Tipped Minimum Wage in Tennessee (2026)

Key numbers at a glance

How Tennessee tipped pay works

With no state wage statute, the federal Fair Labor Standards Act supplies every number in Tennessee. 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 legally fill that 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. The workweek is the unit of measurement: no averaging across weeks, and inside one week a Broadway-floor Saturday cannot subsidize the dead Tuesday that preceded it.

The protection that matters is the top-up rule. If your tips do not carry you to $7.25 in a given workweek, the employer must pay the shortfall — every hour of every week lands at full minimum or better. Put numbers on it: 38 hours at $2.13 is $80.94 from the employer, and the weekly floor is 38 × $7.25 = $275.50. Keep $560 in tips and you are at $640.94, comfortably clear. Keep only $170 — a week when the bachelorette traffic simply did not show — and cash plus tips is $250.94, short by $24.56, which must appear as make-up pay. Our server paycheck calculator runs this check on your own hours and tips in seconds.

Tennessee's figures — $2.13 cash, $7.25 minimum, $5.12 maximum credit — are per the U.S. Department of Labor table, July 2026 revision (view the official DOL table). Note that Tennessee law also preempts local governments from setting minimum wages, so there is no Nashville-only or Memphis-only floor to fall back on. The federal numbers are the whole structure, everywhere in the state.

Tennessee vs. the federal rule

Identical columns, because Tennessee copied nothing and added nothing. The tip credit system here is the federal system at exactly federal strength: the weekly top-up, the full-minimum overtime basis and the tip pool limits are real protections, and they are also the only protections.

The geography around Tennessee is a patchworth of alternatives. To the northwest, Missouri pairs a $7.50 cash wage with a $15.00 minimum; to the east, Virginia pairs the same $2.13 cash wage with a $12.77 minimum. A Memphis server is an afternoon's drive from a floor nearly $8 an hour higher in Missouri; a Knoxville server sits close to Virginia's. On a 38-hour week, the Missouri difference alone is roughly $290 in guaranteed pay. The state-by-state table lays out every neighbor — including North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, all of which match Tennessee's federal numbers.

What Tennessee servers should watch

The top-up, checked weekly. Nashville's hospitality economy is famously lopsided — weekend visitors fund the week, and weekdays can run thin. The slow weeks are exactly when the tip credit is supposed to catch you, and exactly when the top-up gets skipped. Track hours and kept tips per workweek; a sub-$7.25 average means make-up pay is owed, automatically.

Overtime math. Overtime rides on the full minimum, not the $2.13 cash wage: the OT cash rate = cash wage + 0.5 × full minimum ≈ $5.76/hour. Any employer computing time-and-a-half on $2.13 ($3.20) is shorting every overtime hour — the overtime calculator shows exactly what is owed.

Tip pool membership. Pools are for employees who customarily receive tips — servers, bussers, bartenders — and never for managers or supervisors. A manager taking a cut of the pool is the classic violation, and it can void the employer's tip credit, lifting every affected worker's cash wage to the full $7.25.

Your real number. In a downtown Nashville venue, $35 an hour in tips on a $2.13 base is a $37/hour job in disguise. Compute effective hourly — wages plus kept tips, divided by hours — before comparing offers. The floor the law guarantees, in good weeks and bad, is $7.25 times every hour.