bedroom averages about $1,700, according to Zillow. Transportation is taking another bite: AAA reported Florida regular gas averaging about $4.29 per gallon on September 23, up from roughly $3.07 a year earlier.
Those numbers help explain why the jump to $15 may feel significant on paper while still leaving workers navigating major housing and transportation costs.
