Brian Keegan: Boulder’s tipped wage debate rests on a myth about what restaurant workers earn

Brian Keegan is a regular opinion columnist for Boulder Reporting Lab. His “Charting Boulder” column uses public data to make sense of how the city is changing — from housing and politics to income and population — with clear explanations and a focus on equity.

On March 30, Boulder City Councilmember Matt Benjamin wrote his colleagues that a recent survey of Boulder restaurants indicated tipped employees earned about $40 an hour in total compensation. He cited that figure as justification for proposals to slow already approved increases to tipped workers’ minimum wage. Benjamin’s $40 figure is wrong by nearly half — though it is roughly what a worker needs to earn to afford to live in Boulder.

After pandemic-era commitments to address Boulder’s affordability crisis exposed our reliance on essential workers from outside the city and county, Boulder’s elected officials are disappointingly reversing course on minimum wage increases. In November 2025, Boulder County commissioners voted 2-1 to gut a minimum wage schedule of raises that was on track to reach $25 per hour by 2030. The current minimum wage in unincorporated Boulder County is $16.82. In the City of Boulder, it is $16.82.

Boulder’s city council is now weighing whether to slow wage growth for the city’s tipped workers by increasing the “tip offset,” a confusing term for the amount employers can pay tipped workers below the minimum wage. As this city calculator shows, the “larger” offsets being proposed by council would result in lower base wages for workers.  

The direction of the county and city debates becomes less surprising when considering the backgrounds and political coalitions of those involved. In an April straw poll, six Boulder City Councilmembers (Benjamin, Brockett, Kaplan, Marquis, Wallach and Winer) expressed support for expanding the tip offset, which would allow tipped workers’ base pay to rise more slowly than it otherwise would under the planned minimum wage increases.

In a 2024 column for Boulder Weekly, I argued that a city council composed primarily of retirees and self-employed people might reasonably be expected to prioritize the perspectives of business owners over workers. Several of the groups that spent the most supporting Kaplan, Benjamin and Wallach in November 2025 listed cutting tipped wages as a campaign priority.

U.S. Census data suggests the $40-per-hour figure Benjamin cited is off by a factor of almost two. According to the American Community Survey, male food service workers in Boulder County earned a median of $46,305 in 2024, or $23.15 per hour. Female food service workers earned $44,970, or $22.49 per hour. Both figures assume full-time, year-round work, which skews the numbers upward compared with the part-time, slow-Tuesday reality that defines much of restaurant work. 

The $40-per-hour claim also ignores how restaurant compensation works in practice. A server averaging $40 an hour is likely working a high-volume shift at a busy restaurant, a pace that most bodies cannot sustain for 40 hours a week. Restaurant workers rarely receive employer health insurance, disability coverage, retirement matches or meaningful paid sick leave. The industry’s $40-an-hour headline wage numbers treat total tip compensation as equivalent to salaried employment while ignoring the benefits and employment security that make salaried work sustainable. 

Benjamin’s message also rehashes claims that raising the minimum wage will lead to job losses. Recent evidence from California, Seattle and elsewhere complicates the oft-repeated assertion that higher wages inevitably kill jobs. A 2024 review of 72 studies since 1992 on the employment effects of raising the minimum wage found that “the median employment response is essentially zero.”

What makes the $40-per-hour figure revealing is that it is almost exactly the hourly wage a Boulder County worker needs to afford a modest apartment under standard affordability guidelines. While few tipped Boulder workers are clearing $40 per hour, that is the minimum workers need to be able to afford to live in Boulder.

Working backward from the 30% rule, the threshold at which housing is considered a burden, the ACS median gross rent for Boulder County in 2024 — $1,966 per month — requires a worker to earn $38.30 per hour. The 2026 HUD Fair Market Rent for a two-bedroom apartment, the federal benchmark for modest, standard-quality housing, is $2,124 per month, requiring a full-time hourly rate of $42.48 per hour. The Zillow Observed Rent Index for the Boulder metro area was $2,249 per month, or $44.98 per hour.

The number Benjamin cited as proof that workers are thriving is actually the floor for avoiding housing cost burdens in Boulder County. Meanwhile, 59% of Boulder County renters are already cost-burdened, and nearly 45% spend more than 40% of their income on housing.

The strongest argument against supporting a livable minimum wage came from owners of small farms, who argued that seasonal employment patterns combined with higher costs than in incorporated cities would jeopardize their businesses. But the agricultural economics affecting a few hundred workers should not be used to justify slowing wage growth for thousands of workers across Boulder County.

Boulder’s restaurant sector does not show the broad signs of crisis that would justify the policy response now being pursued. U.S. Census County Business Patterns data shows Boulder County had 858 food service establishments in 2019 and 877 in 2023, with the worst years of the pandemic in between.

Restaurants face real pressures like rising food costs tied in part to President Trump’s disastrous policies, escalating commercial rents, post-platformized business models and post-pandemic shifts in consumer behavior. But these pressures are neither unique to Boulder nor a consequence of paying workers a living wage. 

Because Boulder’s governing bodies are composed primarily of the financially independent rather than workers with bosses, these policymakers tend to credit the testimony of business owners while discounting the testimony of workers. This does not make them Gilded Age villains scheming in smoke-filled rooms. But there is something troubling about workers in Boulder being unable to hold city councilmembers accountable at election time because many of those workers have already been pushed into surrounding communities. 

Boulder voters have already begun to address this structural problem by passing Question 2C in 2024. Higher council pay should, over time, expand the pool of people who can afford to serve on council. But it is a slow remedy, and the decisions being made now will shape workers’ lives well before the 2026 elections seat anyone new.

Boulder’s affordability crisis is often described as a consequence of geography, desirability and market forces beyond anyone’s control. But when governing bodies prioritize business interests over worker interests and choose to slow wage growth for the workers least able to absorb the cost of that crisis, it reveals how Boulder’s affordability crisis is also a product of choices we continue to make. 

The tipped workers asking council to protect their wages are not asking for charity. They are asking Boulder to uphold a basic social contract that people who work here should also be able to live here. 

The data and code for replicating these analyses can be found on GitHub.