Tipped Minimum Wage in St. Louis (2026)

Key numbers at a glance

How St. Louis tipped pay works

Missouri's 2026 minimum wage is $15.00 an hour, up from $13.75 in 2025, per the Missouri Department of Labor. Tipped employees must be paid at least 50 percent of that — $7.50 an hour — in direct cash wages, with tips counting toward the remaining $7.50. St. Louis has no local ordinance to layer on top: the city's own ordinance had just reached $10.00 in the summer of 2017 when a state preemption law took effect on August 28, 2017 and dropped the local floor back to the state rate, where it has stayed since. So one rulebook governs St. Louis: the state's.

The math is weekly, not shift by shift. A 25-hour week owes you 25 × $15.00 = $375.00 in combined cash wages plus tips, of which 25 × $7.50 = $187.50 must be cash. A good week with $240 in tips lands at $427.50 total — an effective $17.10 an hour — with no employer add-on. A slow week with $100 in tips lands at $287.50, an effective $11.50 an hour, and the employer must pay an $87.50 top-up to reach $375.00. That is the tip credit's bargain: the house shares your good weeks, and it funds your bad ones. Run your own numbers through the server paycheck calculator.

The comparison is the story. Missouri's $15.00 is more than double the federal $7.25 floor, and its $7.50 cash wage is 3.5 times the $2.13 federal tipped minimum — the numbers line up like this:

St. Louis vs. Missouri vs. the federal rule

Overtime is its own line item: Missouri requires time and a half for hours over 40 in a workweek, and for tipped workers the department puts the overtime total at $22.50 an hour — the $15.00 minimum plus half — per labor.mo.gov. Where a federal-floor server's guarantee on a 25-hour week is $181.25, a St. Louis server's is $375.00, tips included — and the top-up holds that floor even when the room is dead.

What St. Louis servers should watch

The river is a rate line. Missouri's rules follow hours worked in Missouri. East St. Louis and the Illinois suburbs run on Illinois law, which sets a higher minimum than Missouri and a higher tipped cash wage, adjusted annually — see our Illinois state page for the current figures. A banquet server who works both sides of the river should see two rates on the stub. Verify where your hours were coded with the Missouri Division of Labor Standards.

The tip credit is conditional. Paying $7.50 in cash is only lawful if tips actually carry you to $15.00 an hour averaged over the workweek. Employers must track tips, including credit-card tips, and make up shortfalls on the check. The notice and recordkeeping rules are in our tip credit explainer.

Side work at the tipped rate. Hours of non-tipped sidework can still legally ride the tip credit in Missouri, but the $15.00 weekly average must hold across all hours. If a week of rolling silverware kills your average, the top-up owes you the difference — and excessive non-tipped time has its own limits under the federal dual-jobs rule. See dual jobs and side work.

Tip pools stay in the ranks. Missouri follows the federal rule: pools may include only employees who customarily receive tips — servers, bussers, bartenders, runners — never managers or owners. A house cut flowing upward is a violation; our tip pool guide shows what a lawful split looks like.

Your real number. A $7.50 base with $23 an hour in tips is a $30.50-an-hour job; a $7.50 base with $5 in tips is a $15.00-an-hour job the employer funds. Compute effective hourly — wages plus kept tips, divided by hours — before comparing offers, and compare metros on our city minimum wage hub, the Missouri state page, or the Kansas City breakdown.