Restauromics Weekly Update

Florida's minimum wage climbs to $15.00 an hour on September 30, the final scheduled step of the constitutional amendment voters approved back in 2020. The tipped cash wage rises alongside it, from $10.98 to $11.98. After this step, Florida stops legislating the number entirely. Every future increase gets tied to inflation, automatically, with no ballot measure required.

That last part is the real story. Florida joins a growing list of states that have shifted from politically negotiated wage hikes to formula-driven ones pegged to the Consumer Price Index. It means your labor line item now moves every year whether or not anyone in Tallahassee votes on it.

If you operate outside Florida, do not tune out. A growing number of states now index their minimum wage to inflation in some form, and mid-year effective dates, like the July 1 increases in Chicago, D.C., and Oregon this year, are becoming more common than the traditional January 1 reset. The days of one predictable annual wage conversation are ending.

See 2026 labor and regulatory updates →

The Credit Card Competition Act, first introduced in 2022 and reintroduced this January by Senators Roger Marshall and Dick Durbin, just picked up an endorsement from President Trump. That is the kind of bipartisan alignment swipe fee reform has never had before, and it changes the odds of this actually moving through Congress.

The bill would force large banks to enable at least one non-Visa, non-Mastercard network on every card, giving merchants a real choice of routing instead of a default. Visa and Mastercard currently process 85 percent of credit card transactions nationwide, with essentially no competitive pressure on what they charge to move a dollar from a diner's card to your bank account. Estimated combined savings for businesses and consumers: $17 billion a year.

The National Restaurant Association and the Independent Restaurant Coalition are both backing it, which tells you how much this issue actually costs the average operator. Swipe fees already sit near the top of the list of costs nobody budgets for correctly, right behind food and labor, and they get worse every time a guest taps instead of swipes.

Track the swipe fee fight →

Insurance rarely gets its own headline, but it is consistently one of the costs operators name as a top-five pressure point, and 2026 data finally puts real numbers behind the complaint. A full restaurant coverage package, combining general liability, a business owner's policy, and workers' comp, now averages $359 a month, or roughly $4,306 a year. That is more than most operators budgeted even two years ago.

The breakdown matters more than the total. General liability alone runs about $146 a month, and restaurants sit at the high end of that category industry-wide because of one specific risk: slip-and-fall claims. Workers' comp averages $63 a month, and a standalone business owner's policy averages $214. Your actual number depends heavily on two factors: seating capacity and annual sales volume, both proxies for how many claims your business is statistically likely to generate.

A 30-seat counter-service spot doing $200,000 a year and a 200-cover full-service room doing $1.5 million are not the same risk, and insurers price them accordingly. If your restaurant has grown since your last policy review, your coverage limits may not have kept pace with your actual exposure, and that gap only shows up the day you file a claim.

See the full 2026 restaurant insurance cost report →

The commission rate printed in your delivery app contract is not the number that matters. DoorDash lists 15 to 30 percent depending on plan tier, Uber Eats runs 15 to 27 percent, Grubhub advertises as low as 5 percent, and none of those figures include what operators actually pay once promotions, sponsored placement, and pickup fees get layered on top.

The real number, according to 2026 industry data, lands closer to 30 to 40 percent of order value once every add-on is counted. Run that through a normal kitchen's cost structure and the margin math turns brutal fast: at a 25 percent effective commission, a well-run kitchen might clear 5 to 7 percent margin on a delivery order. At 30 percent, that drops to 0 to 2 percent. You are covering your costs and doing volume for its own sake, not making money on that order.

This is not an argument to quit delivery. It is an argument to stop treating every app the same way and stop assuming visibility spend pays for itself by default. The operators still making money on third-party delivery treat it as one channel among several, not the backbone of the business, and they track per-order margin the same way they track food cost.

Read the true cost of third-party delivery →