Florida's minimum wage hits $15: what it pays and what comes next

Florida's minimum wage rose to $15.00 an hour on September 30, 2026, up from $14.00. It applies to every hour worked in Florida by employees covered under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, and tipped employees must now get a direct wage of at least $11.98 an hour from their employer, up from $10.98. This is the last of the $1 annual steps voters approved with Amendment 2 in November 2020.

The next change is not in 2027, whatever you may have read. FloridaCommerce's official notice says the $15.00 rate is effective from September 30, 2026 to December 31, 2027. Inflation indexing resumes with a calculation in September 2027, and the first inflation-adjusted rate takes effect on January 1, 2028.

What $15 an hour pays over a year

At full time, 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, $15.00 an hour is $31,200 a year before taxes. That's $600 a week, or $2,600 a month on average.

Florida has no state income tax. The state constitution bars a tax on the income of residents who are natural persons, so your paycheck deductions are federal only. For a single filer with no other income, this is what comes out in 2026:

Those are full-year tax figures. Your employer withholds using IRS tables, so individual paychecks can be off by a few dollars, and the difference settles when you file. If you put part of your pay into a 401(k), add it in our take-home pay calculator, which handles Florida and every other state. Health insurance premiums and a second job are not in the calculator, so take those into account separately.

The $1 raise, before and after taxes

A dollar an hour sounds small. Over a full-time year it is $2,080 gross. After federal tax and payroll taxes, you keep $1,671.28 of it, because part of the raise lands in the 12% bracket and 7.65% goes to Social Security and Medicare.

Full time, single filer	$14.00 (old rate)	$15.00 (since Sept. 30)
Gross pay per year	$29,120.00	$31,200.00
Federal income tax	$1,314.40	$1,564.00
Social Security (6.2%)	$1,805.44	$1,934.40
Medicare (1.45%)	$422.24	$452.40
Take-home per year	$25,577.92	$27,249.20
Take-home per month	$2,131.49	$2,270.77

So the raise is worth $139.28 a month in your pocket, or about 80 cents of every extra dollar. Nobody at the minimum wage "loses money" by moving into the 12% bracket; only the dollars above $12,400 of taxable income are taxed at 12%.

One thing to watch on your first paycheck after the change: the new rate is effective September 30, so hours worked before that date in the same pay period were still owed at $14.00. A biweekly check covering, say, September 21 through October 4 should show two rates. If every hour is at $14, ask payroll. If you want to see how your pay dates fall for the rest of the year, our 2026 pay period calendar lays them out.

What your 2026 W-2 will show

Because the raise came with three months left in the year, your 2026 earnings are a blend. 2026 has 261 weekdays: 194 of them fall between January 1 and September 29, and 67 from Wednesday, September 30 through December 31. If you're paid for 8 hours every weekday, that's $21,728 at $14.00 plus $8,040 at $15.00, or $29,768 for the 2026 calendar year. In 2027, the first full year at $15, the same schedule pays $31,320, because 2027 also has 261 weekdays. The $31,200 above is the usual 52-week shorthand, and your actual W-2 also depends on pay dates and any unpaid days.

Tipped workers: $11.98 direct, $15 guaranteed

Florida lets employers count tips toward the minimum wage, but only up to a fixed tip credit of $3.02 an hour, the federal amount from 2003 that the constitution locks in. That number never moves, so the direct wage is always the full minimum minus $3.02: $15.00 minus $3.02 = $11.98.

Compare that with the federal floor of $2.13 an hour for tipped workers, and you can see why Florida servers and bartenders get a real paycheck from the employer, not just tips. At 40 hours, the direct wage is $479.20 a week, or $24,918.40 a year. Your tips must cover at least the other $120.80 a week. If they don't in any workweek, your employer has to make up the difference so you average at least $15.00 an hour.

Overtime for tipped employees is where payroll mistakes happen. Under the FLSA rules that Florida's constitution follows, overtime is figured on the full minimum wage, and the employer can't take a bigger tip credit on an overtime hour. At $15.00 that means $22.50 an hour, minus the $3.02 credit, for a direct overtime wage of $19.48. A check that pays $17.97 (1.5 times $11.98) is short by $1.51 for every overtime hour. Our overtime calculator shows the full math for non-tipped hours.

What happens next: inflation indexing from 2028

Article X, Section 24 of the Florida Constitution tells the state to recalculate the rate on September 30, 2027 and every September 30 after that. The method is mechanical: take the current minimum wage and raise it by the change in the CPI-W, the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers, over the twelve months before September 1. The new rate is published and takes effect the following January 1.

That gives Florida a 15-month stretch at $15.00, from September 30, 2026 through December 31, 2027. Nobody knows the 2028 rate yet, since it depends on inflation data that doesn't exist. The arithmetic is simple enough to do in your head, though: every 1% of CPI-W inflation adds 15 cents, so 1% would make it $15.15. Because the $3.02 tip credit stays fixed, the tipped direct wage rises by exactly the same number of cents.

The constitution sets a floor, not a ceiling: the Legislature may raise the rate by statute. Nothing official points to that happening before the 2028 indexing.

If you're still being paid $14

Employers must post the state notice where employees can see it, and the 2026 poster states the $15.00 and $11.98 figures. If your pay didn't change, start with payroll; it's often a system that wasn't updated. If that fails, Florida law lets you bring a civil action after you notify your employer and give it 15 days to resolve the claim. A court can award back wages plus an equal amount in damages and attorney's fees, and willful violators face a $1,000 fine per violation payable to the state.

For anyone weighing a job offer, $15 an hour is the floor, and an hourly offer is easier to judge once you see it as a yearly number. Our hourly to salary calculator does that conversion for any rate and schedule.

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