A circuit court judge recently ruled that Florida’s constitution was violated as the minimum wage was not raised to meet the pace of inflation. Therefore on June 1, Florida’s minimum wage goes up from $7.25 an hour to $7.31 an hour.

Earlier this year worker groups sued, saying that the Agency for Workforce Innovation had miscalculated the state’s minimum wage, and that had cost workers about 6 cents an hour. In 2004, voters had approved a constitutional amendment establishing a minimum wage. But in 2010 the state agency set the minimum wage at $7.06, down from $7.21 because the cost of living had fallen in 2009. But the law does not provide for decreases in times of deflation, according to the Florida Supreme Court, and worker groups argued that is why the state rate should have stayed at $7.21.

Officials index Florida’s rate to the cost of living each year. But on January 1 they had applied the formula to last year’s lower base rate at $7.06 per hour, and created a new rate of $7.16. Because that rate was less than the federal rate, the minimum wage remained at $7.25 an hour. If the state had applied the index to the $7.21 rate, the minimum wage would have risen to $7.31 an hour.