Tipped Minimum Wage in West Virginia (2026)

Key numbers at a glance

How West Virginia tipped pay works

West Virginia sets its own minimum wage — $8.75 an hour, a full $1.50 above the federal $7.25 — and allows employers to take a tip credit of up to 70% of it. Do the arithmetic and you get a $2.62 cash wage and a maximum tip credit of $6.13 per hour. If your cash wage plus tips average at least $8.75 for every hour of the workweek, the employer owes nothing beyond the $2.62. Those are the current figures per the U.S. Department of Labor table, July 2026 — cross-check anything you are told at hire against the official DOL table.

Because the credit is 70%, West Virginia employers lean on tips harder than federal law requires: the gap your tips must legally fill is $6.13 an hour, not the federal $5.12. The safety net is the weekly top-up. Run the numbers for a 30-hour week: the employer's cash share is 30 × $2.62 = $78.60, and the weekly floor is 30 × $8.75 = $262.50. Keep $430 in tips and you are at $508.60 — well clear. Keep only $150 and cash plus tips is $228.60, short by $33.90, which must appear on the check as make-up pay. Our server paycheck calculator runs this check on your own hours and tips in seconds.

The workweek is the unit of measurement. No averaging across weeks, and inside a single week a strong Saturday cannot subsidize a dead Tuesday. Every hour of every workweek must land at $8.75 or better once tips are counted — and if they don't, the employer, not you, absorbs the shortfall.

West Virginia vs. the federal rule

West Virginia pays 49 cents more in cash but takes a dollar more in credit, so the two systems are closer than they look — the real difference is the floor the top-up protects: $8.75 instead of $7.25, worth $30 a week at 40 hours. For how each state lines up, see the tipped minimum wage by state table.

Small employers: the six-employee line

West Virginia's wage law applies to employers with 6 or more employees. Below that line, the state rules drop away — but the federal rules usually step in. Any restaurant doing meaningful interstate business or $500,000 or more in annual sales is covered by the FLSA regardless of headcount, which means a $2.13 cash wage and a $7.25 floor instead of $2.62 and $8.75.

The practical move is to know which floor is yours before your first slow week. Ask at hire: state system or federal? The answer changes the weekly floor by a dollar fifty an hour, and it changes what your top-up should say on the stub when tips go thin.

What West Virginia servers should watch

The $8.75 floor, not the federal one. The classic West Virginia error is topping up to $7.25 — the federal number — instead of $8.75. If a slow week's make-up pay brings you only to $7.25 an hour, you have been shorted $1.50 for every hour of that week. Track hours and kept tips per workweek and check the average against $8.75.

Overtime math. Overtime rides on the full minimum, not the $2.62 cash wage: the OT cash rate = cash wage + 0.5 × full minimum ≈ $7.00 an hour, plus your tips. An employer paying time-and-a-half on $2.13 or $2.62 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 violation that voids the employer's tip credit — which jumps every affected server's cash wage to the full $8.75 minimum for the affected period.

Your real number. A $2.62 base under $25 an hour in tips is a $27-an-hour job in disguise. Compare offers by effective hourly — total wages plus kept tips, divided by hours — not by the cash wage on the offer letter.