What is the minimum wage in Florida? Bills to lower wages for apprenticeships fail to pass

Yahoo

14-05-2025

What's going on with the minimum wage in Florida?
Rumors flew in April that President Donald Trump raised the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour. He did not.
Two bills in the 2025 Florida legislative session that sailed through committee hearings would have allowed people working in apprenticeships, internships, or work-study programs to choose to work for less. Supporters said young students and teenagers were missing out on training opportunities due to high state-mandated wages. Critics warned that companies could label all entry-level jobs as 'apprenticeships' or 'internships' to force employees to work for less.
However, both bills, SB 676 and HB 541, died on May 3, along with about 1,300 other bills in this year's session that were "indefinitely postponed and withdrawn from consideration" so Florida lawmakers could focus instead on the battle over the still-unfinished final 2025-26 state budget.
So, where does that leave Florida's workers?
Florida's minimum wage is currently $13 an hour for non-tipped employees and $9.98 for tipped employees. On Sept. 30, 2025, both those rates will go up another dollar. They'll go up another buck in 2026 until the state minimum wage is $15 an hour, a move mandated by an amendment Florida voters approved in 2020.
In 2004, another voter-approved amendment established a state minimum wage "to provide a decent and healthy life for them and their families, that protects their employers from unfair low-wage competition, and that does not force them to rely on taxpayer-funded public services in order to avoid economic hardship."
One of the bills that did make it through the legislature this year severely limits the chances of Florida voters ever managing to do something like that again. On the same day it passed, Gov. Ron DeSantis quickly signed into law a bill that makes it more difficult for citizens to get constitutional amendments on the ballot, effective immediately.
The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009.
Most states, including Florida, have established higher minimum wages and 21 states raised theirs at the beginning of the year. Michigan passed a gradual wage hike similar to Florida's.
Fourteen states pay the federal minimum rate of $7.25, Georgia, Wyoming and Montana pay less, and Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee have no state minimum wage law.
Where is minimum wage going up? These states and cities are due for hikes in 2025
When he was still president-elect in December, Trump said he would consider raising the federal minimum wage. But he has made no moves to do so, and his Treasury secretary flatly said no.
During Scott Bessent's Senate confirmation hearing, Sen. Bernie Sanders asked him point-blank if he would work to raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
"I believe that the minimum wage is more of a statewide and regional issue," Bessent replied. When asked again, he said simply, "No, sir."
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the highest minimum wage in the U.S. is $17.50 an hour in Washington, D.C.
The highest state minimum wage is Washington state, with $16.66. California and parts of New York pay $16.50.
Georgia and Wyoming businesses pay $5.15 an hour, although in Georgia, it only applies to employers of six or more employees. In Montana, businesses with gross annual sales of less than $110,000 pay $4 an hour.
Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee have no state minimum wage law.
Employers of tipped employees must pay their employees minimum wage, but they can count the tips the employees receive toward it up to the maximum of $3.02, the allowable Fair Labor Standards Act tip credit of 2003. So the direct wage they must pay is the minimum wage minus $3.02.
The current minimum wage in Florida is $13 an hour, so the tipped minimum wage is $9.98. Both will go up a dollar each until they reach $15 an hour for non-tipped employees and $11.98 for tipped employees.
The minimum wage is different from a living wage, however, which tries to calculate how much a person needs to earn per hour to afford the necessities — housing, childcare, health care, food, etc. — where they live.
According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) living wage calculator, the living wage in Florida is $23.41 an hour for one adult with no children, $38.72 for an adult with one child, $47.53 for an adult with two children and $59.64 for an adult with three children, as of February 2025.
No, there are certain occupations and situations where the Department of Labor allowed exemptions to the federal minimum wage law where employees may be paid less. These include, among others:
Executive, administrative and professional employees
Commissioned sales employees
Farm workers
Seasonal or recreational establishment workers
Newspaper delivery people
Federal criminal investigators
Informal workers such as babysitters
Minors under certain circumstances
Student workers
Employees with disabilities if the employer has a certificate from the Department of Labor allowing it (a measure to encourage more employers to hire people with disabilities)
Nonprofit or educational organizations that have applied for an exemption, and others.
Employees of enterprises with an annual gross income of less than $50,000
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Florida minimum wage bills lowering apprenticeship pay fail