Florida's minimum wage goes to $15.00 an hour on September 30, 2026, up from $14.00. If you employ anyone in Florida at or near the floor, three things have to change, and one of them has a deadline inside your payroll cycle rather than on the date itself.
The date is the first thing people get wrong. Florida's minimum wage does not change on January 1. It changes on September 30, and it has every year since 2021.
What actually changes
| Now | From September 30, 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Standard minimum wage | $14.00 | $15.00 |
| Tipped employees, direct cash wage | $10.98 | $11.98 |
| Maximum tip credit | $3.02 | $3.02 (unchanged) |
| Overtime at the minimum | $21.00 | $22.50 |
The tip credit is the part worth reading twice. It has not moved, which means the increase passes through to the direct cash wage in full: $15.00 minus the $3.02 credit leaves $11.98 that has to come from you rather than from tips.
Why September 30, and why this one is different
This is the final scheduled step of Amendment 2, the constitutional amendment Florida voters passed in 2020. It set out a fixed ladder: a dollar a year, every September 30, until the wage reached $15.00.
That ladder ends here. From 2027 onward the rate is tied to inflation rather than to a published schedule, which changes the nature of the problem. For five years the next increase has been a known number on a known date, and an employer could set a calendar reminder once and be right every time. After this one, the figure is announced rather than predicted.
The practical consequence: if your process for checking wage rules is “look it up each January,” it has been quietly wrong for five years and it is about to start producing genuinely wrong numbers.
Three things to change
Update payroll so the new rate lands in the right pay period. September 30, 2026 is a Wednesday. Unless your pay period happens to start that day, you have one period that straddles the change: hours worked before the 30th at the old rate, hours from the 30th at the new one. Most payroll systems handle this correctly if the effective date is entered as a date. Many handle it wrongly if someone simply edits the rate on the wrong afternoon.
Replace your minimum wage poster. Florida requires the current rate to be posted where employees can see it. The state publishes the official poster free, in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole, at floridajobs.org/florida-minimum-wage (opens in a new tab). The poster you have is out of date on September 30, and this is the cheapest item on the list to get right.
Re-check your tip credit arithmetic. If you take the credit, the floor you are responsible for paying moves from $10.98 to $11.98. Any tipped employee whose cash wage sits between those two numbers is compliant today and underpaid on September 30 without anyone doing anything.
The tipped-staff case, worked through
Say a server is on the tipped minimum today: $10.98 an hour in cash, with tips expected to cover the remaining $3.02 up to the $14.00 floor.
On September 30 the floor becomes $15.00. The tip credit stays at $3.02. So the cash wage you owe becomes $11.98, an extra dollar an hour from you, per tipped employee, per hour worked.
In Orange County this is the item that actually bites. Hospitality is the region's largest employer, so for most Orlando payrolls the exposure sits in the tipped cash wage rather than in the standard rate.
The rule underneath has not changed: if tips plus cash wage do not reach the full minimum in a given workweek, you make up the difference. What changes is the number that “the full minimum” refers to, and therefore how often that shortfall happens.
What this does to overtime
Overtime is one and a half times the regular rate, so a rate rise is an overtime rise. At $15.00, the overtime rate is $22.50.
This catches employers who pay slightly above minimum and assume they are insulated. If you pay $14.50 today you are above the floor now and below it on September 30, and your overtime obligation moves with it.
What it costs to get this wrong
The reason wage claims attract lawyers is structural rather than moral. Florida's constitution gives an employee a private right of action, and a claimant who prevails recovers the unpaid wages, the same amount again as liquidated damages, and their attorney's fees and costs. A willful violation carries an additional $1,000 fine payable to the state.
→ Related: what decides whether someone is a contractor or an employee
There is a defense, and it is worth understanding because it is the one part of this you control. Under the implementing statute, an employer who proves the underpayment was in good faith, and that it had reasonable grounds to believe it was complying, may have the liquidated damages reduced or removed at the court's discretion. Good faith is not a feeling. It is a record. An employer who can show a documented process for tracking rate changes is in a materially different position from one who can only say that nobody noticed.
Which is why a dollar an hour missed across a handful of tipped staff does not stay a small number. Doubled, plus someone else's legal bill. The arithmetic runs the same whether the underpayment was deliberate or the result of a payroll field nobody updated.
The mistakes we see
Treating it as a January change, and finding out in the first week of October.
Updating the standard rate and forgetting the tipped cash wage, which is a separate field in most payroll systems.
Editing the rate on the day rather than setting an effective date, so a straddling pay period gets paid entirely at one rate.
Assuming a PEO or a payroll vendor handles it silently. Many do. Verifying that yours did is a five-minute job, and the liability is yours either way.
Forgetting anyone paid a flat weekly amount that works out near the floor once you divide by the hours actually worked.
If you are not sure where you stand
The check is small: pull every employee at or within about a dollar of the floor, look at the tipped cash wage as a separate line, and confirm your payroll system holds an effective date rather than a rate someone has to remember to change.