> Divided between two people, that's $637 per month. If we go with the rule that 1/3 of your wages should go to housing, that means you'd need to make $1911 per month to afford that apartment. If you worked 40 hours a week, and there are (on average) 4.3 weeks per month, that means you'd need to make $11.11 per hour to afford that apartment.

Apologies for the approximation nit and acknowledged that it was all back of the envelope, but $11.11/hr struck me as low at face value.

Upping the ante a bit, let's further assume single standard deduction earner with a $1911 net monthly income requirement (because you can't actually pay with money you don't have), which roughly implies 12% marginal tax bracket. Let's also account for fixed 6.2% social security withholding, and fixed 1.45% medicare withholding.

Squaring against this standard 2022 IRS Publication 15-T withholding method[1], we come to the following arithmetic expression to determine gross monthly income requirement:

(grossMonthly - fixed10pc - marginal12pc - ssWithholding - mcWithholding = netMonthly)

  x - 85.60 - 0.12(x - 1935) - 0.062x - 0.0145x = 1911

Crunching the numbers (~$2196 gross monthly income) while using your proposed 4.3 weeks per month scalar, it's more like $12.77/hr (or $11.11 being -13.0% in relative error).

To be sure, this assumes complete omission of common tax-advantaged benefits such as deferred 401(k) retirement savings and medical/dental insurance coverage.

> The minimum wage in Florida is currently $8.65 per hour.

Florida's prevailing minimum wage is in fact $10/hr[2], with scheduled increases at $1 every year towards a $15/hr target by 2026[3].

[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15t.pdf ref PDF p. 59

[2] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/state#fl

[3] https://floridajobs.org/docs/default-source/business-growth-...

EDIT: Whoops, accidentally used table values for two-or-more jobs scaling; corrected.