Tipped Minimum Wage in Utah (2026)

Key numbers at a glance

How Utah tipped pay works

The mechanics are the federal mechanics. 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 cover 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, not the shift, is the unit of measurement: no averaging across weeks, and inside one week a powder-day Saturday cannot subsidize a dead Tuesday in the same check.

The reason is the statute's architecture: Utah law excludes employment covered by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act from its minimum wage provisions. Coverage is broad in practice — businesses with roughly $500,000 or more in annual sales, plus any entity engaged in interstate commerce, which includes taking credit cards or buying out-of-state food. That describes essentially every restaurant and bar in the state. So while Utah's code has its own wage section, it does not apply to you if you work for a covered employer; the federal numbers do. Utah'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).

The safety net is the weekly top-up rule. If your tips do not carry you to $7.25 in a given workweek, the employer must pay the difference — every hour of every week lands at full minimum or better. Numbers make it concrete: 28 hours at $2.13 is $59.64 from the employer, and the weekly floor is 28 × $7.25 = $203.00. Keep $410 in tips and you are at $469.64, well clear. Keep only $110 in a slow mud-season week and cash plus tips is $169.64 — short by $33.36, which must appear as make-up pay. The server paycheck calculator runs this check on your own hours and tips in seconds.

Utah vs. the federal rule

For covered employers — which is nearly all of them — the Utah column and the federal column are the same column. The state did not raise the floor or tighten the tip credit; it stepped aside and let federal law run the table.

What makes Utah remarkable is the neighborhood. Colorado, next door, requires a $12.14 cash wage against a $15.16 minimum; Arizona pays $12.15 cash against $15.15; and Nevada rejects the tip credit entirely, guaranteeing its full $12.00 minimum in cash before tips count. Utah sits in the middle of the Interior West's high-wage cluster running the bare federal numbers — so a Park City server and a Summit County, Colorado server working the same resort economy sit roughly $8 an hour apart in guaranteed floor. The state-by-state table shows the full regional picture, including Idaho and Wyoming, which join Utah on the federal system.

What Utah servers should watch

The top-up, checked weekly. Utah hospitality is seasonal — ski season, park season, then the shoulder weeks when covers drop. The slow weeks are precisely when the tip credit is supposed to catch you, and precisely when employers forget to run the math. Log 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. 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 who customarily receive tips — never managers or supervisors. When a manager takes a share, the violation can void the employer's tip credit entirely, lifting every affected server's cash wage to the full $7.25.

Your real number. A $2.13 base with $32/hour in tips during peak season is a $34/hour job in disguise — but compute effective hourly (wages plus kept tips, divided by hours) across the whole year, including shoulder season, before comparing this job to one across the border in Colorado, where the guarantee alone starts far higher.