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.
Split Bill Calculator
Everyone ordered something different? Tax and tip shared out in proportion.
Everyone ordered something different
Splitting evenly is easy and often unfair: the person who had soup and tap water pays for someone else's steak. Splitting by item is fair and annoying, because tax and tip are charged on the whole check and somebody has to divide them up.
This calculator does the annoying part. Enter what each person ordered and it shares the tax and the tip out in proportion to each subtotal — so the soup pays soup-sized tax and a soup-sized tip.
The subtotal, and the tax as a rate or as the dollar amount printed on the receipt.
Name and what they ordered. Names are optional — they just make the result readable.
The calculator shows what is assigned versus the subtotal, so a forgotten item cannot silently inflate everyone else.
Why the reconciliation line matters
This is the part most split calculators skip. If you enter four items adding to $80 on a $95 check, something is missing — a drink nobody claimed, a side, a typo. A tool that treats your list as weights will happily distribute 100% of the tax and tip across your $80 and hand back numbers that look right.
They are not right. Everyone in your list just absorbed the missing $15 of tax and tip. So the assigned total is always on screen next to the check subtotal, and it says under, over or exact. You should not have to audit a calculator.
Rounding that does not quietly overcharge
Rounding each person's share up is a normal thing to want — nobody wants to owe 7 cents. But the common implementation is to work out one tip and then divide it, rounding each share up as it goes. Do that with three people and you can collect up to $14.99 more than the bill, with no line explaining where it went.
So when you ask this calculator to round, it rounds the total first and then divides. The shares still come out clean, and they still add up to the bill. Both things are true at once.
The real cost of splitting the bill
There is actual research on this. Gneezy, Haruvy and Yafe ran an experiment (The Economic Journal, 2004) where diners in groups of six either paid individually or split evenly. Paying individually, they spent an average of 37.3 NIS. Splitting evenly, 50.9 NIS — about 36% more. 80% said they would rather pay individually, and then ordered more anyway once they knew the bill was shared.
The authors named the friction precisely:
Some cost is involved in paying individually. A part of it could be the mental cost of figuring out one's share of the bill, and calculating the portion of the tax and tip that apply to that share. Another part would be the social cost of appearing stingy or unfriendly.
This tool removes the first cost. It cannot do anything about the second one — but it is a lot easier to say “mine was $23.40” than to do long division at the table while five people watch.