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Tipping Guide

Tipping customs vary by country and service type. In the United States, 15-20% is standard for sit-down restaurants, 10-15% for takeout, and $1-2 per drink at a bar. For hair salons, spas, and taxis, 15-20% is typical. Delivery drivers generally receive 15-20% of the order total.

Quick Reference

• Restaurant (sit-down): 15-20%
• Buffet: 10%
• Takeout: 10-15%
• Food delivery: 15-20%
• Bartender: $1-2 per drink or 15-20%
• Hairdresser / Barber: 15-20%
• Taxi / Rideshare: 15-20%
• Hotel housekeeping: $2-5 per night

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I tip on the pre-tax or post-tax amount?

Etiquette experts generally recommend tipping on the pre-tax subtotal. However, tipping on the total (including tax) is also common and considered generous. The difference is usually small.

Is it rude not to tip?

In the US, tipping is considered part of a server's compensation and not tipping is generally seen as rude for sit-down restaurant service. In many other countries (Japan, South Korea, parts of Europe), tipping is not expected and can even be considered impolite.

How do I split a bill with different tip amounts?

Enter the total bill, choose the agreed-upon tip percentage, and set the number of people splitting. The "Per Person" amount includes each person's share of both the meal and the tip.

"TIPS" doesn't stand for "To Insure Prompt Service"

The popular folk etymology, that tips is an acronym for "To Insure Prompt Service", is false. The Oxford English Dictionary, Etymonline and every credible linguistic source classify it as a backronym invented long after the word was already in use. Three reasons it can't be right: acronyms-as-words are a 20th-century English habit (the productive process emerges from World War I military culture), the verb is wrong ("ensure" guarantees, "insure" indemnifies, a pre-payment story would be "ETPS"), and tips happen after the service, not before, so the whole framing is anachronistic.

The likely real etymology is from a 16th-century English verb tip meaning "to give, hand, pass" or "to tap lightly," probably borrowed from Low German or Dutch tippen, "to tap." One frequently cited route runs through 17th-century thieves' cant where tip meant "to give or pass discreetly." By the late 17th century, English coffee-house patrons were dropping coins into brass-bound boxes labelled with appreciation phrases, Samuel Pepys's diaries record dozens of coffee-house visits in the 1660s. The related word gratuity descends separately from Latin gratuitus ("freely given") via Old French in the 15th century. Across European languages the gratuity is framed as drink money: French pourboire ("for drinking"), German Trinkgeld ("drink money"), Spanish propina (originally an invitation to drink).

How tipping crossed the Atlantic, and the brief American backlash

In the 19th century, tipping was an un-American habit. Pre-Civil-War US travel writers ridiculed European tipping; American workers refused gratuities as beneath their dignity as free citizens. What changed it was returning post-Civil War American tourists, especially wealthy industrialists and bankers, who brought the European custom back as a status signal. Concurrently, the railroad-sleeping-car magnate George Pullman built a business model that institutionalised tipping. From the late 1860s, Pullman hired thousands of African American men, many recently emancipated, as porters on his luxury sleeping cars, paying them very low wages on the explicit assumption that tips from white passengers would close the gap. The Pullman porters worked roughly 400 hours a month, often 20-hour shifts, paid for their own food, did unpaid prep work, and supplied their own uniforms. The structure embedded a racialised subservience-for-tips dynamic into American service work; the federal tipped-minimum-wage architecture is its lineal descendant.

The backlash was real, fast, and now mostly forgotten. Anti-tipping leagues sprang up in the 1900s and 1910s arguing tipping was an aristocratic stain on American democracy. William Rufus Scott's 1916 polemic The Itching Palm: A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America (full text on Project Gutenberg) is the canonical work, Scott called tipping "the modern form of Flunkyism" and "democracy's deadly foe." Six US states banned tipping outright between 1909 and 1915: Washington (1909, the first), Mississippi, Arkansas, Iowa, South Carolina and Tennessee. Iowa's law fined or jailed tip-takers up to 30 days; Arkansas's penalty was a $10 fine on the waiter. The bans collapsed by the mid-1920s, the Iowa Supreme Court struck the state's anti-tipping law down as unconstitutional in 1919, and the rest were repealed or unenforced by 1926. Tipping won.

The federal tipped-minimum-wage architecture

The legal backbone of American tipping is the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The FLSA's "tip credit" provision lets employers count tips received by an employee toward the federal minimum-wage obligation. The numbers to know:

• Federal minimum wage: $7.25/hour, unchanged since 24 July 2009.
• Federal cash wage for tipped employees: $2.13/hour. The $2.13 figure has not changed since 1991. In 1991 it was set at exactly 50% of the then-prevailing $4.25 federal minimum; the 1996 FLSA amendments severed that 50% link, freezing the tipped wage at $2.13 in dollar terms. It's now been unchanged for 35 years.
• Maximum tip credit: $5.12/hour ($7.25 − $2.13).
• Who counts as a "tipped employee": someone customarily and regularly receiving more than $30 a month in tips.
• Make-up obligation: if direct cash wages plus tips don't equal $7.25/hour in a given workweek, the employer must pay the shortfall.

Seven states require employers to pay the full state minimum to tipped workers, with no tip credit allowed: Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. In these states tips are pure upside on top of the full minimum wage, and the state minimums all sit well above $7.25 (California is $16.50/hour in 2026, Washington $16.66/hour, the rest in similar ranges). Most other states use the federal $2.13 floor or a state cash wage somewhere between $2.13 and the state's regular minimum.

Tipflation, what changed in the 2010s

The biggest shift in modern US tipping is the rise of presets that anchor higher and the spread of tip prompts to transactions that were never tipped before. The phenomenon now has its own name: tipflation or tip creep. The mechanics:

1. Square's 2013 launch of the Square Stand for iPad put a swivel screen on the customer side of the counter at coffee shops, juice bars, food trucks and small cafés. Demoed at Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco in May 2013, listed at $299, started shipping in June 2013. Square's POS software defaulted to a tip-prompt screen with three preset percentages.
2. Default percentages started moving up. Where 15/18/20 had been the de-facto sit-down default, POS-vendor defaults shifted toward 18/20/25 by the late 2010s, and 20/25/30, sometimes higher, appeared on screens by 2022 to 23.
3. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated everything. Customers were primed to tip more generously to support service workers; tip prompts proliferated to settings like coffee pickup, self-serve kiosks and even car repair.

The data behind the cultural complaint: Pew Research, August 2023 (n = 11,945 US adults), 72% say tipping is expected in more places than five years ago; 40% oppose businesses suggesting tip amounts on the bill or screen and only 24% favour; 72% oppose automatic service charges. Bankrate 2025: 63% of Americans hold at least one negative view of tipping (up from 59% in 2024); 41% call tipping culture "out of control" (up from 35%). Always-tip rates dropped year-over-year for several categories: hairdresser/barber 55 to 54%, coffee barista 20 to 18%, home services 10 to 9%. The generational gap is wide: 25% of Gen Z and 45% of millennials always tip a hairstylist, vs 67% of Gen X and 71% of Boomers.

Pre-tax vs post-tax, the small but real difference

The Emily Post Institute recommends tipping on the pre-tax subtotal. The reasoning: tax is a government charge that has nothing to do with the quality of service the server delivered, and tipping on tax inflates the tip by the local sales-tax rate. Most digital tip prompts compute the suggested-tip dollar amount on the post-tax total, partly because the post-tax total is the last number on the screen and partly because higher base = higher computed tip = higher revenue for the server.

The math difference is small but real. On a $100 bill at, say, 8% sales tax: pre-tax 20% tip is $20; post-tax 20% on $108 is $21.60. The difference is the local sales-tax rate × the tip percent, roughly 1.5 to 2% of the subtotal in most US locales. Across many meals it adds up. If you want to compute pre-tax, enter the subtotal (the amount before sales tax appears on the bill) into this calculator and apply the percentage to that.

Mental-math shortcuts for tipping in your head

• 10%: move the decimal one place left. $48.60 → $4.86.
• 20%: 10% × 2. $4.86 × 2 = $9.72.
• 15%: 10% + half of 10%. $4.86 + $2.43 = $7.29.
• 18%: 20% − 10% of 20%. $9.72 − $0.97 = $8.75.
• 25%: divide by 4. $48.60 ÷ 4 = $12.15.
• Doubling the tax trick (US-only): in many US cities the sales tax is roughly half the desired tip percentage, so doubling the printed tax line is a fast 18 to 20% approximation. Breaks down where sales tax is low or absent.

Why splitting the bill encourages over-ordering

A 2004 paper by Uri Gneezy, Ernan Haruvy and Hadas Yafe in the Economic Journal ran a clean experiment: diners assigned to "split the bill equally" consumed more than diners assigned to "pay for what you ordered." The externality of dividing the bill encourages each diner to over-order, your extra appetiser becomes everyone's problem, not yours. The result is repeatedly cited in popular writing on bill splitting and is highly relevant to a calculator that does the splitting math. The implication, if you're with a group: order what you actually want, not what you'd want if everyone's contributing to your bill.

A separate, more relevant strand of research from Michael Lynn at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration has analysed dozens of studies on the relationship between service quality and tip size. The headline finding from Lynn's meta-analysis: there's a statistically significant but weak correlation between service quality and tip amount, weak enough to question whether tips actually serve as a useful incentive or measure of server performance. Most of the variance in what people tip is explained by social norms, screen design and customer mood, not by service quality.

Tipping abroad, the US norm is not universal

• France: by law since 1985, restaurant prices must include service, service compris, at roughly 15%. A small additional cash tip (~5% or rounding up) is appreciated for excellent service.
• Continental Europe broadly: similar service-included norm. Modest rounding-up tips are typical rather than 18 to 20%.
• United Kingdom: many restaurants add a discretionary service charge of 12.5% (10 to 20% range nationally). Customers can ask for it to be removed. The UK Tipping Act 2023 requires that any discretionary service charge collected be passed on in full to staff.
• Japan: tipping is not part of Japanese service culture and can be perceived as awkward or insulting. The cultural concept omotenashi frames hospitality as professional pride, not a service that needs cash incentivisation. Servers will sometimes chase tipping foreigners down the street to return what they assume was forgotten change.
• Australia and New Zealand: historically no tipping culture; both countries pay full minimum wages with no tip credit. In urban fine dining (Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland) 10 to 15% has crept in for outstanding service since around 2021. Casual settings: still unnecessary.
• UAE and Dubai: most restaurants add a 10% service charge by government mandate (or include it in pricing). Additional cash tips of 10 to 15% are common in restaurants and customary for personal service (drivers, hotel staff) but never legally required.
• South Korea, China: tipping not customary; service charge sometimes included at high-end venues; foreign tips often refused.

The Danny Meyer "Hospitality Included" experiment

In October 2015, Union Square Hospitality Group, the Danny Meyer restaurant group behind The Modern, Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe and others, announced "Hospitality Included": tips would be eliminated, menu prices raised about 20%, and front- and back-of-house staff paid through revenue-share. The stated goals were closing the front-of-house / back-of-house pay gap and removing the customer-bias dimension of tip-based compensation.

By July 2020, USHG announced it was reversing course. The COVID-19 pandemic was the immediate trigger, the group was reopening after shutdown, customers wanted to tip generously to support workers, and the math had never quite worked out. Even before the pandemic, "Hospitality Included" had cost USHG some servers (who could earn more elsewhere on tips) and confused customers used to seeing pre-tip prices on menus. The experiment is the canonical real-world stress test of the no-tipping case. Lesson: replacing tips with higher prices is structurally hard in a market where competing restaurants still tip, you lose tipped staff and confuse customers.

More questions

What's the right tip for an Uber or Lyft driver?

15 to 20% via the in-app tipping flow. In-app tipping was added by Uber in 2017 (Lyft had it earlier); before that, no expectation. A $2 to $3 minimum is sensible for short rides, $5 to $10 for airport runs. The drivers see the tip after the ride, so a real tip rather than a five-star rating is what actually moves their earnings.

How much do you tip hotel housekeeping?

$1 to $5 per night, paid daily, not at the end of stay. The "paid daily" part matters because crews rotate, so tipping at end-of-stay misses earlier shifts. Leave the cash on the pillow with a note ("for housekeeping") so it's clear it's a tip and not forgotten money. $5 a night is the luxury-property norm.

Do I tip on the food-delivery service fee?

No. The service fee goes to the platform (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub), not the driver. Tip on the food subtotal, 15 to 20% with a $3 to $5 minimum to protect drivers on small orders where percent-only would be derisory. On Instacart and Shipt, shoppers see your tip before they accept the order; low-tip orders get picked up slowly or skipped entirely.

What happened to the 15% baseline in US restaurants?

It moved up. The historic 15% baseline pushed to 18 to 20% in the 2010s, and 20% is now the post-pandemic default for adequate-or-better sit-down service. The Emily Post Institute, Pew, AAA and Reader's Digest all converged on 18 to 22% as the recommended range by the mid-2020s. The 25% line that increasingly appears on tip-prompt screens is anchoring, not etiquette.

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