How much does a waiter or waitress make in Illinois?

The median wage for waiters or waitresses in Illinois is $31,200 a year, or $15.00 an hour.

Half earn more than that and half earn less. The figure comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational wage survey for May 2025.

BLS’s mean (average) wage for waiters or waitresses in Illinois is $35,610 a year. The median is $31,200.

The mean sits higher when a smaller group of high earners pulls the average up. For a typical paycheck, the median is the better middle.

The median hourly wage is $15.00. At a full-time year that lines up with about $31,200 a year.

BLS May 2025; hourly and annual figures come from the same survey.

BLS does not publish starting pay. The closest figure it does publish is the low end of the range: in Illinois, the lowest-paid 10% of waiters or waitresses earn under $31,200 a year and a quarter earn under $31,200 ($15.00 and $15.00 an hour).

New hires often start somewhere in that band, but the May 2025 survey does not record experience, so read it as a floor to compare an offer against rather than a typical first salary.

The overall salary range for waiters or waitresses in Illinois spans from $31,200 for the bottom 10% to $49,470 for top earners.

The middle 50% earn between $31,200 and $32,720 a year, with the overall median at $31,200.

On the median wage of $31,200, a single filer taking the 2026 standard deduction keeps an estimated $25,850 a year, or roughly $2,154 a month.

That is after federal, state and FICA tax, an effective rate of 17.2%.

Illinois takes $1,400 of it in state income tax.

On the median annual salary of $31,200, estimated take-home pay is roughly $2,154 a month after federal, state, and FICA taxes.

For workers paid on a standard biweekly schedule (26 pay periods per year), each paycheck is approximately $994 net.

No. The median in Illinois is 11.4% below the national median of $35,230.

Nominal pay is only half the comparison: prices in Illinois sit at 100 against a national 100, so the gap in what the money buys is different from the gap in the salary.

It is 0.37 times the median household income of $83,390. A household often has more than one earner, so a single salary at this level goes further than the ratio alone suggests.

Prices in Illinois run at 100 against a national average of 100, with rents at 93.9, so $31,200 here buys about what $31,213 buys at national average prices.

The top tenth earn $49,470 a year or more. The 10th-percentile wage is $31,200.

Experience, specialty, employer and the part of Illinois someone works in all move a wage inside that range; the survey reports the spread, not the reason for it.

The survey counted 72,900 of these jobs in Illinois for May 2025.

That makes the occupation 18% less concentrated here than in the country as a whole. It counts wage and salary jobs, so the self-employed are outside it.