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Florida's minimum wage is a constitutionally mandated rate that increases automatically each September 30 without any legislative vote. The current rate is $14.00 per hour, effective since September 30, 2025, and the constitutional escalator driving these raises keeps the floor $6.
Amendment 2 to Florida's constitution, approved by voters on November 3, 2020, hardwired a $1.00-per-year minimum wage escalator into state law that bypasses the legislature entirely. That mechanism set the minimum wage in Florida at $13.
Before 2004, Florida had no state minimum wage at all. Voters fixed that twice through constitutional amendments, the second of which created a fixed $1.00-per-year escalator that brought the minimum wage in Florida to $13.00 per hour on September 30, 2024, with a $15.
Section 652 of New York's Labor Law sets the minimum wage in NYC at $16.00 per hour as of January 1, 2024. That headline number hides a tiered system of tip credits, industry-specific floors, and geographic zones that can reduce a worker's guaranteed cash wage to $10.
New York's minimum wage operates through a geographic tier system that pays workers in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester a different hourly rate than workers in the rest of the state. The 2024 update set those tiers at $16.00 and $15.
The Florida Constitution, not the state legislature, controls the minimum wage for roughly 10 million workers statewide. That constitutional lock is the defining feature of Florida's wage law: the current rate is $14.00 per hour, rising to $15.
Amendment 2, the constitutional provision Florida voters approved on November 3, 2020, locked the state's minimum wage into a fixed $1-per-year escalator that no governor or legislature can repeal.
New York City's minimum wage is the legal hourly floor every employer in the five boroughs must pay, and on January 1, 2024, it climbed from $15.00 to $16.00 per hour. That dollar increase was the first move in a three-year legislated schedule that reaches $17.
The Department of Labor's National Prevailing Wage Center is processing standard OES wage requests filed in March 2026, putting prevailing wage determination processing time at roughly 3 months per case.
California's Director of Industrial Relations sets prevailing wage rates for every county and trade classification in the state, drawing primarily from collectively bargained union agreements.
A prevailing wage is the minimum hourly rate, including fringe benefits, that contractors and subcontractors must pay workers on government-funded projects, as determined by the U.S. Department of Labor or a state equivalent.
The Davis-Bacon Act requires contractors on federal construction projects to pay locally determined wage rates. It has done so since 1931.
