87 Cents
Do you know how much your server makes an hour?
In 35 years, my wage as a waiter has gone up 87 cents.
Let that sink in.
My first tipped job was at the Original Pancake House in Champaign, Illinois. My friend’s family owned it, and I begged him to ask his dad to hire me. I was 16 with a driver’s license and ready to work without the restrictions of a worker’s permit. My hourly wage was $2.13 plus tips. The weekends were long and lucrative shifts easily making around $150 — cash money out the door. Living under my parents’ roof with few expenses, I did quite well in high school. At 17 they made me a nighttime supervisor, gave me keys to the OPH castle and a raise to $4.50 an hour when I supervised.
Today in 2026 I make $3.00 an hour waiting tables at a Santa Fe institution. With tips I average around $49 an hour, so I’m not complaining about my take home. Many of my overachieving coworkers pull six figures waiting tables, but they also work their asses off. What this means to me is the guest is my real boss, and I’ll go to bat for my tables every time because they’re the ones actually paying me.
On top of the minuscule raise over three and a half decades, last year my employer quietly raised our hourly to $4.50 — the same wage I made as a teenage supervisor in the early 90’s. Then quietly took it back to $3.00 this year. No explanation. No acknowledgment. For a 40-hour a week worker, that’s roughly $3,000 a year given and then taken away without a word.
Not a single coworker noticed. Not the raise. Not the decrease.
I noticed. It’s my job to notice. I am a financial advisor and many of my colleagues are also my clients.
When I asked a member of the management team about it, I got a vague answer about the payroll people advising the change. Back when I first started, I questioned our base rate because I knew other restaurants that paid more, and the owner told me that because the restaurant sits within Santa Fe city limits, rather than the county, he only had to pay the city minimum, which is technically accurate. That conversation most certainly marked me with a scarlet letter, so I wasn’t rushing to the office to ask about the wage decrease this time around.
Santa Fe enacted its Living Wage Ordinance back in February 2003 — one of the first cities in the country to do so. Progressive, right? Except the city ordinance doesn’t set a separate local base for tipped workers. It defaults to the New Mexico state $3.00 tipped minimum rate. That $3.00 is just the base — employers use what’s called a tip credit, which lets them count tips toward the full minimum wage requirement. In theory, if tips don’t cover the gap, employers must make up the difference.
In practice though, enforcement is a mess. The National Employment Law Project’s October 2025 report on Santa Fe’s tipped wage cited a U.S. Department of Labor investigation from 2010-2012 that found an 83.8% noncompliance rate among the nearly 9,000 full-service restaurants investigated. The same report notes that 59% of tipped workers have reported wage theft related to tips.
You can read the full report here: The Case for Eliminating the Subminimum Tipped Wage in Santa Fe, New Mexico
However, Santa Fe County, which includes El Dorado and Tesuque, has a formula that ties the tipped base wage to 30% of the full living wage, currently working out to $4.62 an hour. Same place, completely different rules depending on which side of a line the restaurant sits on.
That same NELP report noted that then-Mayor Alan Webber proposed raising the city’s minimum wage to $17.50 by 2027 — and completely left the tipped wage out of the proposal. A progressive mayor in a progressive city, and the people serving him dinner still make $3.00 an hour base.
Meanwhile Albuquerque has a $7.20 base for tipped employees, and Las Cruces is at $5.20 per hour. Perhaps newly elected Mayor Michael J. Garcia appreciates the tipped workers in Santa Fe and will address this disparity.
The national numbers highlight how far behind Santa Fe really is, especially considering the Santa Fe housing index is around 60% more expensive than the national average. Arizona pays tipped workers $11.70 an hour. Colorado pays $11.79. San Francisco — where I waited tables in 1999 for $8.00 an hour — now pays $19.18, with no separate tipped category for minimum wage at all. Incidentally, San Francisco also requires employers with 20 or more workers to spend a specific amount per hour on employee healthcare, which is often seen as an added surcharge on the guest’s check. Chicago is phasing out its tipped minimum entirely by July 2028 and currently pays tipped workers $12.62 per hour.
New Mexico and Santa Fe remain at $3.00 per hour.
This debate often overlooks the human cost. Research from the Economic Policy Institute, cited in the NELP report, shows tipped workers are twice as likely to live in poverty as non-tipped workers. Among servers and bartenders, the poverty rate is nearly 15%. In Santa Fe County, 79.4% of tipped workers are women, so this is more than just a labor issue.
The inflation rate since 1993 — the year I graduated high school — has been approximately 128%. Translation, what cost a dollar then costs $2.28 today and yet my wage has gone up 87 cents in 30-plus years.
I’ve run restaurant numbers, managed budgets and scrutinized P&L statements. I know that profit margins are razor thin. I understand why owners watch every penny. The system is built on the assumption that tips will make up the difference — and they do — for experienced servers at busy restaurants on good nights. But does that mean the restaurant should be let off the hook entirely — shrug and say you make good money, you shouldn't complain?
I am fortunate in my current position, and I’ve worked hard for many years to earn my spot. But not every server works at a Santa Fe institution on weekends pulling $49 an hour. Many tipped workers are younger, newer, at lower volume places, working slower shifts — and 79% of them are women.
87 cents in 35 years. The math is broken and everyone in Santa Fe is pretending it isn’t.