Given a cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold, such as the complement of a hyperbolic knot, one can take a maximal cusp and then measure the length of the shortest nontrivial curve in the cusp boundary. Call this length the minimal cusp length for the manifold. It will be shown that the minimal cusp length for any cusp in any hyperbolic 3-manifold is always at least 1.0, and that 1.0 is a discrete value in the set of all minimal cusp lengths. Moreover, 1.0 is realized as the minimal cusp length for only one manifold, the figure-eight knot complement. We will further delineate the inital segment in the spectrum of values of minimal cusp lengths.