On September 30, Florida's minimum wage went from $14 to $15 an hour, and the cash wage for tipped workers rose from $10.98 to $11.98, HRMorning reported. It was the last of the dollar-a-year steps voters put into the state constitution in 2020, a climb that started at $10 in 2021.
Most of the talk has been about the bottom of the scale. Florida Trend's summary of Daytona Beach News-Journal reporting found that some owners have raised prices and cut staff, while others support the increase. The Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association's Samantha Padgett warned that some employers "may not be prepared for the fact that $15 is not the ceiling," according to WUSF reporting carried by Jacksonville Today.
She's right, but the raise to $15 is the cost every owner saw coming for six years. The harder one is the employee who has been with you three years, was making $16 when the floor was $14, trained the new hire, and, unless you've changed their pay, now makes a dollar more than that person does.
When the floor pushes up the wages just above it, that's called a spillover. A 2021 study in the Journal of Labor Economics found "modest spillovers extending up to $2.50 above the minimum wage," but only at firms with a large share of low-wage workers. Modest means the raise at the bottom doesn't fully travel up. When the floor rises a dollar and the next rung rises less, the premium for experience shrinks. That's compression, and the employee who notices it first is the one who trained the new hire.
In the Jacksonville area, a lot of people sit on those rungs. BLS figures for May 2025 show food preparation and serving jobs were 9.4% of local employment and paid an average of $17.57 an hour. Hotel desk clerks averaged $16.80 and receptionists $18.13, against an area-wide average of $31.59. Those are averages, so many people in those jobs earned less, and the floor has gone up $2 since then.
The schedule makes it worse. The dollar steps were printed years in advance. Starting next year, the state will calculate a new rate each September 30 using the CPI-W, an inflation index for wage earners, and the new rate takes effect the following January 1. The first one lands on January 1, 2028. CPI-W rose 3.5% in the 12 months through August. At that pace, $15 would become about $15.53. That's a smaller jump than the 7% owners just absorbed, and it comes every year, with the size known only a few months ahead.
An owner who handles that by deciding each person's raise from memory every winter will rebuild the same ladder every year, and it will drift a little each time. The fix is to write the ladder down. Set pay bands by role, and set a rule for how far above the floor each band sits. When the floor moves, the whole ladder moves with it, and nobody has to remember to do it. Then do the same on the other side of the ledger. If labor costs move every January, your quotes and service contracts need a way to move too. How to write escalation terms into a contract is a question for your attorney or accountant.
A written pay structure is also one less thing that lives only in the owner's head, and a business that runs on its owner is hard to sell. RVRBN is building its work around helping owners get ready to sell, so we have an interest in owners doing this.
Watch the next CPI release on October 14 and the readings through next August, which set the 2028 rate. Watch whether local job postings start creeping above the new floor before the state says they have to. And this month, decide whether the people you were paying above the old minimum are still where you meant them to be. If they aren't, that's the first band to write down.
If you want to talk through what this means for your company, get in touch.