$14.00Minimum wage today — constitutionally setrises Sep 30, 2026
$15.00Minimum wage from Sept 30, 2026, then CPI-indexedFla. Const. Art. X §24
2×Automatic liquidated damages on a minimum-wage claimFla. Stat. §448.110
15Days to cure after notice, before suit can be filed§448.110(6)
Florida in short
Florida sets no daily overtime, no meal breaks, and no rest breaks for adult workers. Hours are governed by the federal FLSA — 1.5× the regular rate past 40 in a workweek. Minors under 18 must receive a 30-minute break after four consecutive hours, but adults have no statutory break entitlement at all. Florida also has no state heat-illness standard for outdoor workers, and since HB 433 took effect on July 1, 2024, local governments are barred from imposing their own heat requirements — which ended Miami-Dade’s proposed construction heat ordinance before it began.
Where Florida is not permissive is the wage itself. The minimum wage is set in the state constitution on a published escalator: $14.00 an hour today, rising to $15.00 on September 30, 2026, and indexed to inflation annually after that. More importantly, Florida’s minimum-wage law carries a direct private right of action with automatic liquidated (double) damages plus attorney’s fees, requiring only a 15-day notice to cure and no agency filing first. An underpayment that would be a routine correction elsewhere is a doubled judgment here.
Summary as of July 2026 — rules move; verify current requirements with the Florida labor department and qualified counsel. The California column is there for scale, not because it applies to you: it's the regime CDO's engine was built to, which is why Florida's rules run inside it with room to spare.
What Florida employers actually have to get right
On hours, Florida is federal-simple: overtime past 40 in a workweek, no daily overtime, no double time, and no state-mandated meal or rest breaks for adults. (A vestigial 1920s provision, Fla. Stat. §448.01, describes a ten-hour legal workday for manual labor, but its own carve-out for FLSA-covered employers renders it inapplicable to essentially every modern contractor.) Minors under 18 must get a 30-minute break after four consecutive hours of work.
The wage side is where Florida bites. The minimum wage sits in the state constitution (Art. X, §24) on a voter-approved escalator: $14.00 an hour now, $15.00 on September 30, 2026, then annual inflation indexing. Contractors bidding multi-year work should be pricing the step, not discovering it.
And the enforcement mechanism is unusually direct. Fla. Stat. §448.110 gives an underpaid worker a private right of action with automatic liquidated damages equal to the unpaid amount — a doubling — plus attorney’s fees, after only a 15-day notice to cure. There is no requirement to go through a state agency first. This is why Florida wage claims escalate fast: the plaintiff’s side has a fee-shifting statute and a doubling multiplier from day one.
On heat, Florida moved deliberately in the other direction. HB 433, codified at Fla. Stat. §448.106 and effective July 1, 2024, prohibits local governments from requiring heat-exposure protections beyond state or federal law for private employers — killing Miami-Dade’s pending ordinance. No state standard replaced it. Outdoor crews in one of the hottest, most humid construction markets in the country are therefore covered by federal OSHA’s General Duty Clause and its 2026–2031 Heat National Emphasis Program, and nothing more prescriptive.
For a Florida roofing or field-services company, that combination points at one conclusion: your exposure lives in pay accuracy and hour records, not break penalties. Regular-rate errors, unpaid travel between sites, and rounding drift are what get doubled. CDO computes the regular rate correctly — including nondiscretionary bonuses — pays to the minute with no rounding, and keeps a GPS-verified trail per punch.
The one most Florida contractors get wrong
Florida’s minimum-wage statute isn’t just a rate — it’s a fee-shifting, damage-doubling private cause of action that a worker can file after a 15-day notice without ever contacting a state agency. Contractors treat a small underpayment as a payroll correction; under §448.110 it is the unpaid wages, an equal amount again in liquidated damages, and the other side’s attorney’s fees. Combined with a minimum wage that steps up every September 30, a stale pay rate in your payroll system is a compounding liability, not a clerical error.
Wherever the rules land on the strictness scale, the constant is the same: disputes are decided by records. CDO's GPS-verified, minute-level, bilingual punch trail — reviewed by AI, with exceptions surfaced for human judgment — is the record that wins them. See why teams pick CDO →