Before tax — the food and drink line.
Your receipt almost certainly suggests tips on the discounted total. Many servers are tipped out on the pre-discount amount instead. No authority settles this — pick the one you mean.
Pick your state, or type the exact tax off the receipt below.
The number on your receipt always wins. Type it here and the state average is ignored.
We take it out of the tip base so you don't tip on a tip.
Type what each person ordered. Tax and tip are shared out in proportion — not divided evenly.
Do You Tip on Tax?
We read the IRS’s own tipping publication end to end, and the Emily Post Institute’s most recent word on tipping. Neither one answers this. Here is what the difference actually costs.
Short answer: nobody owns this question. Not the IRS, not Emily Post, not your restaurant. Anyone who tells you there is a rule is telling you their preference and calling it a rule..
That sounds like a dodge, so here is exactly what we checked, and what the choice is worth in money.
Who actually decides this
We went looking for an authority. There isn’t one.
IRS Publication 531 is the federal government’s document about tips. We read it in full. It does not contain a single line about whether a tip should be worked out before or after sales tax. The only percentage in it is a formula employers use to allocate tips among staff, which has nothing to do with what you leave.
The Emily Post Institute is the closest thing tipping has to a referee. Their most recent published word on restaurant tipping, on Substack on 2 October 2025, says a “minimum 15 percent tip.” That is the whole of it. It is silent on tax. It is silent on coupons and discounts too.
What the choice is actually worth
This matters less than the internet argues about it. Take a $100 meal in a place with 9% sales tax, at a 20% tip:
Tip on the taxed total ($109): $21.80 — total $130.80
The gap: $1.80.
On a $40 lunch the gap is about 70 cents. The argument is bigger than the money.
Where it stops being small is on a large bill in a high-tax city. On a $400 dinner at 10%, the same choice is $8.
What your receipt has already decided for you
Here is the part worth knowing. When a card machine offers you 18% / 20% / 25%, it has already picked a base — and it does not tell you which one. Some terminals compute those buttons on the pre-tax subtotal. Some compute them on the total after tax. The buttons look identical either way.
So if you have ever tapped 20% believing you were tipping on the food, you may or may not have been. That is not a scandal; it is just something the screen doesn’t say out loud.
The calculator at the top of this page shows both numbers side by side, so you can see which one your receipt is doing and decide on purpose.
What we do, and why
Our default is pre-tax, for one honest reason: sales tax is not service. Nobody at that restaurant earned the tax. It is collected on behalf of the state and passed straight through. Tipping on it means tipping on a number the staff never touched.
That is a defensible position, not a ruling. If you round up and tip on the total because it is simpler and it is a couple of dollars, that is also completely fine, and no authority exists to tell you otherwise.