Josh Hawley proposes raising federal minimum wage to $15. What is Florida's minimum wage
Ultraconservative Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley joined Democratic Vermont Sen. Peter Welch to introduce a bill on June 10 to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
The bill, dubbed the 'Higher Wages for American Workers Act,' would raise the minimum wage starting in January 2026 and allow it to increase on the basis of inflation in subsequent years. It's unclear if the bill will be taken up for a vote.
The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour and has not changed since 2009, while the cost of living has risen dramatically. Previous Congressional efforts to raise the minimum wage have failed.
President Donald Trump said in December before he took office that he would "consider" raising the federal minimum wage, and rumors flew in April that he had bumped it to $25 an hour. Not only was that not true, he revoked a 2024 executive order that set the minimum wage for federal contractors at $17.75.
'For decades, working Americans have seen their wages flatline," Hawley said in a statement. "One major culprit of this is the failure of the federal minimum wage to keep up with the economic reality facing hardworking Americans every day."
Welch, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, echoed a similar sentiment. 'Every hardworking American deserves a living wage that helps put a roof over their head and food on the table – $7.25 an hour doesn't even come close,' he said.
Critics, such as the Employment Policies Institute, say the change would result in a loss of jobs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found in an analysis that raising the minimum wage would 'raise the earnings and family income of most low-wage workers' but would cause other low-income workers to lose their jobs and their family income to fall.
How does this compare with Florida?
States may choose their own minimum wage levels and many of them are far ahead of the federal minimum wage.
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 again in 2026 until the state minimum wage is $15 an hour, a move mandated by a constitutional amendment Florida voters approved in 2020.
The state minimum wage was first established in 2004 by another voter-approved amendment "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."
There have been efforts to work around it. Two bills in the 2025 Florida legislative session 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 cheaply.
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.
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 raise the minimum wage 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.
There are also certain occupations and situations where the Department of Labor allows exemptions to the federal minimum wage law and employees may be paid less, including farm workers, executive, administrative and professional employees. commissioned sales employees, seasonal or recreational establishment workers, minors under certain circumstances, employees with disabilities under certain situations, employees of enterprises with an annual gross income of less than $50,000, and more.
Where is minimum wage going up? These states and cities are due for hikes in 2025
Even if it passes, gets signed by Trump and gets past any legal challenges, it's unclear if Florida would respond by immediately adopting the new federal minimum wage or simply waiting unto the state reaches that level in the time frame it's already on.
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.
Florida's minimum wage was initially tied to the federal minimum wage created in 1938 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 which set the minimum hourly wage at 25 cents, banned oppressive child labor and capped the maximum workweek at 44 hours.
In 2005, Florida voters approved Amendment 5 to establish a state minimum wage over the federal standard. Florida has paid its minimum wage workers more than the federal minimum ever since.
Amendment 5 brought the hourly wage for non-tipped employees to $6.15, a dollar more than the federal minimum at the time, and required the Department of Economic Opportunity to calculate an adjusted state minimum wage rate based on the rate of inflation for the 12 months prior to Sept. 1, based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers. There have been several increases since:
2005: Raised to $6.15 an hour
2006: Raised to $6.40 an hour
2009: Raised to $7.21 an hour
2010: Raised to $7.25 an hour
2016: After 6 years, raised to $8.05 an hour
2017: Raised to $8.10 an hour
2018: Raised to $8.25 an hour
2019: Raised to $8.45 an hour
2021: Raised to $10 an hour to meet requirements from the 2020 amendment
2022: Raised to $11 an hour
2023: Raised to $12 an hour
2024: Raised to $13 an hour
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Hawley introduces $15 minimum wage bill. How would this affect Florida?
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