Enter your week's hours, cash wage, and tips — see your real hourly rate and the make-up pay your employer owes if tips fell short.
Your real hourly rate this week
—
| Cash wages + tips | — |
| Minimum wage floor for your hours | — |
| Make-up pay owed | — |
| — |
Federal rules with your local numbers — states vary on tipped wages, tip credits, and overtime for tipped work. Your state labor department has the exact figures. Not legal advice.
The tip credit math
floor = minimum wage × hours (per workweek)
owed = floor − (cash wage × hours + tips), when positive
The tipped wage isn't a lower minimum wage — it's the same minimum wage with tips counted toward it. The moment tips stop covering the gap in any workweek, the employer's payroll must. Slow season, snowstorm week, construction blocking the entrance: those weeks, the make-up line is your money.
A worked example
35 hours at $2.13 with $180 in tips: $254.55 earned against a $253.75 floor — legal by 80 cents, a $7.27 real hourly rate. Same week with $150 in tips earns $224.55, so the employer owes $29.20 in make-up pay. Servers who track this per week routinely find shortfall weeks nobody flagged.
If the make-up pay isn't happening
Keep your own record (hours and tips per week — a notes app is enough), raise it with payroll first (often genuinely an error), and know the backstop: the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division takes tip-credit complaints and recovers back pay. For the rest of your paycheck picture, the tip payout calculator splits pooled tips and the overtime calculator covers the over-40 weeks — where tipped overtime math gets its own wrinkles.
Frequently asked questions
How does the $2.13 tipped minimum wage work?
Federal law lets employers pay tipped workers $2.13/hour in cash IF tips fill the gap to the regular $7.25 minimum — that gap ($5.12) is the 'tip credit.' The rule with teeth: if a week's tips don't get you to $7.25 for every hour, the employer must pay the difference. That make-up pay is the law, not a favor.
My tips didn't cover minimum wage — what am I owed?
The employer owes the difference between what you got (cash wage + tips) and minimum wage × hours for that workweek. This calculator computes the exact number. It's checked week by week, not shift by shift — one great Friday can legally cover a dead Tuesday in the same week.
Does my state use $2.13?
Fewer than half do. Seven states (including California and Washington) require FULL minimum wage before tips; most others set a higher tipped wage than federal. Both fields above are editable — put in your state's numbers (your state labor department site has them) and the math adjusts.
Can my employer take my tips or make me share them?
Managers and owners can never keep tips, period. Tip POOLING among coworkers is legal — but if the pool includes back-of-house (cooks, dishwashers), the employer must pay full minimum wage and take no tip credit. Our tip payout calculator handles the pool-splitting math itself.