My Tipping Philosophy for 2026: What to Tip After the Post-COVID Tipping Surge

Are you a generous tipper or do you give the bare minimum? Do you tip extra for great service, or nothing at all for bad service? Do you tip the same for a to-go order as you would for a table you sat at for two hours?

I first wrote about my tipping philosophy back in 2008, and the honest answer is that the question has only gotten more complicated since then — not less. Between digital tip screens flipping around to face you at the counter, tip suggestions creeping from 15% up to 20% as the “low” option, and a new federal tax deduction aimed squarely at tipped workers, 2026 is a genuinely strange time to figure out what you “should” tip.

How Tipping Culture Has Changed Since the Pandemic

Tipping norms shifted hard during COVID, when tipping generously felt like one of the few ways to support service workers directly. That goodwill has curdled into something researchers are now calling “tipping fatigue.” Two-thirds of Americans say they’re experiencing it, up from 60% a year ago and 53% back in 2023, and nearly 9 in 10 believe tipping culture has “gotten out of control.”

The biggest culprit is the digital tip screen. Consumers are now prompted to tip an average of ten times a month — at coffee counters, self-checkout kiosks, and pickup windows where no table service happened at all — and about three in four say they’ve noticed the suggested minimum tip creeping up, from 10% to 15% in many cases. Nearly 60% still feel pressured to tip when a screen is staring at them, though that’s down from 66% just a year ago as more people start hitting “no tip” or a custom amount instead of the pre-set buttons.

The result: average tip percentages at restaurants, cafes, and bars have actually dipped below 15% for the first time in years, according to payment-processor data, even as suggested tip percentages on the screens keep climbing. People are pushing back with their thumbs.

My Tipping Philosophy

My own approach hasn’t really changed since I first wrote this post, and I think that’s the point — a philosophy shouldn’t swing with whatever a POS terminal suggests. Having lived a large part of my life outside the U.S., where the sticker price already includes service, I still find the American system unusual. But I also think American service is, on average, better than what you get in Europe or Australia, and tipping is a real part of why.

Here’s my scale:

1. Meets expectations: around 15% of the total bill.
2. Excellent, above-and-beyond service: 20-25% of the pre-tax bill.
3. Genuinely bad service: $0. If it’s added automatically as an “auto-gratuity,” I ask for it to be removed.
4. Delivery or to-go orders: 10%, calculated on the pre-tax, pre-fee amount — not on top of the delivery app’s own service charges.

I don’t tip on a flat, no-questions-asked basis, and I don’t think that’s harsh. A server who’s attentive and a server who’s ignored my table for 20 minutes shouldn’t get the same reward. Tipping on a sliding scale is the one piece of leverage a customer actually has over service quality.

Does the No Tax on Tips Deduction Mean You Should Tip Less?

Since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act created a federal deduction for tip income, I’ve had readers ask a version of the same question: if the server’s tips are now more tax-advantaged, does that mean I can tip less?

No — and here’s the actual math behind why. The deduction lets eligible tipped workers deduct up to $25,000 in reported tips from their federal taxable income each year, through the 2028 tax year, and it phases out for workers with modified adjusted gross income above $150,000 single or $300,000 joint. It doesn’t touch Social Security or Medicare payroll taxes, and it doesn’t touch state or local income tax in most states. It’s also temporary — scheduled to expire after 2028 unless Congress extends it. For the full breakdown of who qualifies and how much it’s actually worth, see my complete 2026-2027 No Tax on Tips guide.

More importantly, tipping was never really a tax-optimization exercise for the customer. It’s compensation for work performed in real time, and the tax treatment of that income on the worker’s end doesn’t change what the service was worth. Cutting your tip because a server’s tax bill went down is like cutting a plumber’s invoice because you assume they’ll get a refund next April — it isn’t your line item to adjust.

How Minimum Wage Rules Affect What You’re Really Tipping For

Part of why I don’t treat tipping as optional in the U.S. comes down to how tipped wages actually work. Federal law allows employers to pay tipped workers a direct cash wage as low as $2.13 an hour, using a “tip credit” to make up the rest of the standard $7.25 federal minimum wage. If tips don’t cover the gap in a given week, the employer is legally required to make up the difference — but in practice, the tip is doing real wage-replacement work, not just padding a paycheck.

That said, this isn’t uniform everywhere. A growing number of states require tipped employees to be paid the full state minimum wage before tips even factor in, which changes how essential any individual tip is to that worker’s income. I keep a full state-by-state breakdown, including which states still allow the lower tipped minimum wage and which don’t, in my 2026-2027 minimum wage by state guide — worth a look if you split time between states with very different rules.

Common Situations That Trip People Up

• Counter service with a flipped screen: You’re not obligated to hit one of the preset percentages. A $0 or custom tip is a legitimate answer when no real service was provided.
• Delivery apps stacking fees on top of a tip: Calculate your tip off the food subtotal, not the inflated total after service and delivery fees are added — otherwise you’re effectively tipping on the platform’s markup.
• Auto-gratuity for large parties: This is a contractual service charge, not a discretionary tip, and restaurants are required to disclose it on the menu. You can still ask for it to be adjusted if service was genuinely poor.
• Tipping on takeout you picked up yourself: I still tip around 10% here if staff prepared and packaged the order, per the reasoning Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary laid out well back in 2022 — someone still did real work to get your order ready.
• Feeling guilted by a screen into overtipping: It’s fine to decline. Roughly 4 in 10 people now choose a custom tip amount instead of the suggested buttons, and that number is growing every year.

Looking Ahead: 2027 Outlook

Expect the backlash to keep building. More states and cities are debating rules that would require businesses to disclose service charges more clearly, and some point-of-sale vendors are already testing “no prompt” checkout flows for counter-service transactions after merchant complaints about tip fatigue driving away customers. On the tax side, the No Tax on Tips deduction is still scheduled to sunset after the 2028 tax year, so expect renewed debate in Congress in 2027 about whether to extend it — which will likely reopen this same “should tipping norms change” conversation all over again. For related reading, see The A to Z of Good Personal Finance: My Saving and Investing Philosophy and my broader Master Your Money guide for the full income-and-spending roadmap.

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