Tools & Equipment

Required tools are the employer's to furnish

Section 9(B) of Wage Order No. 5 establishes the default for tools and equipment: when tools or equipment are required to perform the job, they must be provided and maintained by the employer. The principle is the same anti-subsidy rule that governs uniforms and the broader reimbursement duty — the equipment necessary to do the work is a cost of the business, and the business, not the worker, must bear it. The default is broad and reaches the full range of equipment a restaurant job requires: the point-of-sale hardware, the kitchen equipment, the cookware and smallwares, the safety equipment. The starting presumption for any required item is therefore that the employer furnishes and maintains it, and the burden is on the employer to bring an item within the single narrow exception if it wishes to require the employee to supply it.

The structure matters because it frames the analysis as a default with one exception rather than a balancing test. For any tool or equipment the job requires, the question is binary: either the item falls within the hand-tool exception — in which case the employer may, but need not, require the employee to provide it — or it does not, in which case the employer must furnish and maintain it. There is no middle category and no general license to push equipment costs onto employees; the exception is the only route out of the default, and it is tightly drawn. For a restaurant, this means that the great majority of required equipment is the employer's to supply, and the analysis reduces to identifying the handful of items that might qualify for the exception and confirming that both of its conditions are met. The sections below state the exception, apply its two conditions, work through the common restaurant items, and emphasize how narrowly the exception must be read.

Two conditions, both required

The exception to the furnish-and-maintain default is narrow and conjunctive: an employee whose wages are at least twice the minimum wage may be required to provide and maintain hand tools and equipment customarily required by the trade or craft. Two conditions must both be satisfied for the exception to apply, and the conjunction is the key to the rule. The first is the wage condition: the employee must earn at least twice the minimum wage — at the 2026 general minimum of $16.90, that is $33.80 per hour, and at the fast-food minimum of $20.00, it is $40.00 per hour. The second is the tool condition: the items must be hand tools and equipment customarily required by the trade or craft — tools that the relevant trade conventionally expects its practitioners to own and bring, not equipment idiosyncratic to the particular employer. Only when both conditions hold may the employer require the employee to supply and maintain the tools; if either fails, the default returns and the employer must furnish them.

The conjunctive structure is what makes the exception so limited in the restaurant setting, and it is the analytic point an operator must internalize. Because both conditions are required, the exception is unavailable whenever the employee earns less than twice the minimum wage or the tools are not customarily trade-supplied — and in a restaurant, one or the other frequently fails. Most hourly restaurant employees earn well below twice the minimum wage, so the wage condition alone defeats the exception for them regardless of the tools at issue: a server, busser, host, or dishwasher earning near the minimum cannot be required to supply any required tools, because the wage threshold is not met. And many items a restaurant requires are not "customarily required by the trade" in the relevant sense — they are employer equipment, not trade tools the craft expects the worker to own. The exception, in practice, reaches a narrow band: hand tools the culinary trade conventionally expects its practitioners to own, held by employees paid at least twice the minimum wage — most paradigmatically, a chef's or experienced cook's own knives, where that cook is paid above the threshold. Outside that band, the default controls.

Both conditions must hold — at least twice the minimum wage, and hand tools the trade customarily requires. In a restaurant, one or the other usually fails, and the default returns.

The chef's knives, and the limits around them

The exception's paradigm in a restaurant is the experienced cook's or chef's own knives, and working through it shows both conditions in operation. Chef's knives are plausibly hand tools customarily required by the culinary trade — many skilled cooks own and bring their own knives as a matter of professional convention, satisfying the tool condition. Whether the employer may require a given cook to supply them then turns on the wage condition: if the cook earns at least twice the minimum wage, both conditions are met and the employer may require the cook to provide and maintain the knives; if the cook earns less, the wage condition fails and the employer must furnish them despite their being customary trade tools. The same item — chef's knives — thus sorts differently depending solely on the cook's wage, which is why the exception's application is wage-specific and must be assessed employee by employee rather than assumed across the kitchen.

Two limits keep the exception from expanding beyond its paradigm. First, it reaches hand tools only — manual implements the worker operates by hand — and not powered equipment, which the employer must furnish regardless of wage or custom; a power mixer, a slicer, or other powered kitchen equipment is outside the exception entirely. Second, the tools must be customarily required by the trade, which excludes employer-specific equipment and items the particular restaurant requires but the trade does not conventionally expect the worker to own; an employer cannot bring an idiosyncratic required item within the exception merely by labeling it a "tool." Safety equipment likewise falls outside the exception, because it is not a customary trade tool the craft expects the worker to supply but protective equipment the employer must furnish. The exception, properly applied, is confined to genuine hand tools the trade conventionally expects practitioners to own — and even then only for employees above the wage threshold. Everything else the job requires remains the employer's to provide.

What the employer furnishes, and the narrow exception

Sorting the common restaurant items against the default and the exception yields a clear pattern. The employer must furnish and maintain the great majority of required equipment: the point-of-sale hardware the front of house uses; the kitchen equipment — ranges, ovens, refrigeration, powered appliances; the cookware and smallwares the kitchen runs on; the safety equipment — cut-resistant gloves, where required — and any employer-specific equipment the particular restaurant requires. None of these is a hand tool customarily supplied by the trade, so the exception does not reach them, and the employer's duty to furnish is independent of the employee's wage. This is the bulk of the restaurant's required equipment, and it is all the employer's to provide.

The exception's footprint is correspondingly small, confined to the genuine hand-tool case for above-threshold employees. An experienced cook's or chef's own knives — and perhaps a small set of comparable hand tools the culinary trade conventionally expects skilled practitioners to own — may be the employee's to provide, but only where that employee earns at least twice the minimum wage. For the many restaurant employees paid below that threshold, even their required hand tools must be furnished by the employer, because the wage condition is not met. The operator's practical takeaway is twofold: treat essentially all required equipment as the employer's to furnish and maintain, and invoke the hand-tool exception only for the specific case of customary trade hand tools held by employees demonstrably paid above twice the minimum wage, confirming both conditions before requiring any employee to supply a tool. An operator that defaults to furnishing required equipment, and reserves the exception for the narrow knife case with the wage condition verified, neither over-supplies nor incurs the reimbursement exposure that requiring employees to buy their own equipment would create. The classifier below tests the sort.

Each item against the default and the exception

Each example is tested against the § 9(B) default and the two-condition hand-tool exception. Select a scenario:

Fig. 1. The tools analysis under Wage Order No. 5, § 9(B). The employer must furnish and maintain required tools and equipment, except hand tools customarily required by the trade for employees earning at least twice the minimum wage — both conditions required. Powered and safety equipment are always the employer's. Outcomes are fact-specific.

Verify both conditions, or furnish

The exception's narrowness is itself the practical lesson, because the most common error is to invoke it without confirming both conditions. An operator that requires cooks to supply their own knives on the assumption that knives are "trade tools" has confirmed only the tool condition; the exception fails unless the wage condition is also met, and for any cook earning less than twice the minimum wage, requiring the cook to buy the knives is a violation — the employer must furnish them or reimburse their cost. The wage condition is the one most likely to be overlooked and most likely to fail, because the threshold is high relative to typical restaurant wages: at twice the general minimum, the employee must earn $33.80 per hour, well above what most line cooks are paid, so the exception is unavailable for the majority of the kitchen even as to genuine trade hand tools. The operator must therefore verify the specific employee's wage against twice the applicable minimum before requiring that employee to supply any tool, rather than applying a blanket knife policy across cooks of varying wages.

Where the exception is misapplied, the resulting exposure runs through section 2802 and feeds the capstone. A required tool the employee was made to buy outside the exception is a necessary expense incurred in obedience to the employer's directions, reimbursable under section 2802 with interest and the mandatory attorney's fees — so a kitchen-wide policy of requiring cooks to supply their own knives, applied to below-threshold cooks, generates a reimbursement claim across every affected cook, with the fee-driven exposure the category carries. The remediation mirrors the category's: furnish required tools and equipment by default; reserve the hand-tool exception for the specific case of customary trade hand tools held by employees verified to earn at least twice the minimum wage; and reimburse employees who were improperly required to supply tools. Because the tools obligation is one instance of the section 2802 indemnity, the tools component slots into the exposure model and the reimbursement-policy remediation the capstone develops. The operator that furnishes by default and invokes the exception only with both conditions confirmed closes another of the four reimbursement gaps that compose the category's exposure.

Furnish by default, and invoke the exception only with both conditions verified