For more than a decade, Orlando has held the dubious distinction of offering the lowest median wages of any major metro area in America. We’re talking dead last — 50th out of 50, trailing regions half our size and with much cheaper costs of living.

It means we’re a community full of people who work full-time jobs and yet still can’t make ends meet. Some can’t afford cars or homes. Some work into their 70s.

Well, according to the latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Orlando is no longer dead last. We’re now second-to-last at 49th. A slight improvement but still dreadfully low.

One of the starkest stats: One out of every four jobs in Central Florida paid less than $16.76 an hour, which was just a few bucks more than minimum wage when the numbers were tallied through May of last year.

This explains why we’re a community full of people who live on the edge of a financial cliff.

On the plus side, local wages have risen faster in recent years than they have in America at large. But they’re still way below average for cities our size.

The new dead last is Las Vegas. It’s not surprising that two tourism towns are in a battle for the bottom. When your economy is built on the backs of hotel desk clerks, ride attendants and people who change bed linens for a living, many will struggle. Both communities make headlines for a lack of workforce housing.

Once upon a time, Central Florida was affordable. That’s no longer the case. Homes that cost $150,000 in 2000 now cost $400,000. Wages haven’t kept pace.

The median wage in metro Orlando for 2024 was $45,410, including tips, bonuses and incentives, according to the BLS. That’s about $4,000 below the national median.

If you want to put a face on those numbers, meet Ricardo Zabala, a 58-year-old cook at one of the nicer sit-down restaurants inside the Italian section of Epcot’s World Showcase.

Zabala hand crafts pasta at Via Napoli, where the chicken parm costs $38 and large pizzas start at $42. He makes just above the median wage in Central Florida, more than many cooks, and yet drives Uber shifts both before and after his full-time job to pay his bills and cover the mortgage on his 1,800-square-foot house in Haines City.

Zabala moved to Central Florida eight years ago from Venezuela in search of a better life. He says he found it: “I am very grateful to this country for opening the doors.” But gratitude doesn’t pay his mortgage. So he starts picking up passengers in his 2015 Kia Sedona as early as 6 am and as late as 10 pm, driving them everywhere from Tampa to Orlando.

Zabala, a married father of three grown children, makes $23.50 an hour in his full-time job as a cook, which translates to about $48,000 a year. His wife also works part-time.

Twenty years ago, $48,000 would’ve been a big-deal salary in Orlando. Today, it’s barely enough to get by. Housing costs have skyrocketed so much that a Redfin report from earlier this year said the median monthly mortgage in Orlando is $2,782, meaning annual payments of $33,384. That’s before utilities, food, children’s needs or anything else.

And keep in mind, a full fourth of the jobs here paid $34,800 or less last year.

There’s a convenient mythology that most of these low-wage jobs are held down by college kids or retirees happily killing time. That’s simply not the case. We are a tourism community that relies upon hundreds of thousands of people working low-wage jobs as their full-time occupation.

Trailing our peers

It’s not surprising that wages in Orlando trail big, costly places like Silicon Valley and New York City. But even among similarly sized and smaller cities, we fare poorly.

The Orlando metro region, which includes Orange, Seminole and Osceola counties, is America’s 20th-largest metro but has the 49th-lowest wages.

We’re a region the size of Denver or Baltimore — but with the kind of salaries you’d expect in Birmingham, Ala. or Grand Rapids, Mich.

Actually, median wages in Birmingham and Grand Rapids are slightly higher, even though both metros are about a third the size of Central Florida and have lower costs of living.

Whenever we talk about wages, some people dismiss the issue, suggesting that if any low-paid worker is unhappy with their job, they should just get a college degree or better job. Those people don’t understand how economies work.

Even if every single low-wage worker in Orlando got a degree in computer programming, this community would still have 130,000 hotel rooms that need to be scrubbed. Restaurant tables would still need to be bussed. The grounds at theme parks would still need to be patrolled and mowed.

No matter how you try to spit shine it, if you build an economy around low-paying jobs, you’re going to have a community full of people who struggle.

Zabala doesn’t have extravagant dreams. When I asked if he wanted to make $100,000, he laughed. More like $30 an hour or $62,000 a year, he said — closer to what his reps in the Unite Here Local 737 union for service workers in Orlando are trying to get him in negotiations with the Patina Group that owns the Via Napoli restaurant at Epcot.

To be clear, Zabala wasn’t complaining about his life. He didn’t come to me. I found him when looking for someone who was making around the median wage here. He loves cooking and gets a thrill every time a Disney guest sends word back to the kitchen that they enjoyed his pasta so much they’d like to meet the chef and snap a photo with him. “I love to make magic for the guests,” he said with the help of a translator.

But Zabala still struggles financially. “Every time I try to save, something comes up,” he said.

I asked him for examples. He cited insurance costs for both his house and his car, especially with the extra coverage he needs to offer ride-share services. Then there are the taxes on his modest Haines City home of around $8,000 a year — an amount that isn’t uncommon in his subdivision full of newcomers in newly constructed, $260,000 homes that are also subject to development-district fees. That consumes another giant chunk of annual income.

We all pay

Low wages aren’t just problematic for the people who earn them. An abundance of low salaries means problems for everyone. Welfare rolls swell. Nonprofits are strained. Families lack stability. There’s less disposable income to support local businesses.

A few years ago, the Heart of Florida United Way concluded the average family of four needs to earn between $90,000 and $98,000 to cover basic living expenses in Central Florida.  Well, when your median wage is around $45,000, that means half the jobs pay less than that. And a fourth pay way less, meaning even two parents working full-time couldn’t clear that threshold.

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Years ago, local leaders aspired for more. They sent delegations to places like Austin, Texas and Charlotte, N.C. that had courted higher-paying industries like technology and finance to see what they could learn.

But then the politicians and business leaders came back home and did the same thing they’d done for the half-century before — focused on expanding the low-wage tourism economy at the expense of virtually everything else.

Yes, there have been local efforts to grow and court higher-wage industries. But those efforts are dwarfed by the billions of dollars Orange County spends promoting and expanding tourism. As a result, we add three times as many new jobs for fast-food workers as we do for software developers.

Those numbers aren’t hypothetical. Between 2023 and 2024, Central Florida gained about 1,150 new jobs in software development with a median annual salary of $123,060, which is great. But we added another 3,170 jobs for fast-food counter workers with a median wage of $27,570.

All told, we have approximately 200,000 jobs in food prep and fast food alone. That’s a population approximately the size of Tallahassee or Fort Lauderdale that simply can’t make ends meet working those full-time jobs.

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Reasons for hope

As I mentioned above, there are bright spots. While the median wage in America increased by about 42% over the past decade, Orlando’s went up by 54%. Over the past 25 years, we’ve outpaced the national average by even more.

Just last year, this region added 4,800 jobs in health care with a median salary of $79,270. That’s good. People who earn those kinds of salaries usually aren’t worried about their next meal.

This community has people and institutions working to create more of those jobs. We’ve invested in a medical school and burgeoning health-care sector in east Orange County. We have a National Entrepreneur Center, a business incubation center at UCF and more.

But we focus far more of our energy and money continually feeding the low-wage beast.  Every time we spend another half billion dollars expanding the convention center or another $100 million promoting tourism, we’re creating more jobs that keep us at the bottom.

For his part, Zabala says he’s going to keep doing his best at his job and keep trying to pay down debt and build up a nest egg.

Meanwhile, he’s also cheering on his 23-year-old daughter, who also works at a theme park while holding down a side hustle. She, though, is taking advantage of Disney’s continuing-education program for employees and hopes to get a degree in nursing.

So Zabala’s hope is that, unlike him, she’s not still trying to hold down two jobs with her 60th birthday around the corner.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2025/11/14/maxwell-orlando-ranks-49th-out-of-50-in-wages/