Hotel Wage & Hour exists because hospitality pay law stopped fitting in a general employment-law practice guide. Tip credits, banquet service charges, housekeeper workload premiums, hotel-specific minimum wages, occupation-coded tax deductions — the industry now has a wage-and-hour law of its own. This site treats it that way.

Who this is for#

Hotel owners and operators, general managers, HR and payroll leaders, finance teams, asset managers, and the lawyers and consultants who advise them. The orientation is compliance: what the rules are, where they diverge, what they cost, and how to operationalize them. Workers and their advocates will find the same rules stated the same way — accuracy doesn't take sides.

Publisher#

Hotel Wage & Hour is published by Arthur Karadzhyan. His professional profile describes his background and wage-and-hour practice. The editorial standards below govern this resource; the methodology and data provenance page explains how its sources, review dates, and calculation boundaries are documented.

Editorial methodology#

  • Primary sources first. Statutes, regulations, agency bulletins, and court opinions are the basis for every substantive statement; secondary sources (law-firm alerts, trade press) corroborate and contextualize.
  • Everything is dated. Every page carries a visible last-reviewed date; every data record (state rates, ordinance schedules) carries its own. If a date looks old relative to a fast-moving issue, treat the content accordingly.
  • Volatile items get re-verified. Rates that adjust annually, pending litigation, and active rulemakings are checked against current sources before each review cycle — and we say so when something is genuinely unsettled (no, we won't tell you how Camp v. Home Depot ended, because it hasn't).
  • Numbers are sourced. The 50-state tables and the hotel-ordinance dataset cite the agency page or document each figure came from, with access dates.
  • Simplification is flagged. Briefs compress; where the compression loses nuance that matters (tiered tipped wages, CBA carve-outs, local layering), the page says so and points to the source.

What this site is not#

Not legal advice, not a substitute for counsel, not a payroll system, and not affiliated with any government agency, union, or trade association. Reading it creates no attorney-client relationship with anyone. The disclaimer is short and worth reading.

Corrections#

A resource like this earns trust by being correctable. If a rate, date, holding, or citation is wrong, we want to know — corrections are reviewed against primary sources and applied with the page's review date updated. Errata that change compliance posture are also noted on the developments page.

Email a correction to Arthur Karadzhyan at arthur.karadzhyan@gmail.com. Include the page address, the passage or figure at issue, the proposed correction, and a link to the supporting source. For a rate or deadline, identify the jurisdiction and effective date so the relevant edition can be checked.

How the site is built#

The site combines static briefs and reference pages with versioned calculator datasets. A legal update requires both source review and cross-page edits: the prose, tables, calendar, search excerpts, and tool rules are checked together. Calculation regressions and release checks help keep the published copy consistent with the reviewed files. The site serves static pages with self-hosted scripts and fonts, sets no tracking cookies, and keeps calculator inputs in your browser.