Are servers in state earning that much?

32 comments

1. No. A server in a very high priced, high volume restaurant might make that much, but it’s a specific skill set and people do it as a career. The vast majority of servers don’t make nearly that much.

2. Totally depends on the place you work

   I quite being a server at a large corporate restaurant because while some days I made good money, on average, I was making less then 15 an hr on most days

   But I’ve had friends that worked at locally owned beach side restaurants/bars that made 30+ an hr

3. The debates on tipping rarely include people who are earning tips. They tend to make out well on tips.

   For non-Americans, you have to separate your principles from your bottom line. Yes, you’re paying more than the amount on the menu for your food. But I literally just got back from Germany on Sunday and eating at restaurants was expensive as hell – way more than my 20% tip back home. I can’t say I’ve ever been impressed by the cost of eating out in Europe (or the service, but that’s more of a culture rub than a deficiency).

   Edit: I should balance this by saying something nice. Coffee in Europe is fantastic.

4. In a decent restaurant with alcohol service, it’s really easy to make great money. I had a roommate *25 years ago* that was clearing $100+/hr at a Chili’s. She worked 3-4 nights a week and paid all her bills and for her classes at the local university.

   I typically made $25-35 hr delivering pizzas in that same time period.

5. It’s possible for a server to make $100/hour with tips factored in, working peak times.

   The problem is that there aren’t always 40 ‘peak hours’ in a week, and to work all the peak hours means working 7 days a week.

   For every Saturday dinner / Friday Night Happy Hour, there’s a Tuesday afternoon at 2 pm where it’s dead. Scheduling shifts is tricky, because everyone wants the high-value shifts, and no one wants the dead times.

   It’s also not completely consistent. You can have a Friday night where it’s $400 in tips for a 4 hour shift, and then the next Friday you’re lucky to get $100 in tip for the same 4 hour shift. Sometimes it’s a numbers game (is the restaurant/bar busy?) and sometimes it’s just dumb luck (did you get the well-off bankers who tip well, or did you get the four travelling salesmen who can only spend their company’s per diem?)

   **TL;dr version**: Servers can make $100/hour, but not for 40 hours a week, not even necessarily for 20 hours a week, and not consistently over a year.

6. I was a server in the 90s and made $50 an hour.

7. Servers would absolutely make less money in the US. if tipping culture disappeared overnight. The free market cost of “unskilled” labor is much lower than what servers, bartenders, etc. actually end up making.

8. Some servers can make bank and think of it this way. You can work 15-20 hours Fri/Sat/Sun at a high end steakhouse and make as much as you would at an office job in the course of two weeks.

   Of course a lot of servers have to work their way up to higher end serving and really have to put in the work. It isn’t just serving. You need to know your food, your culture, your wine. You need to be an expert on what you are serving.

   Even outside of the higher end stuff, if you work in a restaurant moving customers in and out quickly like at a diner, a bunch of $2-4 tips per person add up pretty quickly if you manage 5 tables and a couple of counter spaces.

   Either way its a physically demanding job. You’re on your feet for entire evenings and the jobs with the most earning potential are very much tied to the economy. Tourism dips or companies pull back on travel and that downtown steakhouse can empty out pretty quickly.

9. It’s not exactly unreasonable in a lot of places.

   Assuming an 18% average tip, a server would have to serve $555.56 of food every hour to make $100/hour. That might be a lot in rural Missouri but there’s no shortage of places where a server could do that most nights in the NYC area.

   The flip side, of course, is a lot could go wrong. All it takes is a rainy weekend to ensure you make well under that for the week.

   Of course servers don’t have to be making $100/hour to want tips. Even a mediocre server is going to come out well ahead of minimum wage with tips. You could do $30/hour working at a place like Applebees. That’s only about $60K a year but it’s still much better then what servers could get elsewhere.

10. I paid a significant part of my college via bartending/serving at an upscale restaurant in our college town. Football weekend when rich alumni come to town? It wasn’t uncommon to get several $100+ tips. You just had to sell the student thing.

    Even regular nights, you know couple out on a date. $200 meal, I’m guaranteed they at least drop a $20 if not more.

11. I was a server for over a decade and made $27/hour at an Applebee’s for all of 2002. That’s $46/hr in 2023 dollars. At least that’s what I claimed on my taxes. 😉

    Yeah, it’s amazing money and for a young person or someone looking to pick up a part time job, you’re not going to find someone offering more than that. Even if you just work the weekend, you’re going to bank.

    They’ve tried to get rid of tipping at restaurants and every time it fails because servers just leave to go work somewhere they can make more money. Notable examples include Joe’s Crab Shack and Tom Colicchio’s restaurants.

    This is why the tipping system is likely to never go away. Servers don’t want it to go away, employers like it, and post mortems done by Joe’s show that customers actually in general do like the tipping system. Reddit is an outlier here, probably because it’s poorly understood.

12. It’s possible in the right setting, especially when you factor in that many of those tips are going untaxed

13. As a server I paid rent and tuition with tip money.

    As a bartender I make more in the summer at the bar than I do during the year as a teacher. I make about the same bartending for tips than what I made when I was still a medical laboratory scientist.

    The only people who want to see tipping culture gone are people who don’t want to have to tip anymore. Most of us who actually collect the tips are quite happy.

14. Yes, many of them make $50+ an hour.

    Just think about how tipping culture works. You go into a restaraunt, stay for an hour, and spend $100. Modern tipping culture wants to claim that “20% is normal” so you tip the guy $20. If he’s got just 2 other tables that hour that spent at least $50 each (pretty hard not to with 2 or more people) and also tipped the supposedly appropriate 20%, he’s made *at least* $40 + base wage that hour. Also, if you tipped with cash, he’s almost certainly pocketing that whole tip under the table and not paying any taxes on it.

    The whole thing is absurd and waiting tables is one of the most lucrative and easy ways to make a good living working few hours in an unskilled labor position. They make more than roofers, painters, drywallers, etc and don’t have to work nearly as hard.

15. For most? Probably not. For some? Yeah some probably make even more than that.

    I did it part time for like 6 months when I was in college. I made about $15-20 per hour at a low end restaurant. And that was 20+ years ago.

16. You can do very well in the right restaurant with the right attitude.

    You can also do pretty poorly if it’s a slow day and even worse if it’s a slow week.

    Servers rarely get PTO, so getting sick and missing a few days of work can fuck you up quick.

17. I waited tables in highschool 25 years ago. Even back then $20 an hour average was a bad night.

    I liked to pick up Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon shifts from the college age servers that just wanted to go out and party when I could. $40-$50 an hour was easy money on those shifts.

    Customers hate tipping because food is already expensive and then we have to pay even more. Plus 10% used to be the norm but it’s crept up to 20-25% these days.

    Also for reference I’ve got a buddy who is a waiter at a high end restaurant. I don’t know exactly how much he makes, but I know he makes serious money.

    Servers would make far less money without tips. Which is why it will never change. Business owners and servers don’t want it to change.

18. Waited tables and bartended in college back in the mid to later 2000s. I earned enough working about 4 to 5 shifts a week to pay for my rent, bills, and most of my college tuition (granted, it was in-state at an affordable university).

    Today, I know some folks that I used to work with that now are in fine dining and can make $60k+ a year. I’ve heard of some breaking six figures annually as well.

19. Also for tax purposes you only have to report 15%. If you get more than that it’s all yours.

20. It really depends on the type of restaurant they work in… but waiters in high end restaurants (Michelin star spots, fancy steakhouses and such) can make over $100k per year. In other trendy restaurants, it’s not unusual to make $50-70k per year. But its a physically demanding job, and the hours often suck.

    I had a co-worker who had been a waiter in a downtown steak house and took like a 30% pay cut to become a graphic designer, but he hated working evenings and weekends and never seeing his 3 kids.

21. Yes, we keep telling you guys our servers make way. It’s than yours, and for some reason you don’t believe it.

22. I’ve just taken a job serving again as a transition this summer while I figure my life out. I easily make $30-40 an hour, and on really busy days I walk with close to $55-60 and hour, and my shifts are 5 hours long. And it is all cash in hand. No waiting for my check in two weeks, I have it right then.

23. I once went home with $300 working a 4 hours shift at olive garden. That was awesome.

24. $30 is attainable at any decent restaurant. $100/hour is top.5% working in fine dining.

25. My sister is a server who only works 3-4 hours per day, and she makes more take home pay than I do in my office job. She even brings home more take home pay than our mom who works a nice paying factory job. However, she doesn’t have any benefits. No insurance, no 401K, etc. So while she may make more money day to day, she doesn’t get any of the stability that comes with a “normal” job. Restaurants she has worked far have closed down with no notice, she doesn’t get paid vacation, or any kind of benefits.

26. I worked at a bar in the late 2000s as a barback. I made like $2 something an hour paycheck pay and averaged $150-$250 a night for 5 hours of work in tips. That was just my cut from the bartenders so they made even more.

    I wouldn’t be surprised at all if someone said they made over $30/hr in tips as a server. The reason people don’t kill for the jobs is you don’t work 40 hours a week, there aren’t benefits, and the hours are random usually.

27. I worked at Bob Evans in college. No alcohol, cheap food, and lots of old people. 15 years ago I could make $400 in tips just working Saturday and Sunday morning/afternoon. The work was hard but financially rewarding; there’s no way I ever would have done that job for an hourly wage.

28. My girlfriend is a bartender at a college bar that is a lot of wealthier students and professors, some weekends she brings in $600 on a busy Saturday. Summers suck for her though.

29. In California, servers make at least minimum wage, just like everyone else. Which is now $15.50

    Most of the bigger cities have their own, higher minimum wage. Plus they rake in hella cash. I imagine Hollywood servers make bank compared to other places

30. It’s not easy to be a good waiter.
    It’s not easy getting a waiter job.
    Be good looking, physically capable, great memory, and really personable.

    Good serving gigs aren’t easy to get.

31. You can earn that much, a lot do not. It really depends on your location, the type of restaurant you work at, and how good of a server you are. Fine dining in a major city? $100/hr is not uncommon. But that is a very specific skill set. The people who make that have usually chosen this as their actual career and have spent years learning how to execute that kind of very demanding service.

    It’s also worth noting that, while the world as a whole is struggling with a cost of living crisis and inflation, it is especially bad in the US. What is a livable wage in many countries is not a livable wage here. Factor in a lot of costs/bills that Americans have that many people (especially in Europe) don’t – health insurance, student debt, childcare is expensive as hell (can literally cost as much as a mortgage in some places), etc. and despite what many Americans perceive European taxes to be, we actually get taxed on a lot more things than most Europeans, even if income tax is lower here. So add that on top of it.

    Servers here also provide a different kind of service to servers in other countries. While in most other countries a server is expected to take an order and maybe check on a table once, that’s kind of it. In the US, servers are expected to basically pretend like they’re your best friend, anticipate your every possible need before you realize you need it, make any possible accommodation at any time, check on your table multiple times.

    Personally – yeah, I need to make $30/hour to consider working somewhere, if I want to live decently. I live somewhere with a cost of living equivalent to London.

    Also, be aware that it’s very common for servers and bartenders to inflate their numbers a bit/be optimistic. It’s a weird flex thing among peers and makes them feel a bit better about the shit they have to deal with every shift – customers are “always right” here in a way they aren’t in other countries and it can make for a pretty miserable experience plenty of the time. It takes it toll and remembering the good nights when you walk home with a ton of money makes you feel better about having to deal with the bullshit.

32. I was a server in my twenties and deep into my thirties. It’s great per hour wages with tips but it’s unpredictable and seasonal. I’d say 75% of the money is made Thursday Friday Saturday evening but no one is allowed to just work those shifts. Also some months are busy and some are slow.

    I think it’s great money for you g twenty somethings who need flexibility for education and the like. It’s said there were three kinds of servers, those working on becoming teachers, those working in becoming nurses and those working on becoming alcoholics.