Florida by the Numbers

Florida added roughly 5.6 million residents in twenty years, growing about 32 percent, and passed New York in 2014 to become the third largest state in the country. Growth is the backdrop for everything else on this site: every budget fight, every housing bill, and every school funding formula happens inside this curve.

Values are July 1 estimates. The y axis is trimmed to the data range, not zero.

View the data table

Year	Residents	Change

Adjusted for inflation, Florida's economy produced about 58 percent more in 2025 than in 2005. The chart also shows what the housing collapse did. Output peaked in 2007, fell for two years, and did not pass its 2007 level again until 2015. Florida lost eight years, and that lost decade shaped the budgets, the wages, and the politics that followed.

Values are chained 2017 dollars, which remove inflation so years can be compared honestly. The y axis is trimmed to the data range, not zero.

View the data table

Year	Output (millions of chained 2017 dollars)	Annual change

Florida's minimum wage exists because voters wrote it into the constitution, twice. Amendment 5 (2004) created a state wage with an annual inflation adjustment. Amendment 2 (2020) cleared the 60 percent supermajority the constitution requires and set a dollar a year path to $15.00. The gray line is the federal minimum wage, which has not moved since July 2009.

The chart shows the rate in effect at the end of each year. Mid-year effective dates, including the 2011 court-ordered correction, are in the table below. The final step is scheduled, not yet in effect, and is drawn dashed.

View every rate change since 2005

Effective	Rate	What changed

Florida's twenty year report card splits cleanly by grade level. Fourth graders finish near the top of the country: in 2024 only one state scored significantly higher in math, and Florida reads above a national average it sat seven points below in 1998. By eighth grade the advantage is gone. The 2024 eighth grade math score fell below Florida's own 2003 score, and eighth grade reading is statistically identical to 1998. Whatever is working in Florida's elementary schools stops working somewhere on the way to eighth grade, and note 1 explains why even the strong half carries an asterisk.

Scale scores, 0 to 500, public school students only. Charts window 2003 to 2024, and each y axis is trimmed to its own data range.

View all four series

Year	G4 read FL	G4 read US	G4 math FL	G4 math US	G8 read FL	G8 read US	G8 math FL	G8 math US

The chart above stops at eighth grade because the data does. NAEP tests grades 4, 8, and 12, reports state results at 4 and 8 only, and nothing else independent fills the space: for the entire back half of a student's career, Florida grades Florida. It was not always this bare. Each independent instrument that once measured Florida's older students has been switched off, one at a time, and the state's own yardstick was replaced twice in eight years. The table shows who measures what today; the timelines show how it got this way.

FAST ELA and mathematics also exist at grades K to 2 as progress monitoring; the rows above describe the statewide, standardized assessments of s. 1008.22(3)(a), which run grades 3 to 10 in ELA and 3 to 8 in mathematics.

FAST mathematics ends at grade 8. Above that, mathematics is measured only by the Algebra 1 and Geometry end-of-course exams, which follow the course, not the grade, so a student may sit them in grade 8 or grade 11.

The grade 11 administration is mandatory for districts under s. 1008.22(3)(c), Florida Statutes, subject to appropriation, with the district selecting the test. FLDOE's assessment results pages publish no results from it. The grade 10 college-exam administration rests on the assessment schedule, not the statute.

NAEP state-level results exist at grades 4 and 8 only. The restored 2028 and 2032 grade 12 state-level NAEP is opt-in; whether Florida opts in is an open decision.

The independent instruments, in order of disappearance

This contraction is federal. Florida did not cause it, and the entries below say so; the state's own choices follow separately.

1. 2012. Florida buys its own PISA state sample, 55 schools, and gets the only international measure its high schoolers have ever had: reading 492, not measurably different from the U.S. average; math 467, measurably below the U.S. 481. Source.
2. 2015. Florida does not repeat. Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Puerto Rico take 2015 samples; after that, no U.S. state or territory takes one in 2018 or 2022. The international window closed for everyone. Source.
3. 2009 and 2013. Florida volunteers for both rounds of the grade 12 state-level NAEP pilot. The program ends after 2013, and every grade 12 release since has been national only. Source.
4. February 2025. The scheduled age 17 Long-Term Trend administration is canceled; field operations end February 19. Ages 9 and 13 proceed. The 17-year-old line had last actually been assessed in 2012. Source.
5. March 2025. A Department of Education reduction in force leaves NCES, which runs NAEP, with between one and three employees remaining as of July 2025, per the Department's own Inspector General. Source.
6. April 21, 2025. The National Assessment Governing Board cuts roughly a dozen scheduled assessments through 2032, including grade 12 state-level reading and math, citing the Department's stated need to find efficiencies. Source.
7. May 15, 2026. The board restores grade 12 state-level reading and math for 2028 and 2032, opt-in for states, along with civics and science additions. Writing stays gone entirely, and no Long-Term Trend of any age runs before 2033. Source.

Florida's own choices

1. 2015. Florida replaces FCAT 2.0 with the Florida Standards Assessments: a new instrument and new cut scores. Source.
2. 2014. Under SB 1720, most Florida public high school graduates become exempt from college placement testing. Developmental math enrollment falls from 38 to 22 percent in one year, and the state stops systematically measuring whether its own graduates arrive ready for college-level work. Source.
3. 2023. Florida replaces FSA with FAST on the B.E.S.T. scale. FLDOE's own guidance: performance comparisons should not be made across the two systems. No state-scored Florida series now reaches back past 2023. Source.
4. 2023-24. Districtwide ACT, SAT, or CLT administration to every grade 11 student becomes mandatory, subject to appropriation. FLDOE's assessment results pages publish no results from it: a nationally comparable measure, given every year, reported nowhere. Source.

Coverage table from the Florida Statewide Assessment Program 2025-2026 Schedule, Office of Assessment, revision of 12/19/25; grade 11 mandate from s. 1008.22(3)(c), Florida Statutes (2025) (archived), verified 2026-08-06; timeline entries cite their federal and state primary documents inline. Chronology verified against nagb.gov board actions, the NCES assessment calendar, and the Department of Education Inspector General; the full verification record is in the site repository.

Above grade 8, the numbers are Florida's own: state-administered, state-scored, against a threshold the State Board of Education sets, comparable to no other state and to no Florida before 2023, when the current scale began. The number that matters most in that system is the grade 10 reading gate, the score a student needs for a standard diploma: 58 percent cleared it on the spring 2025 test, up from 53 percent in 2024. What share of the cohort ultimately passes after four annual retake windows and concordant SAT or ACT scores, FLDOE does not publish. The state's headline claim from this system, 61 percent of students in grades 3 through 10 scored on or above grade level on the end-of-year ELA progress monitoring assessment, is the Governor's office, June 26, 2026 announcement's figure (source), and the threshold behind it is state-set.

Level 3 on the grade 10 FAST ELA Reading assessment is the passing level for the graduation requirement, per FLDOE's own scale guidance. The series starts with spring 2024, the first spring administration on the B.E.S.T. scale; the 2022-23 provisional-scale year is excluded rather than mixed. First-administration pass rates understate eventual passing, and no cumulative post-retake rate is published anywhere.

At the end of the pipeline the state reports an outcome count, not a skill measure. The graduation rate is a genuine long series and a genuine rise, from 59.3 percent in 2004-05 to 92.2 percent in 2024-25, the highest in state history. It also carries FLDOE's own caveat: states set different diploma requirements, so the rate is not comparable state to state, and Florida ranked 19th on the most recent federal release covering all states. The gap to 100 is not a dropout rate: of the 2024-25 cohort, 1.8 percent dropped out, 3.3 percent were still enrolled, and the rest split among adult education, certificates of completion, and GED-based diplomas.

Four-year adjusted cohort rate, standard diplomas only, plotted by the spring ending year of each school year. The two flagged years are FLDOE's own emergency-order footnote: those classes were exempt from assessment requirements. The y axis is trimmed to the data range, not zero.

View the data table

School year	Rate

The closest available answer to the employer's question, how Florida's graduates actually do in the world, is the federal adult skills survey. It is nationally comparable and it exists for every Florida county, which no school measure above grade 8 can say. Two limits render with every number: these are modeled estimates, not direct measurements, and they rest on collections from 2012 through 2017, so they describe adults formed by an earlier system. They are the baseline the current system will eventually be measured against.

PIAAC proficiency scale, 0 to 500, adults ages 16 to 74. Ranges in parentheses are 95 percent credible intervals and are part of the estimate. Level 3 is the OECD benchmark for managing complex text and quantitative tasks.

What the levels mean

NCES's own definitions, from the Skills Levels panel of the Skills Map. The bands run below 226 points, 226 to less than 276, and 276 or more, on the 0 to 500 scale.

The people doing the work are paid last in the country. Florida's average teacher salary ranks 50th of the 50 states and D.C. for the third consecutive NEA report, $17,832 below the national average. The 2020 minimum salary initiative raised the pay floor, and Florida's average starting salary of $49,435 ranks 19th, but the ladder above the floor flattened: on the federal Digest's constant-dollar table, the average Florida teacher earned less in 2021 than in 1970, and 12.6 percent less than in 2010. Per-student spending tells the same story, 41st in the nation at $13,487 per student in the 2026 NEA report.

Nominal dollars, plotted by the ending year of each school year. Coverage is benchmark years plus recent annuals, so the lines interpolate between sparse points; the table lists exactly which years are present. The NEA originates this series and NCES republishes it, with BLS wage data documented as the independent audit pair. Y axis trimmed to the data range.

View the data table

School year	Florida	National	Gap

Florida's index crime rate fell by more than half between 2005 and 2020, from 4,654 to 2,158 reported index crimes per 100,000 residents. Then the measurement system changed, and this chart stops. The summary UCR program that produced fifty years of comparable numbers ended with the 2020 cycle; the incident-based system that replaced it counts differently and, in its early years, covered only the agencies that chose to participate. FDLE has published no comparable state rate since. Any chart that draws one continuous line across 2021 is splicing two different measurements, so this page refuses to draw one.

Reported index crimes per 100,000 residents. Rates depend on population estimates: FDLE computes them from its own annual population figures, which differ slightly from the Census series above. The incident-based era (2021 forward) is absent pending an FDLE state-level rate with documented participation coverage. The y axis is trimmed to the data range, not zero.

View the data table

Year	Rate per 100,000	Total index crimes	Population (FDLE)