Tipped Minimum Wage in South Carolina (2026)

Key numbers at a glance

How South Carolina tipped pay works

South Carolina's wage code simply does not address minimums — no state floor for anyone, and no tipped-employee provisions at all. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act fills the silence. The employer pays a $2.13/hour cash wage and may take a tip credit of up to $5.12 against the $7.25 federal minimum — your tips are what legally cover the gap. If cash wage plus tips average at least $7.25 for every hour of the workweek, the employer owes nothing beyond the $2.13. And the workweek, not the shift, is the unit: no averaging across weeks, and inside one week a record Saturday on King Street cannot subsidize a dead Tuesday.

The safety net is the top-up rule. If your tips do not carry you to $7.25 in a given workweek, the employer must pay the difference on the check — every hour of every week lands at full minimum or better. Run the arithmetic once: 40 hours at $2.13 is $85.20 from the employer, and the weekly floor is 40 × $7.25 = $290.00. Keep $640 in tips and you are at $725.20, comfortably clear. Keep only $200 in a slow, off-season week and cash plus tips is $285.20 — short by $4.80, which must appear as make-up pay. Small, yes, but owed to the penny. The server paycheck calculator runs this check on your own numbers in seconds.

South Carolina's figures — $2.13 cash, $7.25 minimum, $5.12 maximum credit — are per the U.S. Department of Labor table, July 2026 revision (see the official DOL table). Because the state statute is silent, every rule that protects you as a tipped worker in South Carolina is a federal rule, enforced through the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division.

South Carolina vs. the federal rule

The South Carolina column is a mirror of the federal column because the state never added a line of its own. The protections are exactly as strong as federal law makes them — the weekly top-up, the full-minimum overtime basis, the exclusion of managers from tip pools — and exactly that strong, no more.

The comparison that South Carolina's coastal workforce should study sits just across the Savannah River. Florida runs a tipped cash wage of $10.98 against a $14.00 minimum — a guaranteed floor nearly double South Carolina's, in the same tourism corridor, for the same seasonal work. A Hilton Head server and a Savannah server can work identical weeks while the law guarantees one of them almost $270 more. The state-by-state table maps the whole country, including North Carolina and Georgia on South Carolina's other borders, both running the same federal numbers.

What South Carolina servers should watch

The top-up, checked weekly. The Lowcountry calendar swings hard — peak season, golf season, then the quiet stretch after the holidays when covers drop. The slow weeks are exactly when the top-up is supposed to catch you, and exactly when employers skip the math. Track hours and kept tips per workweek; a sub-$7.25 average means make-up pay is owed, automatically.

Overtime math. Overtime is computed on the full minimum, not the $2.13 cash wage: the OT cash rate = cash wage + 0.5 × full minimum ≈ $5.76/hour. An employer paying "time-and-a-half on $2.13" ($3.20) is shorting every overtime hour — the overtime calculator prices the difference for your schedule.

Tip pool membership. Pools are legal for employees who customarily receive tips — never managers or supervisors. When a manager takes a share, the violation can void the tip credit entirely, lifting every affected server's cash wage to the full $7.25 for the affected period.

Your real number. In a busy Charleston dining room, $30 an hour in tips on a $2.13 base is a $32/hour job in disguise. Compute effective hourly — wages plus kept tips, divided by hours — before comparing offers, and know the guaranteed floor underneath: $7.25 times every hour, every week, tips or no tips.