Waffle House CEO Joe Rogers III says the restaurant chain is making its “largest additional investment in our workforce” in its 68-year history by raising base pay for servers to $3 an hour.
The increases take effect this month and follow a more than year-long campaign led by a union representing service workers in the South. The effort included strikes and petitions calling for higher wages, safer working conditions and an end to mandatory payroll deductions for meals.
Waffle House’s base pay — excluding tips — will rise to at least $5.25 per hour across all of the company’s 2,000 locations by June 2026, with additional increases based on seniority and shift, Rogers said in a video to employees.
Many restaurants in the US offer what’s called a “tip minimum wage.” Under labor law, they can only offer $2.13 an hour if that amount, combined with tips, at least matches the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, where it has been since 2009.
Waffle House is not changing its policy that requires servers to keep their own tips because it “would be crazy to have a service charge instead of tips,” said Rogers, who also rejected the idea of tip pooling.
Rogers also said Waffle House will try to offset the additional labor costs by raising menu prices, noting that customers at the chain’s urban locations would be among those who would pay more.
The company has not announced any measures to respond to other employee concerns, including safety, especially at 24/7 locations known to attract disorderly visitors.
In April. a fight at a Waffle House near the Ohio State University campus led to a shooting one man killedwhile in February an early morning shooting in a waffle house in Indianapolis killed one person and injured five more.
Waggle House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The privately held Waffle House operates about 2,000 locations, including hundreds in Georgia, where the company is based.
Some states have taken steps to increase wages for restaurant workers because they are more likely to live in poverty than workers in other industries. In April, for example, the minimum wage for most fast-food workers in California rose to $20 per hourthe highest base in the US restaurant industry.
Before California’s wage hike, the highest-paid fast-food workers in the U.S. worked in Washington state, which has a minimum wage of $16.28 per hour.
