Tipped Minimum Wage in Wyoming (2026)

Key numbers at a glance

How Wyoming tipped pay works

Start with the counterintuitive part. Wyoming's books show a $5.15 state minimum wage, but that figure only binds employers who fall entirely outside federal Fair Labor Standards Act coverage — a tiny category, since businesses with roughly $500,000 or more in annual sales, plus any that engage in interstate commerce, are covered. For tipped workers at covered employers, which is essentially all of them, the federal numbers govern: a $2.13/hour cash wage and a tip credit of up to $5.12 against the $7.25 federal minimum — your tips legally cover that gap. These figures are per the U.S. Department of Labor table, July 2026 revision (see the official DOL table).

The math runs on the workweek. If cash wage plus tips average at least $7.25 for every hour of the workweek, the employer owes nothing beyond the $2.13. No averaging across weeks, and inside one week a record Saturday in Jackson Hole cannot subsidize a dead Tuesday in the same check. 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 — every hour of every week lands at full minimum or better. Numbers make it concrete: 32 hours at $2.13 is $68.16 from the employer, and the weekly floor is 32 × $7.25 = $232.00. Keep $480 in tips and you are at $548.16, well clear. Keep only $150 in a quiet shoulder-season week and cash plus tips is $218.16 — short by $13.84, which must appear as make-up pay. The server paycheck calculator runs this check on your own hours and tips in seconds.

One caution on the $5.15 figure: an employer that tries to anchor your tipped wage to the state minimum rather than the federal one is very likely misapplying the law, because the FLSA floor supersedes the lower state rate for covered employment. If the business takes credit cards or buys out-of-state food, it is covered — and the operative numbers are $2.13 and $7.25.

Wyoming vs. the federal rule

For covered employers, the Wyoming column is the federal column — the state's $5.15 rate sits underneath, unused. The protections you have as a tipped worker are the federal ones at exactly federal strength: the weekly top-up, the full-minimum overtime basis and the exclusion of managers from tip pools.

The neighborhood makes Wyoming look stranger still. Colorado, just over the southern border, requires a $12.14 cash wage against a $15.16 minimum; Montana, to the north, rejects the tip credit entirely and pays its full $10.85 minimum in cash before tips count. A Jackson Hole server working the same resort economy as a Colorado slope-town server is guaranteed roughly half the floor — in one of the most expensive hospitality markets in the Rockies. The state-by-state table maps the whole region, including Idaho and Utah, which join Wyoming on the federal system.

What Wyoming servers should watch

Which minimum your employer is using. The $5.15 state figure invites mistakes — and abuse. If your pay stubs show calculations built on $5.15, or a tip credit larger than $5.12, ask the question: a covered employer must run on $7.25/$2.13 no matter what the state book says.

The top-up, checked weekly. Wyoming hospitality swings between peak season — Yellowstone traffic, ski winter — and long, empty shoulders. The slow weeks are exactly when the tip credit is supposed to catch you, and exactly when the top-up gets skipped. 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) — or worse, on some $5.15-based figure — is shorting every overtime hour. The overtime calculator shows the exact number.

Your real number. In a Jackson summer, $38 an hour in tips on a $2.13 base is a $40/hour job in disguise. Compute effective hourly — wages plus kept tips, divided by hours — across the full year, including the shoulder months, before comparing this job to one across the border, where the guarantee alone starts several dollars higher.