How Much Should I Tip?

Standard tip percentages at a glance

The table below covers every major US tipping scenario in one place. The Typical Tip column is the amount most people would leave for competent, average service with no major issues. The Minimum column is the lowest amount considered socially acceptable without being explicitly rude, for when service was unremarkable or slightly below par but not bad enough to complain about. The Notes column adds context specific to that service — situations where the usual rules do not apply, or where a dollar minimum overrides the percentage.

If you remember nothing else from this guide, remember these three rules: first, if someone is performing a personal service for you in the US and their wage structure is built around tips, 15-20% is the default range unless a specific dollar amount is more appropriate. Second, minimum floors often matter more than percentages on small-ticket services like delivery and drinks. Third, when in doubt, rounding up to the next clean number and adding a little extra is never the wrong choice — almost nobody has ever complained about being tipped slightly too much.

Restaurants: 15% minimum, 18% standard, 20% generous

Sit-down restaurant tipping is the original and most widely understood tipping context in the United States, and it is the one almost everyone gets right most of the time. The numbers have shifted upward over the past fifteen years, but the structure of the decision has stayed the same: pick a starting percentage based on how the service went, then adjust up or down for context.

Fifteen percent is the absolute floor. If the server showed up, took your order, brought the food, refilled drinks occasionally, and did not make any major mistakes, 15% is socially acceptable even if nothing about the service stood out as particularly good. Twenty years ago 15% was the default standard; today it is the lower bound, and tipping below it without a specific reason is generally perceived as cheap, rude, or a deliberate signal that something was wrong.

Eighteen percent is the modern standard default. This is the number that most etiquette guides, industry surveys, and server expectations have converged on as of 2026 for competent, professional, friendly service at a casual or mid-range restaurant. If you cannot be bothered to evaluate whether the service was 16% or 21%, defaulting to 18% will never be wrong and will never cause offense. Eighteen percent is also the percentage that most restaurants pre-print on their suggested tip lines at the bottom of credit card receipts, which tells you what the industry itself considers a reasonable baseline.

Twenty percent and above is generous or excellent service territory. Twenty percent sends a clear signal that you appreciated the server's effort, attention, or recommendations. Twenty-five percent and above should be reserved for service that went well beyond the basic job description: a server who managed a table with multiple screaming children without complaint, who fixed a major kitchen error gracefully and proactively, who made perfect wine pairings or menu suggestions that significantly improved the meal, or who kept a romantic anniversary dinner perfectly paced without ever rushing the table. The difference between 18% and 20% on a $100 dinner for two is only $2 per person including tax, but the signal it sends is disproportionately large and meaningful to the server.

A few important restaurant-specific caveats. First, tip on the pre-tax food subtotal, not the post-tax total. Sales tax is not service, it is money that goes to the government, and including it in the tip calculation is both mathematically unnecessary and a slight overpayment for no benefit. Second, automatic gratuities of 18% for parties of six or more are standard — read the fine print on your receipt before tipping on the tip line, because you might be double-tipping. Third, and most importantly: bad food is not bad service. If the steak was overcooked or the soup was cold, that is almost always a kitchen issue, not a server issue. Punishing the server's tip for a mistake they had no control over is unfair. If the food was genuinely bad, ask for a manager — they can comp the dish, adjust the bill, or address the problem in a way the server cannot.

Food delivery: 15-20% with a $3-5 floor

Food delivery tipping has become one of the most contentious tipping categories in modern life, largely because the app checkout screens hide the most important rule from customers. The standard 15-20% range is correct as a starting point, but it only works on orders above roughly $33. Below that threshold, the percentage calculation falls below the practical minimum of $3 to $5 per trip, and almost every driver and delivery guide agrees that the dollar floor should take over. If you remember one thing about delivery tipping, remember this: never tip less than $5 on a food delivery order, no matter how small the food total was.

The reason for the minimum is that delivery has fixed per-trip costs that do not scale with the size of the order. A driver spends roughly the same amount of gas, the same amount of time, and the same amount of vehicle wear whether they are delivering a single $12 burrito or a $120 catering order. The drive to the restaurant, the wait for the food, the drive to your house, and the walk to your door are the same either way. A pure percentage-based tip ignores all of those fixed costs and pays drivers pennies on small orders, which is why drivers often decline small orders with low tips — they literally cannot afford to accept them.

Bad weather, long distance, and apartment walkups with no elevator are the three main scenarios that justify tipping above the standard range. Snow, heavy rain, extreme heat, and thunderstorms make driving both more dangerous and less desirable, so the drivers who are willing to work in those conditions deserve to be compensated for it. An extra $5 or even doubling the tip is not unusual during a real snowstorm. Long distance deliveries that are 8+ miles one way cost the driver extra gas and extra time, and a walkup on the third or fourth floor means real physical labor carrying heavy bags of food. Each of those deserves an additional bump on top of whatever the standard calculation would have been.

Finally, it bears repeating: the delivery fee and service fee that appear on your checkout screen do not go to the driver. Not in part, not a little bit — they overwhelmingly go to the platform itself as pure revenue. If your $40 sushi order has $8 in assorted fees and you think "I already paid enough," your frustration is valid, but it should be directed at the platform, not the driver. The only money the driver sees is the platform's tiny base pay of $2 to $4 per trip plus whatever you tip. More detail on all of this and a working calculator can be found at the dedicated Delivery Tip Calculator page.

Rideshare & taxi: 15-20% on the fare

Uber, Lyft, and traditional taxi cabs all follow roughly the same tipping convention: 15-20% of the fare before tolls and fees, with a $1 to $2 minimum on very short rides around town. Tipping in rideshare is slightly newer than tipping in taxis — Uber and Lyft did not even add an in-app tipping option until 2017 — but the practice has become fully normalized as of 2026, and most regular drivers report that roughly 70-80% of passengers now tip at least something through the app or in cash.

On a standard around-town Uber fare of $12 to $18, 15% is $1.80 to $2.70 and 20% is $2.40 to $3.60. That means on short fares, the dollar minimum of $1 to $2 is almost always below the percentage anyway, so you can typically just use the app's 15% or 20% button and be done with it. On a longer airport run of $45 to $60, the difference between 15% and 20% becomes more meaningful — roughly $6.75 to $9.00 at 15% versus $9.00 to $12.00 at 20% — and that gap is where context matters more. If the driver helped you lift three heavy suitcases into the trunk, took a route that avoided a major accident on the highway, or provided water and phone chargers on a hot day, 20% is appropriate. If the driver took the long way, smelled of cigarette smoke, or was on a phone call the entire ride, 10-15% or even the minimum is defensible.

Cash tips for Uber and Lyft are always welcome, but they are no longer expected or required the way they were with old-fashioned taxi cabs. The in-app tipping system passes 100% of the tip through to the driver on both major platforms, and most drivers prefer the consistency and paper trail of app tips. The one advantage of cash is that the driver gets it immediately instead of waiting for their weekly or biweekly payout, which can matter for drivers living paycheck to paycheck. If you want to do a quick calculation in your head and need a working tool, the Uber Tip Calculator page has all the same defaults plus a built-in calculator for airport runs and longer fares.

Hair salons, barbers, and spas: 15-20%

Hair and spa services follow the same basic 15-20% range as restaurants, with a few service-specific twists. The most important of those twists is that if multiple people worked on you during a single visit — the stylist who cut your hair, the colorist who did the highlights, the assistant who washed and blow-dried — you should tip each person separately based on their portion of the total service, or give one larger tip to the lead stylist and explicitly ask them to split it appropriately for the rest of the team. Salons handle tip pooling differently, so when in doubt, asking the front desk how tips are distributed is a reasonable question and avoids the awkwardness of accidentally under-tipping an assistant who did half the work.

A basic men's haircut at a chain barbershop for $25 should get $4 to $5 at 15-20%, or $6 to $8 for a master barber who did a particularly good job with a fade or a complex style. A women's cut and color at a midrange salon for $180 should get $27 to $36, and if you absolutely love the result, tipping $40 (just over 22%) and asking for the same stylist next time is a great way to build a relationship. Nail salons trend toward the same 15-20% range, with a $3 to $5 minimum even for the cheapest basic manicure. The more customization — gel polish, acrylic nails, detailed nail art, a longer massage on the pedicure — the closer to 20% you should lean.

The etiquette question people ask most often about salon tipping is whether to tip the salon owner if they are also the stylist. The conventional answer is no, or at least not the full 15-20%. The owner is already keeping the profit margin on the service, which is significantly larger than what a commissioned employee would make. A small token of appreciation — rounding up generously, a $10 or $20 bill for exceptional work, or a repeat booking with a referral — is kinder and more appropriate than the standard percentage. If the owner is working the reception desk and did not actually perform your service, there is no tipping expectation at all. Much more detail, including per-service tables and common salon scenarios, is on the dedicated How Much to Tip a Hairdresser guide.

Hotels: who to tip and how much

Hotels have more distinct tipping moments per visit than any other common scenario, because you interact with half a dozen different staff roles during a typical stay, and each one has its own separate norm. The biggest mistake most hotel guests make is only remembering the bellhop and forgetting everyone else — especially housekeeping, which is the role that actually cleans your room every day and is almost always the lowest-paid staff in the building.

Housekeeping: $2 to $5 per night, left daily. This is the most frequently missed tip in the entire hotel. The single most important detail is that you should leave the tip on the pillow or desk every single morning of your stay, not as a lump sum on the last day. The reason is simple: the same person might not clean your room every day. Hotels rotate housekeeping schedules, and if you stay five nights and leave $20 on checkout, the person who cleans on day five gets the entire $20 and the people who cleaned on days one through four get nothing. Leaving $4 a day ensures each person who actually cleaned your room is compensated for that specific day's work. Adjust the amount based on hotel quality: $2-3 per night at a budget motel, $3-4 per night at a midrange chain, $4-5 per night at a nicer resort or boutique property.

Bellhop / porter: $1 to $2 per bag, $2 minimum. Tip when the bags are delivered to your room, not when they first take them at the curb. If one bellhop takes two bags up to the third floor for you, $4 to $5 is appropriate — the per-bag guideline plus a little extra for the stairs. If you have four or more bags, $5 to $10 total is standard. Bellhops who go beyond just carrying bags — calling you a taxi in the rain, running to get you extra towels at midnight, storing your luggage early because your room was not ready — deserve an extra $5 on top of the per-bag amount for the extra favor.

Concierge: nothing for routine, $5 to $20 for special help. Asking for directions to the nearest subway, recommending a tourist restaurant, or calling you a standard taxi does not require a tip. Getting you a reservation at a fully booked three-Michelin-star restaurant on two hours' notice, scoring sold-out Broadway tickets, or arranging a private last-minute tour of a museum that is closed to the public — each of those is worth $10 to $20 or more depending on how hard they worked and how much you valued the outcome. Concierges who go genuinely out of their way for guests are some of the hardest-working people in hotels, and they remember good tippers and will help them even more the next time they stay.

Valet parking: $2 to $5 when your car is returned. Do not tip when you drop the car off; tip when the valet brings it back to you. If it is raining or snowing, lean toward $5 or even $10. If the valet had to park your car far away because the lot was full and brought it to you within two minutes despite that, err on the generous side. Some hotels have complimentary valet that is included in the resort fee — still tip the person who brings your car back, because the resort fee almost never goes to the individual valet attendants.

Room service: 15-20% if not already included. Read the bill. Most major hotels add an automatic service charge or gratuity of 18% to every room service order, and it will be explicitly listed on the receipt. If it is already there, do not add another tip on the tip line — you are effectively paying twice. If there is no automatic charge listed, or if the charge is described as a "service fee" rather than a "gratuity" or "tip," then 15-20% is standard. Also: a $2 to $5 cash tip handed directly to the person who brings the tray is always appreciated if they were on time and set everything up nicely for you.

Doorman: $1 to $2 for hailing a cab or handling bags. If the doorman just held the door open for you as you walked in, no tip is expected. If they stood out in the rain for three minutes waving down a taxi because every cab in the city was taken, or if they helped you carry four suitcases from the curb to the front desk, then $2 to $5 is a nice thank-you. A full deep dive into hotel tipping with per-role examples and common edge cases is available on the Hotel Tipping Guide page.

Bars & bartenders: per drink or 15-20%

Bartender tipping follows two separate conventions depending on whether you are ordering individual drinks or running a tab, and you can use whichever is more convenient for a given situation. Both methods are acceptable and bartenders are used to seeing both.

Per-drink method: $1 to $2 per drink. This is the classic cash-at-the-bar method for when you are ordering a beer, a glass of wine, or a simple well drink and paying right away. Sliding a dollar or two across the bar per drink is quick, easy, and universally understood. One beer = $1 tip. Two glasses of wine = $2 to $4 tip. A round of four shots = $4 to $8 tip. This method works best when you are at a busy bar and want to close out immediately instead of opening a tab, or when you are paying cash and want to keep transactions simple.

Percentage method: 15-20% of the bar tab. If you are running a tab all night, ordering craft cocktails with lots of ingredients, or buying bottles of wine, the percentage method is more appropriate because it naturally scales with the price and complexity of what the bartender is making. A bartender who spends two minutes crafting a custom smoked old-fashioned with homemade bitters deserves more than $1 per drink, and the percentage method accounts for that. If your final tab is $68 for three rounds of craft cocktails for you and a friend, 18% is $12.24 and 20% is $13.60 — either amount is completely reasonable for the work involved over the course of an evening.

A few bar-specific tips. First, never order a complicated custom cocktail at 11pm on a Saturday at a busy club with a ten-deep bar and then tip only $1. The bartender is working at maximum speed and your custom drink made them fall further behind. Either order something simple or tip generously for the extra work. Second, if a bartender gives you a free drink, comps a round, or hooks you up with something off-menu, the polite move is to tip them at least the retail value of the free drink on top of whatever your regular tip would have been. Third, cash is still slightly preferred at dive bars and neighborhood spots, but at almost every modern bar the card tip is perfectly fine and the bartender gets it on their paycheck either way.

Other tipping scenarios

Not every tipping situation needs its own dedicated section. Below are the remaining common scenarios with short, actionable guidance for each one.

Movers. Moving is physically demanding, heavy-labor work in all weather, and tipping movers is standard and expected. The two common methods are a flat per-mover per-day amount or 5-10% of the total moving bill. For a half-day move with two movers (four hours or less), $10 to $20 per mover is the baseline minimum, or $20-30 if they handled heavy furniture up multiple flights of stairs with no damage. For a full day of moving (eight hours), $40 to $50 per mover is standard. On a large full-house move with a total bill of $2,000 to $4,000, 5% would be $100 to $200 split between the crew, which aligns roughly with the per-person per-day method. Always tip individually to each mover if you can, rather than handing one lump sum to the foreman and assuming it gets split evenly. Cold water, sports drinks, and pizza or sandwiches on a long move are also appreciated and go a long way toward keeping the crew motivated and careful with your belongings.

Dog groomer. Standard tip is 15-20% of the grooming bill, with a $5 minimum even for a small dog basic bath and trim. Extra tipping is expected if your dog was difficult — large breed, heavily matted coat, anxious or aggressive during grooming, or required extra handling time beyond a standard appointment. A dog with three inches of matted fur that the groomer has to carefully shave down without cutting the dog is doing twice as much work as a typical poodle trim, and an extra $10 to $20 on top of the standard 15% acknowledges that. Some groomers work at chain salons like Petco or Petsmart on commission plus tips, while others are independent owner-operators; the same 15-20% rule applies to both, though tipping an independent owner who set their own prices is slightly more optional than tipping an employee groomer.

Tour guide. Tour tipping depends entirely on whether the tour is public group or private. For a standard paid public group walking tour — $20 to $40 per person, 20+ people on the tour — $5 to $10 per person is the expected tip range, or 10-15% of the ticket price if the tour was particularly good and the guide was engaging. For a private custom tour with a dedicated guide just for you and your family, 15-20% of the total tour cost is more aligned with other personal services. Free walking tours that ask for tips at the end rely entirely on gratuities for the guide's income — the guideline there is $10 to $20 per adult if you enjoyed the tour, or at least $5 per person even if it was only okay, since the guide worked for two hours for no base pay whatsoever.

Masseuse / massage therapist. 15-20% is the standard, following the same structure as a salon or spa. A 60-minute Swedish massage for $110 should get $16.50 to $22, with 18% ($19.80) being the default middle ground. The same caveat always applies: check whether the spa or massage studio adds an automatic service charge or gratuity to the bill before you tip on the tip line. Some corporate massage chains add 18% automatically and then still print a tip line hoping you will double-tip, so read the receipt carefully. For a home massage therapist who comes to your house with their own table, oils, and equipment, tipping is slightly more optional since they set their own rates and keep most of the revenue, but 10-15% is still a kind gesture for a great session.

Valet parking (non-hotel). Restaurants, event venues, and city garages that offer valet all follow the same $2 to $5 standard when the valet returns your car. The only time you tip on the way in is if the valet provides an extra service like carrying bags or helping with a disabled passenger. If the valet parking is "free" or comped by the restaurant, still tip the individual valet who brings your car back — the complimentary parking is a marketing cost for the venue, and the valet attendant themselves are almost always paid low hourly wages plus tips.

Should you tip before or after tax?

This is one of the most commonly debated questions in tipping, and the short answer is: before tax is slightly more correct, after tax is simpler and also fine. There is no universal right answer, and servers almost never notice or care which method you used on any individual check, because the difference is usually well under $5 even on a large dinner.

The argument for tipping before tax is that sales tax is a government charge, not a service charge. The server did not provide 8% more service because the state of California charges 8% sales tax — they provided exactly the same service they would have provided in Oregon where there is no sales tax at all. Why should the tip go up just because the government decided to tax the meal more? Mathematically this argument holds up, and it is the method recommended by the majority of etiquette writers, the Emily Post Institute, and most consumer finance guides.

The argument for tipping after tax is mostly practical: it is easier. Most customers look at the final total number on the bottom of the receipt — the one that includes tax — and apply a percentage to that, because it requires no mental math to separate the subtotal from the tax. The post-tax method is technically paying slightly more, but the difference is so small on any individual check that it almost never matters. On a $100 dinner with 8% tax and an 18% tip, the difference between pre-tax and post-tax is $1.44 total — less than the cost of a single soda. People who care strongly about correctness use pre-tax; people who want simplicity use post-tax. Both are fine.

If you want to see side-by-side totals for common bill sizes, state-by-state tax differences, and the actual etiquette expert positions spelled out in full, the dedicated Tip Before or After Tax guide walks through every angle including how the IRS treats tipping, what receipt suggested tip lines actually calculate, and whether servers care about the difference at all.

How to calculate tip in your head

You do not need a calculator to figure out a standard restaurant tip. There are three widely used mental math shortcuts that let you compute 15%, 18%, or 20% of any bill in under five seconds, all based on the 10% trick. The 10% trick itself is simple: take the bill total and move the decimal point one place to the left. So a bill of $86.42 becomes $8.642 at 10%, which you can round to $8.64 in your head. That is the base number for everything else.

To get 20%: calculate 10% and then double it. On the same $86.42 bill, 10% is $8.64 and 20% is $17.28. This is the easiest trick to remember, and since 20% is now widely considered a generous standard tip, knowing this one method covers the majority of tipping scenarios you will encounter.

To get 15%: calculate 10%, then take half of that 10% number, and add them together. Half of $8.64 is $4.32, so 15% is $8.64 + $4.32 = $12.96. Round up to $13 and you are done. This is the classic method taught in personal finance classes and it works perfectly every time.

To get 18%: the fastest approximation is to calculate 20% using the method above, then subtract 2%. Two percent is easy because it is exactly one-fifth of 10%. On the $86.42 bill, 20% is $17.28. Two percent of $86.42 is about $1.73 (exactly one-fifth of $8.64). Subtract: $17.28 - $1.73 = $15.55, which is almost exactly the real 18% value of $15.56. Off by a single cent, and it took about three seconds to do in your head.

Once you can do 10%, 15%, 18%, and 20% mentally, you never need to pull out your phone at a table again. The dedicated How to Calculate Tip guide walks through all four mental math tricks with multiple worked examples, plus the exact percentage formula, how to split tips between multiple people, and when it makes sense to use a calculator instead of doing it in your head.

When it's okay not to tip (and when it's not)

Not every interaction requires a tip, even in the United States. Drawing the line correctly is part of being a thoughtful, polite customer. The three columns below separate scenarios into the absolute no-tip situations, the optional situations where tipping is a nice gesture but not expected, and the mandatory situations where skipping the tip means the person serving you is effectively working below minimum wage.

One final principle to live by: if you are unsure whether to tip and you can afford it, leave a small tip anyway. Over-tipping by a few dollars is a mistake that costs almost nothing and makes someone's day a little better. Under-tipping or skipping a tip when you should have left one can genuinely ruin someone's shift, because they had factored that expected income into their budget. The cost of being generous when in doubt is trivial; the cost of being cheap when you were supposed to tip is not.

Frequently asked questions