Denver Gazette

Colorado minimum wage will jump in 2027 to $15.71/hour, $12.69 tipped

By Mark Samuelson August 14, 2026 | updated 5 hours ago

Barista at Convict Coffee in Parker, 2025. The minimum wage for tipped employees will rise statewide in 2017 to $12.69/hour. (Mark Samuelson, Denver Gazette)

The minimum wage for Colorado hourly employees is set to climb next year to $15.71 per hour from the current wage of $15.16 an hour.

Restaurant servers and other tipped workers will see a new minimum wage of $12.69 an hour.

The increases were announced Thursday by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment’s Division of Labor Standards and Statistics.

Colorado’s minimum wage is adjusted annually following state constitutional amendments approved by voters in 2006 and 2017, which had boosted it by set yearly increments to $12 an hour in 2020 followed by regular annual increases adjusted for cost-of-living.

Last week, the City and County of Denver announced a minimum wage increase to $19.84. Municipalities can require higher wages than the state minimum.

Restaurant owners were quick to raise worries about the consequences for taverns and other establishments with tipped workers.

“Denver restaurants are already struggling under extraordinary cost pressures from the price of food, rent, utilities, insurance, labor and more,” Sonia Riggs, president of the Colorado Restaurant Association & Foundation, said in an email to The Denver Gazette.

Worries of restaurant owners

“Increasing the minimum wage to $19.84 (in Denver) in 2027 will add tens of thousands of dollars in new annual costs for every local restaurant, shrinking their impossibly tight margins even further,” she added.

“These added costs will make dining out even more expensive and add to Denver’s already high cost of living. It’s a troubling inflationary cycle,” Riggs said.

She said she hoped the Denver City Council would do more specifically to support the family-owned establishments in Denver neighborhoods.

But Dan Klehm, who opened Convict Coffee in Parker two years ago and has a second store now open near DU, told The Denver Gazette that employers have a responsibility to keep their employees comfortable in the context of the cost of living.

“What a lot of employers are doing is counting on the generosity of strangers to comp their employees,” Klehm said. He noted that he pays a minimum $20 per hour in addition to tipped income and maintains a policy of keeping his lowest-paid employee within a one-to-five ratio of his own compensation as corporate owner.

“I opened in Parker two years ago and haven’t lost an employee,” he added. “Our sales are growing, and that’s a sign of having employees stay with us.”

Klehm will open his third area store at East Colfax Avenue and York Street in coming weeks, he noted.

Colorado adjusts the wage using the federal Consumer Price Index, referencing an All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) version of the CPI that tracks spending habits of urban consumers, based on a wide sample of the U.S. population.

Denver uses an Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers CPI focused on households supported by hourly wages or clerical work based on a more targeted sample.

According to the DLSS, the new wage of $15.71 represents a 3.6% increase over the current wage and a 41.5% increase from the wage in 2019 of $11.10 an hour.

The increases follow the release of a study on national wage performance over the past five years, showing that although wages of U.S. workers as a whole are failing to keep pace with inflation, Denver area workers are coming out slightly ahead.

That July report by a London-based tech firm said that metro Denver workers had averaged a $344 annual increase in real wages during the last five years, after backing out the cost of inflation.

Area workers ahead?

Denver area workers showed the 14th-highest real wage increase of all major U.S. metro areas, the study said. However, the study noted that local inflationary costs, including for housing, could be giving a false positive to that “real” wage performance assessment.

Also in July, a nonpartisan policy group issued a broad-based economic report showing Colorado outperforming the national economy, but lagging major competitor states including Arizona, Texas and Utah. That study had noted a 40% chance of a recession in Colorado in the coming year.

The study by the Romer Institute of Evidence-based Policy had noted that wages in Colorado run well ahead of peer states, but that higher living costs reduce those benefits to workers and make for added employer costs.

An earlier ranking by CNBC had dropped Colorado from among its annual “America’s Top States for Business” ranking to 25th best economy, from its 11th-best ranking in 2025. That study had rated the state lower on “business friendliness” and noted recent population losses that may be resulting from high costs of living and housing.

Besides Denver, local cities exceeding the Colorado minimum wage include Edgewater, at $18.17 an hour, $13.50 with a tip credit; and Boulder, $16.82 an hour, $13.80 with the tip credit.

Colorado has a website at cdle.colorado.gov/dlss that tracks minimum wages, including those of other localities that will post higher minimum wages for 2027.