Money · 1 of 5

What servers make

Typical

$35,230

Part time or a slow house

$18,100

Top tenth: fine dining and busy city rooms

$64,720

The national median is $35,230 a year, and the bottom tenth are near $18,100. Read that low figure carefully: full-time all-year serving is not the norm, so a lot of the bottom of this range is people working part time, seasonally or a few shifts a week. The house you work in matters more than anything else you control.