On Wednesday, September 30, every hour worked in Florida gets more expensive. The state minimum wage rises from $14.00 to $15.00 an hour, and the direct cash wage for tipped employees climbs from $10.98 to $11.98. Because the date lands midweek, your next payroll run will straddle two different legal minimums — hours worked Tuesday night are paid under one rate, and hours worked Wednesday morning under another.
This is the final $1 step of Amendment 2, the constitutional amendment Florida voters approved in November 2020 that has raised the wage floor by a dollar every September since 2021. There is no phase-in left after this one: $15.00 holds through all of 2027, and then inflation indexing takes over. Here is what changes, what it costs you, and the checklist to get right before October.
What Changes on September 30
The core numbers are simple, and every Florida employer should have them memorized by the end of this month:
| Worker type | Through Sept. 29, 2026 | Starting Sept. 30, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Standard (non-exempt) employees | $14.00/hour | $15.00/hour |
| Tipped employees (direct cash wage) | $10.98/hour | $11.98/hour |
| Maximum tip credit employers may claim | $3.02/hour | $3.02/hour (unchanged) |
| Overtime floor (1.5x for hours over 40) | $21.00/hour | $22.50/hour |
The standard rate jumps about 7.1 percent, while the tipped cash wage rises about 9.1 percent — the bigger percentage because it starts from a smaller base. If you run a restaurant, bar, hotel, or salon, the tipped increase is the one that moves your labor budget most.
A few scope notes worth knowing:
- The floor covers virtually everyone working in Florida. Employees exempt from the federal minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act (bona fide executive, administrative, professional, and outside-sales employees, among others) are likewise outside Florida's floor. Everyone else — full-time, part-time, seasonal, temporary — is covered.
- No city or county can set a different general minimum. Florida law preempts local minimum-wage ordinances for private employers, so $15.00 is the number statewide. You do not need to check for a higher city rate the way a multi-state employer does in California or Washington.
- The rate applies by hours worked, not by pay date. Hours an employee works on September 29 are paid at the old rate; hours worked September 30 and later are paid at the new rate — even if both land on the same paycheck.
The Tipped-Wage Math, Worked Through
Florida lets employers count up to $3.02 per hour of a tipped employee's tips toward the $15.00 minimum. That tip credit does not change this year — but because the floor rises, the cash wage you must pay directly rises with it: $15.00 minus $3.02 equals $11.98.
Three rules around tipped pay trip up employers every September, so walk through them deliberately:
1. The credit only works if tips actually fill the gap
The $3.02 credit is a ceiling, not a guarantee. If a server's $11.98 cash wage plus actual tips falls short of $15.00 an hour in a given workweek, you must make up the difference on that paycheck. Slow Tuesday lunch shifts are where this bites: the obligation is measured per workweek, so one dead shift can create a make-up payment even when weekend shifts were lucrative. Your payroll system should be computing this automatically — verify that it is before the September 30 run, not after an employee complains.
2. You must give written tip-credit notice before taking the credit
Federal law requires employers to tell tipped employees, in writing, the cash wage being paid, the tip credit being claimed, and that tips remain the employee's property (among other disclosures) — before the credit is taken. With the cash wage changing to $11.98, your existing notices state the wrong number. Issue updated notices on or before September 30 and keep a signed copy in each tipped employee's file. An outdated notice is one of the cheapest compliance failures to fix and one of the most common findings when tipped-pay disputes land in front of an investigator.
3. Tips still belong to the employee
Nothing about Amendment 2 changes tip ownership. Supervisors and managers still may not take a cut of a tip pool, and service charges you keep are wages, not tips — they cannot be counted toward the credit. If your menu or invoices carry an "operations charge" or similar fee under Florida's disclosure rules, make sure your bookkeeping distinguishes retained fees (your revenue, then a wage expense when paid out) from genuine gratuities passed to staff.
What Happens After: $15.00 Through 2027, Then Inflation
One feature of this year's increase surprises employers: the freeze that follows. The $15.00 rate (and the $11.98 tipped wage) stays fixed through all of 2027. Florida then calculates its first inflation-based adjustment on September 30, 2027, and the adjusted rate takes effect January 1, 2028 — shifting future increases from a September cycle to a January cycle, with annual January adjustments after that.
Practically, that means two things for your planning:
- Budget 2027 labor at $15.00 flat. No mid-year step to model. That stability is a genuine gift for annual budgeting after six straight years of September increases.
- Set a calendar reminder for fall 2027. The first CPI-adjusted number will arrive with only about three months' lead time before it takes effect, and by then the September-increase habit will be six years stale. Future-you will appreciate the nudge.
Your Pre-October Payroll Checklist
Work through these nine items before the September 30 run. They are ordered by consequence of getting them wrong.
1. Load the new rates with a September 30 effective date. Enter $15.00 standard and $11.98 tipped in your payroll system effective September 30, not October 1. A surprising number of violations come from systems that flip rates on the first of the month — that leaves September 30 paid a dollar short for every covered hour.
2. Split the straddling pay period. For any pay period covering both sides of September 30, hours must be valued at the rate in effect when worked. Most modern payroll platforms handle mid-period rate changes if the effective date is set correctly; confirm yours does, and spot-check the first run by hand.
3. Reset the overtime floor to $22.50. Any non-exempt employee whose regular rate sits at the minimum now earns overtime at $22.50 an hour. If your system derives overtime from the regular rate automatically, this follows from item 1 — but verify it, especially for tipped employees whose overtime math layers the credit on top of the higher base.
4. Issue updated tip-credit notices. As covered above: new written notices to every tipped employee on or before September 30, signed copies retained.
5. Post the new state minimum-wage notice. Florida publishes an updated minimum-wage poster each year showing the current rates, available from Florida Commerce. Replace the old poster at every Florida worksite — including break rooms at secondary locations that are easy to forget — before the new rate takes effect.
6. Audit everyone between $14.00 and $15.00. Pull a wage listing and flag every employee below $15.00, including salaried non-exempt workers whose hourly equivalent may have slipped under the floor. Part-time and seasonal rosters are the usual hiding spots for a forgotten $14.25 rate.
7. Decide what to do about compression. Your $15.50 shift leads just watched new hires land fifty cents below them. You are not legally required to raise anyone already above the floor — but doing nothing invites resentment and turnover among the experienced staff who train those new hires. Model a compression adjustment (many operators bump each tier by some fraction of the $1 increase) and price it before your leads price it for you by quitting.
8. Update new-hire packets and offer letters. Anything quoting $14.00 — offer templates, onboarding documents, job postings — needs the new figure. A posting that still advertises the old rate after September 30 is both a compliance problem and a recruiting embarrassment.
9. Reconcile tip records for the transition week. Make sure reported tips, charged tips, and cash-wage payments for the week containing September 30 tie to the correct rates on each side of the line. If you operate a large food-or-beverage establishment, remember your tip-reporting obligations ride on top of all of this — clean records now are what make year-end information returns painless.
Why Mistakes Here Cost More Than the Missing Dollar
Florida enforces its wage floor through employee lawsuits, not just agency action, and the remedies stack. An employee who was underpaid must first notify you in writing and give you 15 days to fix it — which is genuinely useful grace if your payroll vendor fumbles the transition. But if the claim is not resolved in that window, the employee may sue for the back wages owed plus an equal amount as liquidated damages, plus reasonable attorney's fees. In effect, every dollar of underpayment can become two dollars plus the other side's legal bill.
Intentional violations add a fine of up to $1,000 per violation payable to the state, and the Attorney General may pursue enforcement as well. Retaliating against an employee for asserting minimum-wage rights — cutting hours, reassigning shifts, termination — is itself a violation with its own remedies. The practical takeaway: treat that 15-day cure notice as the emergency it is. When one arrives, pay what is owed immediately, audit the whole roster for the same error, and document the fix.
Book the Increase Cleanly in Your Own Records
A wage-floor change is also a bookkeeping event, and how you record it determines whether you can answer the questions it will raise. Create a distinct pay-rate effective date in your books for September 30 so labor-cost variances in October trace to the mandate rather than looking like drift. If you track labor as a percentage of revenue — and any restaurant, retail, or hospitality operator should — re-baseline the target now: a 7 percent increase in the wage floor with flat prices pushes the ratio up by roughly two points on a 30-percent-labor business, and you want that modeled before it shows up as a surprise.
Keep the compliance paperwork with the payroll records: the updated tip-credit notices, the poster-replacement log by location, and the wage-listing audit from checklist item 6. If a dispute ever arises, that file is what turns a multi-year fishing expedition into a single answered question. Operators who run their books in plain-text accounting will appreciate that every one of these artifacts — rate changes, effective dates, per-location logs — is just structured text that versions cleanly alongside the ledger. The docs show how to structure payroll and payables accounts so a change like this one stays traceable years later.
Keep Your Payroll Records Audit-Ready From Day One
As you work through the September 30 changeover, remember that the wage increase itself is only half the job — proving you paid it correctly, months or years later, is the other half. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data, including payroll records you can version, search, and reconcile without a black box. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.
