Tip Calculator

Enter the bill, choose a tip percentage, and set how many people are paying. The calculator shows the tip, the total including tip, and the amount each person owes, updating as you type. Nothing is submitted anywhere — the arithmetic runs entirely in your browser.

How the tip is calculated

A tip is a share of the bill, so the core of it is short:

tip = bill × rate ÷ 100

The total is the bill plus the tip, and the per-person share is that total divided by the number of people in the group. Dividing by 100 is what turns a rate written as "18" into the fraction 0.18; you could equally multiply the bill by the rate as a decimal and skip the division.

Take the default values as a worked example: a bill of 86.40, an 18% tip, four people. The tip comes to 86.40 × 0.18 = 15.55. Adding it to the bill gives 101.95, and dividing by four means each person pays 25.49. You can check any of these against the results panel — the calculator carries full precision internally and only rounds the displayed figures to the nearest cent, which is why the parts can look a cent or two off from a sum you rounded at every step.

A percentage is just a count per hundred, so an 18% tip means 18 cents added for every dollar of the bill. To do it in your head, a common trick is to take 10% by moving the decimal one place left, halve that for 5%, and add the two to reach 15%, then nudge upward for a higher rate. The tool spares you the work, but the mental version is useful when the presets printed on a receipt do not match what you meant to leave.

Where the custom began

The word carries its own small history. The verb "tip" in the sense "give a gratuity to" is recorded by 1706, and the noun for the money itself is first attested in 1755. It grew out of an earlier thieves' cant term, current around 1600, in which "tip" meant simply to give, hand or pass something, and it is possibly connected to the Low German tippen, to poke or tap lightly. The often-repeated claim that the word is an acronym for "to insure promptitude" is a later invention with no support in the record, and acronyms of that kind barely existed as a way of coining words before the twentieth century. "Gratuity" is older and more formal: it entered English in the 1520s meaning graciousness, from the French gratuité and the Medieval Latin gratuitas, a free gift, and by the 1530s it already meant money given for a service.

The practice itself took shape in Tudor and Stuart England. Overnight guests at a country house were expected to leave coins, known as vails, for the servants who had attended them, and the habit spread from private homes into London's coffeehouses and other businesses during the seventeenth century. At that stage it marked the leisured class rather than standing in for a wage.

Why American tipping went its own way

Tipping crossed the Atlantic in the 1850s and 1860s, carried home by wealthy Americans who had traveled in Europe and wanted a hint of aristocracy. It met real resistance. Many Americans saw handing money to a servant as a feudal gesture at odds with a democratic society. The writer William R. Scott gave a whole 1916 book, The Itching Palm, to the argument, holding that "the relation of a man giving a tip and a man accepting it is as undemocratic as the relation of master and slave."

The backlash briefly became law. Six states passed anti-tipping statutes, starting with Washington in 1909; enforcement proved impractical, and the last of them, in Mississippi, was repealed in 1926. National Prohibition, ratified in January 1919 and in force from January 1920, then cut restaurant and hotel revenues so sharply that owners came to welcome tips as a way to hold down their own wage costs.

That shift is why an American tip behaves differently from a European one. Federal law lets employers pay tipped workers a reduced cash wage on the assumption that tips make up the rest. The federal tipped minimum has stood at 2.13 dollars an hour since 1991, unchanged for more than three decades; where it equaled half the standard minimum wage in 1968, by 2010 it had slipped to under a third of it. So a restaurant tip in the United States forms part of the server's pay rather than a bonus, which is why the expected percentage there runs higher than almost anywhere else.

What counts as a normal tip today

Tipping norms vary more by country than almost any other everyday money habit, which trips up travelers constantly.

• United States and Canada: 15–20% of the pre-tax bill for table service, with 18% a common middle choice. Etiquette guides put buffet and self-service dining lower, around 10% of the pre-tax bill, and treat counter tip jars as carrying no obligation at all.
• United Kingdom: about 10% in restaurants, but check the bill first — a service charge of about 12.5% is often already added, and tipping on top of it is not expected.
• Continental Europe: rounding up or leaving 5–10% is a courtesy rather than an obligation, since service staff earn a full wage. In France a tip is neither required nor expected.
• Australia and New Zealand: tipping is genuinely optional and expected almost nowhere, though people may round up for good service.
• Japan: tipping is not practiced, since service charges are normally built into hotel and restaurant bills; cash left on a table is likely to be chased down and handed back, so it is best left out entirely.

If a service charge is already on the bill, treat it as the tip unless the service clearly earned more.

Splitting the bill fairly

Splitting the total evenly is the default here because it is what most groups actually do. It makes no difference whether you split the tip and the bill separately or split the combined total — the arithmetic gives the same answer either way, and this tool divides the combined total. Even splitting only starts to feel unfair when one person ordered the lobster and everyone else had soup. For that, run the calculator once per person using their own subtotal, set the split to one, and add the results.

By convention the tip is figured on the pre-tax bill, and no server will object to that. Most people tip on the final total anyway, because that is the figure printed at the bottom of the receipt; on an ordinary meal the gap between the two comes to well under a dollar a head.

Tipping guidance here reflects broad customs, not rules, and wage figures and percentages change over time. When a venue posts its own service-charge policy, that policy wins. See our full disclaimer.

Frequently asked questions

How much should I tip at a restaurant in the US?

For table service in the United States, 15% is considered a baseline and 18–20% is standard for good service. Servers are often paid below the regular minimum wage on the assumption that tips make up the difference, which is why the expected percentage is higher than almost anywhere else.

Do I tip on the amount before or after sales tax?

Convention says the pre-tax amount, and nobody will ever object to that. In practice most people tip on the final total because that is the number staring at them on the receipt. On a typical bill the difference works out to well under a dollar per person.

Is tipping expected in the UK, Europe or Australia?

Far less than in the US. In the UK around 10% is polite for table service unless a service charge is already on the bill. In much of the EU rounding up or leaving 5–10% is appreciated but optional, and in Australia tipping is genuinely optional almost everywhere.

Should the tip be split before or after adding it to the bill?

It makes no difference. Splitting the tip and splitting the bill separately gives the same result as splitting the combined total — this calculator splits the combined total, which is what groups almost always want.