How much to tip in the US: every common situation, with the arithmetic

If you are unsure how much to tip, you are in the majority. In a 2023 survey of 11,945 US adults by the Pew Research Center, only about a third said it was extremely or very easy to know whether to tip (34%) or how much (33%). And 72% said tipping is expected in more places than it was five years earlier.

The rules themselves are short. Here they are, followed by the arithmetic for the cases where they get awkward.

How much to tip, by situation

The ranges are the Emily Post Institute’s, from its general tipping guide. The last column applies them to example bills.

The guide covers tip jars, not the tip screens now common at counters. A screen asks the same question as a jar, so the jar row is the closest guide.

Why the restaurant row is different

Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, an employer can pay a tipped worker a cash wage of $2.13 an hour and count up to $5.12 an hour of tips toward the $7.25 federal minimum wage, according to the Department of Labor’s Fact Sheet #15. Some states, including California, Oregon and Washington, require the full state minimum wage before tips, as the Department’s state-by-state table shows. Where the tip credit applies, the restaurant tip is counted toward the server’s wage itself.

What Americans actually tip

Pew asked how often people tip in different settings. The share who say they always or often tip:

The amounts sit lower than the etiquette range. A majority would tip 15% or less for an average meal at a sit-down restaurant, and only about a quarter would tip 20% or more. So 15% is where guidance and habit overlap, and 20% is the top of the range rather than the norm.

Pre-tax or post-tax? The arithmetic

The Emily Post guide calculates the restaurant tip on the bill before tax. If you tip on the after-tax total instead, the gap is always the tip rate times the tax.

Dinner for four, $148.00 of food, and a sales tax of 8% (an example rate; yours depends on where you eat): $11.84 of tax, $159.84 in total.

At an 18% tip and an 8% tax, tipping on the total adds 1.44% of the food bill: $2.13 here, about 53 cents a head. Neither choice is rude. Picking one and using it every time is the useful habit.

The bill that already includes a tip

Some restaurants add an automatic gratuity, often for large parties, so read the bill before you reach for a percentage. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act a compulsory charge for service is not a tip (DOL Fact Sheet #15). The IRS lists a large dining party’s automatic gratuity as a service charge, because a tip has to be voluntary and its amount set by the customer (IRS fact sheet FS-2017-08).

Missing the line is expensive. A party of eight, $420 of food, an 18% automatic gratuity of $75.60. Add a reflexive 20% ($84.00) on top and service has cost $159.60, or 38% of the food. Leaving something extra for exceptional service is still your choice; doing it by accident is the thing to avoid.

The bar tab: per drink or percentage?

The bartender row offers two rules, and which one is more generous depends on the price of the drink.

The rules meet at about $10 a drink, where $1.50–$2 is 15–20%. Below that, $2 a drink runs well above 20%. Above it, $1 a drink falls well under 15%, and the percentage is the rule to use.

When a group splits the tip

The tip follows the food. If everyone ordered about the same, divide the total with tip by the number of people. If not, give each person the same percentage on what they ordered: at 20%, a $16 salad carries $3.20 of tip and a $52 steak carries $10.40. The social side, who proposes what and when, is in how to split a Valentine’s dinner without making it weird.

Where RightSplit fits

RightSplit puts the tip on the same screen as the split. The tip control has four presets, 0%, 15%, 18% and 20%, and a slider from 0 to 30% in whole-percent steps. On an iPhone set to the US or Canada region, the first tip it suggests is 18%; in the UK it starts at 10% and in Japan at 0%. After that it remembers whatever you used last.

The free equal split applies the percentage to the total amount you type. Enter the after-tax total from the dinner above and choose 18%: $188.61, which Round fairly, on by default, splits as $47.16 for one person and $47.15 for the other three, so the shares add up to the cent. That is the post-tax tip, $2.13 more than the pre-tax version. If the bill already includes a service charge, the 0% preset is the one to tap.

In Pro+, item splitting gives each person the tip on what they ordered, and when a scanned receipt has tax and tip lines, RightSplit spreads both in proportion to each person’s items. There are no accounts; only the person holding the phone needs the app.

What it won’t do is choose the percentage. RightSplit doesn’t know whether you are at a buffet or a steakhouse, so the table above is still the part you bring.

TL;DR

• Sit-down restaurants: 15–20% of the bill before tax. Buffets 10%. Most Americans tell Pew they would leave 15% or less.
• Delivery 10–15%, taxis and haircuts 15–20%, housekeeping $2–5 a day, valets $2–5. Takeout and tip jars carry no obligation.
• Tipping after tax adds the tip rate times the tax: $2.13 on an 18% tip for $148 of food at 8% tax.
• At the bar, $1–2 a drink and 15–20% meet at about $10 a drink. On pricier cocktails, use the percentage.
• An automatic gratuity is a service charge under DOL and IRS rules. Read the bill before adding 20% on top.