Florida’s minimum wage rose to $15 an hour on Wednesday, the last of the scheduled annual increases voters approved in a 2020 constitutional amendment. The wage climbed by $1 a year after the amendment took effect in 2021, and it will be adjusted annually for inflation from here. When voters passed the measure, the state minimum was $8.56.

The jump from $8.56 to $15 has not made life easy for everyone, including workers who earn more than the minimum.

Shyanne Tharp, a welder helper at Westbrook in Orlando, moved to Florida from Iowa three years ago. Iowa’s minimum wage was $7.25 then and still is. Tharp worked as a detailer in Iowa and says she was paid well, but she couldn’t get a callback after moving. She says she sent about 200 applications a month with no response.

Her break came at a job fair last year, where she learned about Westbrook and moved into welding. CareerSource Central Florida helped pay for her schooling. Tharp says she and her husband both earn more than the minimum wage, yet their costs of about $3,500 a month, mostly rent and bills, leave them stretched, and they have no children.

CareerSource Central Florida says it has served nearly 78,000 people since 2020. Gina Ronokarijo, the agency’s vice president of workforce operations, says mandated wage increases can ripple upward to workers already earning more than the minimum. She says skilled workers sometimes grow uneasy as pay “starts to compress” and wonder why their own wages aren’t rising too.

Ronokarijo says the agency is also seeing more people looking for work as unemployment rises. She says the difficulty is competition for jobs rather than pay, and that wages have nothing to do with it. More skilled workers, she says, are now chasing the same openings.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show Orlando’s unemployment rate climbed from 4.1% to 4.7% between July 2025 and July 2026.

Follow the St. Pete-Clearwater Sun on Facebook, Google, & X

St. Pete-Clearwater Sun: local St. Pete-Clearwater & Tampa Bay, FL news at PIE-Sun.com