San Diego raises wages for restaurant staff in hotels and venues

San Diego’s hospitality wage floor rose on July 1 for workers in covered hotels, event centers and amusement parks, lifting the base rate to $19 an hour at hotels and amusement parks and $21.06 at event centers. The change reaches restaurant crews inside places such as the San Diego Convention Center, Petco Park, Pechanga Arena and the Civic Theatre, not just front desk staff or ticket sellers.

The ordinance covers employees who work at least two hours in a work week for a covered hospitality employer. Covered hotels can include restaurants, bars and banquet halls on hotel grounds. Banquet servers, bartenders, line cooks and other food-service workers tied to those properties now sit inside a separate wage system that runs above the citywide floor of $17.75 an hour for workers outside the hospitality carve-out.

San Diego set annual increases every July 1 until the hospitality wage reaches $25 an hour in 2030, a slower phase-in than earlier drafts that would have started at $25 much sooner. The City Council adopted the ordinance on Oct. 8, 2025, and the rule became effective July 1, 2026. City notices also require employers to update workplace postings and complaint procedures.

Workers whose pay is built around tips or service charges should check whether the hourly rate on the check matches the new floor before anything else is added. If the paycheck does not reflect the change, keep the pay stub, the posted wage notice, the work schedule and a dated log of hours worked at the covered site. Note the location of each shift, especially if the work was in a hotel restaurant, banquet room, bar or other food outlet on the property.

More than 90 people, many of them hospitality workers and union members, spoke during public comment before the council acted. Sean Elo-Rivera backed the measure, and hospitality is one of San Diego’s largest sectors and one of its lowest-paying. Employers pushed back hard, warning about higher labor costs, while the final carve-out covered hotels with fewer than 150 rooms.

The city’s 2014 wage push lifted the citywide minimum wage to $11.50 by January 2017, and restaurant operators later answered with surcharges of about 3 percent.