Tipped Minimum Wage in Kansas (2026)

Key numbers at a glance

How Kansas tipped pay works

Kansas excludes FLSA-covered employment from its own wage law, and virtually every restaurant is FLSA-covered — through annual sales volume or ordinary interstate business. So the federal numbers govern Kansas tipped pay: a $2.13 an hour cash wage, a $7.25 full minimum, and a maximum tip credit of $5.12, the gap your tips, not your employer, are counted on to cover. If cash wage plus tips average at least $7.25 for every hour of the workweek, the employer owes nothing beyond the $2.13. Those are the current figures per the U.S. Department of Labor table, July 2026 — verify anything you are told at hire against the official DOL table.

The safety net is the weekly top-up, and it is the number most Kansas servers under-know. Take a 30-hour week: the employer's cash share is 30 × $2.13 = $63.90, and the weekly floor is 30 × $7.25 = $217.50. Keep $420 in tips and you are at $483.90 — well clear. Keep only $115 and cash plus tips is $178.90, short by $38.60, which must appear on the check as make-up pay. The workweek is the unit of measurement: no averaging across weeks, and within one week a great Saturday cannot subsidize a dead Tuesday. Our server paycheck calculator runs this check on your own hours and tips in seconds.

For tipped workers at covered employers, then, Kansas is functionally a federal-floor state. The protections — the top-up, the overtime basis, the tip pool limits — are exactly as strong as federal law, and no stronger.

Kansas vs. the federal rule

Kansas is the federal rule for anyone the FLSA covers — there is no separate state number to compare. The contrast worth seeing is the neighborhood, where three of four neighbors have raised their floors:

Only Oklahoma shares Kansas's floor. Missouri pays $7.50 in cash, Colorado $12.14, and Nebraska — though it keeps the federal $2.13 cash wage — requires tips or a top-up to reach a $15.00 minimum. A server in Kansas City, Kansas is a street crossing away from double the guaranteed cash in Kansas City, Missouri. The full map is in our tipped minimum wage by state table.

Who Kansas law actually covers

The Kansas Minimum Wage Act does set a $7.25 minimum — the same as federal — but it excludes employers already covered by the FLSA, along with a set of narrow categories like some small agricultural and domestic work. In practice that means state law is the backstop for only a thin slice of Kansas employers, and for tipped employees at almost any restaurant, bar or cafe in the state, the federal $2.13/$7.25 system is the one that applies.

The practical consequence: a Kansas wage complaint is a federal complaint, handled by the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division. Keep your own record of hours and tips — the employer's federal record-keeping duty is the documentation the enforcement system actually reads.

What Kansas servers should watch

The top-up, checked weekly. Slow weeks are precisely when the tip credit system is supposed to catch you — and precisely when employers forget. If your average for the workweek lands under $7.25, the difference is owed as make-up pay, automatically, not as a favor.

Overtime math. Overtime is based on the full minimum, not the $2.13 cash wage: the OT cash rate = cash wage + 0.5 × full minimum ≈ $5.76 an hour, plus tips. An employer paying time-and-a-half on $2.13 ($3.20) is shorting every overtime hour — the overtime calculator shows the exact number for your week.

Tip pool membership. Pools are legal for employees only, never managers or supervisors. A manager taking a share is the classic violation, and it voids the employer's tip credit — jumping every affected server's cash wage to the full minimum.

Your real number. A $2.13 base with $23 an hour in tips is a $25-an-hour job in disguise. Compute effective hourly — total wages plus kept tips, divided by hours — before comparing this job to an offer across the line in Missouri or Colorado.