How do you check a server paycheck, line by line?

A server’s pay stub, line by line

A tipped paycheck looks strange the first time: your tips show up as pay, then disappear again. Here’s a week on the federal tipped wage, with card tips paid on the check and cash tips you reported:

Regular hours × rate

Your hours at your cash wage. Hold them against your own record, shift by shift. A shift that’s missing, or a break taken off when you didn’t take it, starts here.

Overtime

Hours past 40 in the workweek. On a tipped wage, at least $5.76 an hour under federal law, because it’s figured on the full minimum. More in overtime with tips.

Tip credit make-up

Only in weeks your tips didn’t cover the tip credit. The name changes from one payroll system to the next. See the tip credit, explained.

Charged tips

Card tips paid through your check. Federal law lets your employer take out the card fee on each tip, and nothing more; California doesn’t allow even that (Fact Sheet #15, Labor Commissioner).

Cash tips reported

The cash you declared. It’s added to your gross so taxes can be figured on it, then taken back out further down, because it’s already in your pocket.

Service charges

An automatic 18% on a big party isn’t a tip. If you get part of it, it’s wages, and it may show as its own line (Fact Sheet #15).

Social Security and Medicare

6.2% and 1.45% of your wages plus the tips you reported (IRS Topic 751).

Income tax

Federal, and state where there is one. How much depends on your W-4 and your state.

Why the check can be $0

Now take the same week, but every tip, card included, was paid out in cash at close. The gross is the same $721.02, taxes on all of it come out of your check, and all $648.60 in tips come back off because you already have them. That leaves $17.27 before income tax. A little withholding and the check reads $0.00. That can be exactly right.

When your wages can’t cover the Social Security and Medicare owed on your tips, your employer reports what it couldn’t collect on your W-2, in box 12 with codes A and B, and you pay it with your tax return (IRS Publication 531). If you see those codes in January, that’s where they came from.

What your W-2 shows in January

The year’s stubs add up to your W-2. Box 1 has your wages plus the tips you reported, and box 7 has the tips that Social Security tax applies to. Box 8, allocated tips, shows up at some larger restaurants when the tips you reported come in under your share of 8% of food and drink sales; that amount isn’t in box 1, and the IRS expects you to report it unless your own records show you got less (Publication 531). From the 2026 W-2 on, your total tips also show in box 12 with code TP, for the No tax on tips deduction (Form W-2).

A daily tip log is what lets you check those boxes, and argue with box 8 if you have to. Here’s how to keep one.

Five checks before you call payroll

1. Hours. Add up your shifts for each workweek and compare.
2. Rate. At least your state’s tipped minimum, or the full minimum where there’s no tip credit (every state).
3. Overtime. Hours past 40 in each workweek, figured on the full minimum if you’re on a tipped wage, and never averaged over two weeks.
4. Card tips. The total should match your nightly check-outs, less any card fee your state allows and any tip-out that goes through payroll.
5. Slow weeks. If your tips were thin, look for the make-up line.

The time card calculator does the hours and overtime, and the tip credit calculator does the make-up.

If something’s off

Bring your own record: the dates, your hours, your tips. A missed punch or a wrong rate can be fixed on the next check, and notes from the night make that conversation short.

Federal law doesn’t make employers hand out pay stubs, but it does make them keep records of your hours and pay (DOL), and many states do require a stub. If it doesn’t get fixed, the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division takes complaints at 1-866-487-9243, and so does your state labor department.