What is the difference between a waiter and a server?

What restaurant pays the most for servers?

By Alex Green.

In an era of ever-increasing wages, it is no surprise that the highest-paying employers are often restaurants. But that's not to say that restaurants pay a premium, and the data suggests that some do not. The pay of servers is highly variable, and there are few good data points on restaurant pay.

To determine the highest-paying restaurants in the United States, I examined several measures of pay across three different types of restaurants: fast food, full service, and casual. I then calculated the average pay for each type of restaurant and determined which restaurants pay the highest average pay. This data was compiled from a database of all of the US Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey (ACS) data for 2025 to 2025. That's a fairly wide range for wages in the restaurant industry, so I'm not concerned that these results are skewed by a few high-earning restaurants that pay a lot to employees.

Fast food: The fast food industry includes a mix of restaurants that focus on quick service (like McDonald's, Burger King, and Chick-fil-A), fast casual (like Panera Bread, Applebee's, and Starbucks), and sit-down restaurants that offer the convenience of quick service (like Denny's and TGI Friday's). Fast food restaurants are notorious for paying low wages, but the industry also has a few high-paying outliers.

Fast food restaurants tend to be low-wage jobs because they're relatively low-cost to operate. They can be open 24 hours a day with limited labor costs because most of the work is automated. It's hard to build a profitable business in this sector without paying very low wages to workers.

In the ACS data, there were 6,842 fast food restaurants in the US in 2025.