Florida hit $15 an hour: what the FLSA and the Equal Pay Act still require

On September 30, 2026, Florida’s minimum wage reached $15.00 an hour, the final scheduled increase in a six-year phase-in that Florida voters approved in 2020. For a lot of employers, hitting that number feels like closing the book on wage compliance for the year. It isn’t. The minimum wage is one line in a much larger set of federal wage and hour obligations, and none of the rest of them moved just because Florida’s number did. The Fair Labor Standards Act still determines who is owed overtime and who isn’t, using a test that has nothing to do with what an employee is paid. The Equal Pay Act still requires that employees doing substantially equal work be paid equally regardless of sex, and a raise that closes one gap can just as easily leave another one in place. Both frameworks operate independently of the state minimum wage and independently of each other. Missing one does not excuse the other.

The wage floor: federal, Florida, and which one applies

The federal minimum wage has not moved

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since July 24, 2009. Where a state minimum wage is higher than the federal rate, as is now the case in Florida, employees are entitled to the higher of the two. The federal floor still matters for employers with workers in states that have not raised their own minimum wage, but it has had no practical effect on pay in Florida for years.

Florida reached the top of its schedule on September 30, 2026

Florida’s minimum wage is set by a 2020 amendment to the Florida Constitution, Article X, Section 24. The amendment set the wage at $10.00 an hour effective September 30, 2021, then raised it by $1.00 every September 30 after that until it reached $15.00 an hour. That final increase took effect September 30, 2026:

• Standard minimum wage: $15.00 per hour
• Tipped minimum wage: $11.98 per hour

The tipped rate comes from a fixed tip credit written into the amendment itself, not from a percentage of the current wage. Employers may credit tips up to the amount of the federal tip credit as it existed in 2003: $3.02 an hour ($5.15 federal minimum wage that year, minus the $2.13 federal cash wage). That $3.02 figure is permanently fixed at the 2003 level; it does not move when Florida’s own minimum wage moves. $15.00 minus $3.02 is $11.98.

What happens next is worth reading carefully, because two versions of it are circulating. Starting September 30, 2027, and every September 30 after that, the state recalculates the rate by applying inflation measured over the twelve months before the preceding September 1, using the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) or its successor. The amendment’s operative text, and the implementing statute at Fla. Stat. § 448.110(4)(a), both say each recalculated rate “shall be published and take effect on the following January 1st,” which puts the first inflation-adjusted rate on January 1, 2028, with the wage staying at $15.00 in the meantime. The ballot summary voters actually saw described this more loosely, as increases “revert[ing] to being adjusted annually for inflation starting September 30th, 2027.” We’re following the operative constitutional and statutory text rather than the ballot summary’s shorthand, but FloridaCommerce is required to publish the adjusted rate and its effective date on its website by October 15 each year, and that published notice is what will actually control payroll compliance.

For employers with workers outside Florida

The federal tipped cash wage is $2.13 an hour. That figure dates to 1991, when it was set at 50% of the then-$4.25 federal minimum wage; a 1996 law fixed it as a flat dollar amount instead of a percentage, so it has not moved with any federal minimum wage increase since, including the increase to $7.25 in 2009. The maximum tip credit an employer can claim is simply the difference between the federal minimum wage and that fixed cash wage; at the current $7.25 federal minimum, that ceiling is $5.12 an hour. Neither number is the rate that governs in Florida, where the tipped minimum has stayed above the federal tipped floor throughout the entire phase-in. Employers with tipped employees in other states need to confirm each state’s own tipped wage and tip-credit rules separately; they are not uniform, and several states do not permit a tip credit at all.

Overtime: a separate requirement that doesn’t track the wage increase

Overtime is not a function of what an employee earns. It is a function of hours worked, and it applies independently of any minimum wage change.

Covered non-exempt employees must be paid one and one-half times their regular rate of pay for every hour worked over 40 in a workweek. There is no daily overtime requirement under federal law, and no cap on total weekly hours for employees 16 and older.

FLSA coverage attaches in one of two ways. Enterprise coverage applies to businesses with at least $500,000 in annual sales or business volume, and applies automatically, regardless of revenue, to hospitals, businesses providing medical or nursing care for residents (including skilled nursing and assisted living facilities), schools and preschools, and government agencies. Individual coverage applies separately, on an employee-by-employee basis, when that employee’s own work regularly involves interstate commerce, such as producing goods that will ship out of state, making interstate calls, or handling records of interstate transactions.

The practical point for this year’s wage increase: raising an hourly employee’s base pay to meet the new $15.00 floor changes the number their overtime is calculated from. It does not change the calculation itself, and it does not require any separate action beyond recalculating the regular rate going forward.

Hospitals and residential care: the 40-hour workweek isn’t automatic

The “over 40 in a workweek” standard above is the default, but hospitals and residential care establishments are allowed to adopt a different overtime period under FLSA section 7(j), commonly called the 8-and-80 system: a fixed 14-day period in place of the workweek, with overtime owed for hours worked over 8 in a single workday and for hours over 80 across the 14-day period. It takes an agreement or understanding with employees before the work period begins; it doesn’t apply automatically just because the employer is a hospital or residential care facility. Employers using it need to run both the daily and the 14-day thresholds, not just a weekly one.

Tipped employees: overtime is calculated on $15.00, not $11.98

Overtime for a tipped employee is calculated on the full minimum wage, not on the reduced cash wage the employer actually pays. The tip credit itself stays fixed per hour; it does not scale up for overtime hours. For a Florida tipped employee: 1.5 times the $15.00 minimum wage is $22.50, minus the fixed $3.02 tip credit, for a required overtime cash wage of $19.48 an hour, not 1.5 times $11.98.

A related point that trips up the regular rate generally, not just for tipped employees: the “regular rate” used for overtime is not the same as an employee’s stated hourly or base rate. It has to include nondiscretionary bonuses, shift differentials, and other pay tied to hours or performance, unless a specific statutory exclusion applies. An employee earning a $15.00 base rate plus a nondiscretionary attendance or production bonus has a regular rate above $15.00, and overtime has to be calculated on that higher number.

The exemption question: who is actually exempt from overtime

Executive, administrative, and professional employees can generally be exempt from overtime, but only if they satisfy three separate requirements. Meeting one or two without the third does not create an exemption, with one notable carve-out below.

Salary level. As of a May 14, 2026 technical amendment from the Department of Labor, the salary threshold for these exemptions sits at $684 per week ($35,568 per year). A separate, higher threshold applies to highly compensated employees: $107,432 per year, which must include at least $684 per week paid on a salary or fee basis.

These are the same levels that were in effect before 2024. The Department had issued a rule that year raising both thresholds substantially; a federal court vacated that rule in November 2024, and the Department’s own enforcement had already reverted to the 2019 levels in practice. The May 2026 amendment made that reversion official rather than changing anything operationally.

Salary level and salary basis don’t apply to everyone. Bona fide teachers and bona fide practitioners of law or medicine are exempt from both the salary level and salary basis requirements entirely; for them, the duties test alone determines exempt status. A physician or attorney paid well under $35,568 a year, or paid hourly, can still be exempt. For everyone else in these three categories, both requirements apply.

Salary basis. This is a separate requirement from the salary level, and it is about how the pay is structured, not how much of it there is. An exempt employee has to receive a predetermined amount each pay period that cannot be reduced based on the quality or quantity of work performed, and has to receive the full salary for any week in which any work is performed, regardless of hours or days actually worked. Docking an otherwise-exempt employee’s pay for a partial-day absence, as opposed to a full-day absence taken under a bona fide leave plan, can break the exemption even when that employee’s salary is well above $35,568 a year. One specific exception: an employer may pay a proportionate part of an exempt employee’s salary for time actually worked when that employee takes unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, including a partial day of FMLA leave, without that proration breaking the exemption. Where an actual practice of improper deductions is found outside that exception, the exemption is lost only for the period during which the deductions were made, and only for employees in the same job classification working for the same managers responsible for the deductions, not the whole workforce.

Duties. Each exemption category has its own definition of qualifying work:

• Executive: primary duty is managing the business or a recognized department, customarily directing the work of at least two other full-time employees (or their equivalent), and having real authority or influence over hiring, firing, and advancement decisions.
• Administrative: primary duty is office or non-manual work directly related to management or general business operations, performed with discretion and independent judgment over matters of real significance, not just following established procedures.
• Professional: primary duty requires advanced knowledge in a recognized field of science or learning, acquired through a prolonged course of specialized instruction (the learned professional test), or requires invention, imagination, originality, or talent in a recognized creative or artistic field (the creative professional test).

Highly compensated employees get a lighter version of the duties test: instead of meeting the full executive, administrative, or professional duties test, they only need to customarily and regularly perform at least one of the exempt duties that test would require, as long as their primary duty is still office or non-manual work and they clear the $107,432 compensation threshold.

Paying someone a salary comfortably above $35,568 does not make them exempt if their actual day-to-day duties don’t meet the applicable test, or if the way that pay is administered doesn’t meet the salary basis test (outside the teacher, law, and medicine carve-out above). Job title and pay level are not substitutes for a duties analysis, and that analysis has to be run for each role, not assumed from an org chart.

The Equal Pay Act: a different axis of wage compliance

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 amended the FLSA to prohibit paying employees of one sex less than employees of the opposite sex for equal work within the same establishment, meaning jobs requiring equal skill, effort, and responsibility, performed under similar working conditions. Jobs do not need identical titles to be equal; they need substantially equal content. The “same establishment” element matters for multi-location employers: the comparison generally runs between employees at the same physical location or operation, not across an employer’s entire footprint, though there are exceptions where a central office sets pay for multiple sites.

“Wages” under the Act is read broadly. Federal regulations define it as all payments made to an employee as remuneration for employment, including salary, bonuses, profit sharing, and other fringe benefits such as use of a company car, expense accounts and allowances, and vacation and holiday pay, regardless of whether those same payments would count as “wages” under the FLSA’s separate minimum wage and overtime rules.

An employer can justify a pay differential, but only under one of four defenses:

• A seniority system
• A merit system
• A system that measures earnings by quantity or quality of production
• A differential based on any factor other than sex

One rule cuts across all four: an employer who discovers a wage differential that violates the Act cannot fix it by lowering the higher-paid employee’s wage. The only lawful correction raises the lower wage.

The Equal Pay Act and Title VII overlap but are not the same claim. An employee can bring an Equal Pay Act claim, a Title VII sex-based pay discrimination claim, or both, over the same pay decision. The Equal Pay Act also works differently procedurally: an employee can go directly to federal court without filing an EEOC charge first, and has two years to do so (three years if the violation was willful). Title VII requires exhausting an EEOC charge before suit.

Florida employers and the Equal Pay Act

Florida has its own wage-discrimination statute, Section 448.07 of the Florida Statutes, and it applies only to employers with two or more employees. Its core standard tracks the federal Equal Pay Act closely: the same equal skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions test, and the same four categories of defense. The fourth defense is worded differently under state law: it permits “a differential based on any reasonable factor other than sex when exercised in good faith,” where the federal statute’s text says simply “a differential based on any other factor other than sex,” without the added reasonableness and good-faith language.

The distinction that matters in practice: Section 448.07 states directly that it does not apply to any employer, or any employee whose employer, is already subject to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. Any employer that meets FLSA enterprise coverage is clearly out of Section 448.07’s reach and operating under the federal Equal Pay Act instead. Enterprise coverage isn’t only the $500,000 revenue test: it also reaches hospitals, businesses providing medical or nursing care for residents, schools and preschools, and government agencies automatically, regardless of revenue. Where an employer doesn’t meet enterprise coverage by either route but has one or more individually covered employees, whether that takes the whole employer outside Section 448.07 or just those specific employees is a closer question the statute’s text doesn’t resolve cleanly; either way, the practical range of employers left relying on the state statute alone is small: intrastate businesses under $500,000 in annual business, outside the categories covered regardless of revenue, with two or more employees and no individually covered employees.

For most Florida employers, this means the state equal pay law is not the operative standard even though it exists on the books; the federal Equal Pay Act is. That also means the state statute’s shorter enforcement window, a civil action must be filed within six months after termination of employment, with recovery limited to unpaid wages from the year before the claim is filed, does not apply to most employers either. The federal two- and three-year windows do.

Putting it together

The new minimum wage is one line in a larger set of wage and hour obligations. Here’s what else is still open:

• Does every hourly employee’s base pay meet or exceed $15.00 an hour, or $11.98 for properly documented tipped employees, as of September 30, 2026?
• Has the regular rate used to calculate overtime been recalculated for anyone whose base pay changed, and does that regular rate include nondiscretionary bonuses and shift differentials, not just the stated hourly rate?
• For tipped employees, is overtime being calculated on the full $15.00 minimum wage (yielding $19.48 an hour) rather than on the $11.98 cash wage?
• Has every exempt classification been reviewed against all three requirements (or against the duties test alone, for bona fide teachers, lawyers, and physicians), the current $35,568 salary threshold (or $107,432 for highly compensated employees), the salary basis rules on improper deductions, and the actual duties test for that role, not just its title or pay level?
• If the business is a hospital or residential care establishment using the 8-and-80 overtime system, are both the daily (8-hour) and 14-day (80-hour) thresholds being tracked, not just a weekly one?
• When was pay last compared across employees doing substantially equal work within the same establishment, and is any differential documented against one of the four permitted defenses?
• Does the business meet FLSA enterprise coverage, either the $500,000 annual business test or automatic coverage as a hospital, residential care provider, school, preschool, or government agency, or does any employee’s work independently trigger individual coverage? That determines whether federal overtime and equal pay rules apply, not just the state minimum wage statute.
• If a pay gap was found, was it corrected by raising the lower wage, not lowering the higher one?

This post is general HR and compliance information, not legal advice. Requirements vary based on employer size, location, and circumstances. Consult qualified legal counsel when reviewing wage and hour compliance or resolving a pay differential.