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CalculatorTip Calculator
Enter the bill, the tip percentage and how many people are splitting it. There is no default tip rate baked in — conventions vary too much by country and situation for this tool to guess on your behalf.
Each person pays
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Three honest ways to round, and what each one costs
Splitting a tip evenly rarely lands on a clean number of cents, so something has to be rounded somewhere. Where you round changes who effectively pays more — not by much, but enough to explain why two people's mental maths of the same bill disagree by a few cents. There is no "correct" method; each is just a different place to round.
| Method | What happens | Each pays | Total collected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round the tip first | 9.45 tip rounds to 9 before splitting | 15.38 | 61.50 target, 61.52 collected |
| Round the total first | 61.95 total rounds to 62 before splitting | 15.50 | 62.00 exactly |
| Round each share | 15.4875 exact share rounds to cents per person | 15.49 | 61.96 collected |
Rounding the total first is the only one of the three that always collects exactly what it targets, because the rounding happens once, at the end, on the number everyone is actually splitting. The other two round earlier in the calculation, so the small correction gets multiplied by the number of people before it comes back out — which is why "round each share" over-collects here by a cent per person, four cents in total, even though no single step looks wrong.
Why this tool does not suggest a tip percentage
Tipping norms differ enormously by country, by service type, and by whether a service charge is already included on the bill — some places tip nothing at all, some tip a fixed small amount, some tip a percentage that itself varies with service quality. Publishing a single suggested rate here would be presenting a local custom as a universal fact, which it is not. Set the percentage you already know applies to your situation.
Questions people ask
Is the tip calculated on the bill before or after tax?
On whatever figure you enter as the bill. If your receipt separates tax from the subtotal and you want to tip on the pre-tax amount, enter that subtotal rather than the tax-inclusive total.
What happens if I split between 1 person?
The per-person figure becomes the same as the total — there is nothing to divide, so all three rounding methods give the same answer.
Can I enter a flat tip amount instead of a percentage?
Not directly, but you can reverse-engineer it: divide the flat amount by the bill and multiply by 100 to get the equivalent percentage, then enter that.