What is a tip, and where does the word come from?
A tip is a sum of money handed over voluntarily by a customer, on top of the bill, to reward the quality of the service. It is not payment for a service rendered. It is an extra, left entirely to the discretion of the person paying.
The French word, pourboire, comes from an eighteenth-century expression: giving whoever served you enough for a drink — "pour boire", literally "for a drink". The two words eventually merged into one. The original idea still holds today: a small amount, handed over directly, with no obligation attached.
Tip, service and bill: three different things
Service refers to the front-of-house work, already built into the price of the dishes. The bill is the total. The tip comes afterwards, on top. Plenty of customers still confuse the three, which explains the question that keeps coming up in the dining room: should you leave a tip when service is already included?
The French answer fits in one sentence: nothing obliges you to, but the custom exists. In the restaurant industry, this grey area is nothing new. It has taken on a fresh dimension now that customers pay in cash less and less.
What does French law say about tipping?
Service is included in the displayed prices
Since 1987, the prices displayed in French cafés and restaurants have been all-inclusive. Service included is the rule: no extra percentage can be added to the bill automatically. An establishment that charged a separate "service" fee on top of the displayed price would be breaking price display rules.
The direct consequence: no tip is compulsory in France, whatever kind of table you are sitting at. A customer can choose not to leave a tip without doing anything wrong. Refusing to accept it, or commenting on it in the dining room, is a commercial mistake.
Article L3244-1 of the Labour Code
What the law does regulate is what happens to the money once it has been left. Article L3244-1 of the French Labour Code is unambiguous: tips handed to the employer, or pooled by them, must be paid over in full to staff in direct contact with customers. They cannot stay in the till.
In other words, the owner cannot keep the tips. Nor can they use them to top up a minimum wage, or deduct them from the pay owed. This money belongs to the employees working front of house.
The tip exemption: where do things stand?
To support recruitment, the 2022 Finance Act created a temporary exemption. Tips paid to employees in direct contact with customers were exempt from income tax, from CSG-CRDS and from social security contributions, provided base pay stayed below 1.6 times the minimum wage. The scheme covered both cash and tips paid by card.
It has been rolled over year after year by successive Finance Acts, up to 2025. It is not permanent. Before announcing anything to your teams or your payroll accountant, check the wording in force for the current financial year: the renewal is decided each year-end, and if it is not extended, these amounts are automatically treated as ordinary wages, with contributions due.
How much should you tip in a restaurant? Customary amounts
There is no official scale. There are orders of magnitude, observed across the trade. They vary mainly with the type of establishment and the length of the meal.
- Café, brasserie, quick service: leave a few coins, or round up the bill.
- Traditional restaurant: 5% of the total amount, a little more if the meal ran long.
- Fine dining or starred restaurant: 5 to 10%, taking into account the work of the sommelier and the head waiter.
- Large party or private event: from 10% up to a flat amount agreed in advance.
These benchmarks apply to France. A customer passing through Paris will usually leave slightly more than in the regions, because international visitors have brought their own habits with them. It remains a custom, never a rule.
On the staff side, the question "how much can you take home?" has no legal ceiling. On a busy service, an experienced waiter commonly collects the equivalent of a few tens of euros an evening in a traditional restaurant. The figure depends on the average spend, footfall and, increasingly, on the payment methods on offer.
Tipping by card: the real issue today
This is where things have shifted. Card and phone payments now dominate the restaurant bill. When a customer has no coins on them, they leave nothing, even when they are happy. It is not indifference: it is a purely practical problem.
Since our customers started paying for everything contactless, the dish on the counter has stayed empty. Tipping hasn't gone away — the way to do it has.
Three solutions coexist today for collecting this money.
Card terminals with a tip prompt
Most recent card terminals can display a selection screen before the payment is confirmed: fixed amount, percentage, or no thanks. It is effective and immediate. The point to watch is the accounting setup: the system must keep tips separate from turnover, otherwise you end up paying VAT on money that isn't yours.
The QR code tip jar
A QR code on the table, on the bill or on the counter sends the customer to a dedicated payment page. They choose the amount, confirm, and it's done in ten seconds. The advantage is that it separates the tip from payment for the meal, and lets you assign it to one person or to the whole team. If you have already rolled out a digital menu for your restaurant, the support is already there and adding this costs nothing extra in equipment.
Cash, which isn't going anywhere
Cash remains the simplest form, with no commission and no complicated paper trail. It still accounts for a significant share of tips on lunchtime bills and in tourist areas. Keep the dish on the counter, but stop relying on it alone.
Sharing tips between staff
Once the money is collected, splitting it becomes a team matter. Two systems dominate in the industry.
The first is the individual tip: everyone keeps what they were given at their own tables. It rewards individual performance, but it creates gaps between sections and completely ignores the kitchen and the dishwashers.
The second is the tip pool, often called the "tronc". Everything is gathered together and then shared out according to a formula everyone knows: pro rata to hours worked, by points per role, or in equal shares. This is the most common approach in well-run establishments, and the healthiest one when service depends on a whole brigade.
Who handles the split? In practice, the floor manager or the owner. Nothing prevents it, as long as they keep nothing for themselves and the calculation is transparent. Write it down, pin it up in the back office, apply it on the same date every month. Conflicts over tips almost always come from a vague rule, never from the amount.
Tipping in other countries: Italy, Spain, the United States
Customs change radically from one country to the next. Some countries treat tips as part of pay, others as a simple gesture. The table below gives the most useful benchmarks for customers who are travelling, and for your teams serving tourists.
| Country | Common practice | Usual form |
|---|---|---|
| France | 5 to 10%, optional | Cash, card or QR code, service included in the price |
| Italy | Rare, often nothing | "Coperto" of €1 to €3 already on the bill |
| Spain | 5 to 10% in the big cities | Change left on the table, usually in cash |
| Germany | 5 to 10% | Amount stated to the waiter when paying |
| Portugal | 5 to 10% | Rounding up, usually in coins |
| United States | 15 to 20%, all but compulsory | A "tip" line added to the card receipt |
In the United States, tips top up a base wage that is legally allowed to be lower. Leaving no tip there is read as a punishment. In Morocco, expect around 10% in a tourist restaurant. In Italy, insisting on adding a tip can even make staff uncomfortable.
Customs also vary within a single country. Barcelona doesn't work like an Andalusian village, Milan doesn't work like Naples. The most reliable guide is still to watch the next table along. A customer who decides not to tip in Europe is being perfectly polite, as long as they pay the bill in full.
How to earn more tips front of house
A tip rewards an experience, not just a plate of food. A few levers have a measurable effect, and none of them requires heavy investment.
- Introduce yourself by first name at the start of the meal: that personal connection noticeably increases the amounts left.
- Come back once during the meal, without being pushy, to check everything is fine.
- Bring the bill without keeping people waiting, and clearly offer a way to leave a tip.
- Take care over the end of the meal: it's the last impression that triggers the gesture.
The most profitable lever, though, is technical: make the gesture possible. A customer paying by card who is offered nothing will leave nothing. Displaying a prompt on the terminal, or a QR code on the bill holder, is enough to recover part of what was being lost. At a high-end table, where the average spend is high, the difference quickly runs into hundreds of euros a month for the brigade: worth building in from the start when designing a QR code menu for a fine dining restaurant.
One last piece of advice, valid for everyone: talk to the team before changing anything. Moving from the dish on the counter to digital changes how the money actually gets shared between roles. A decision that is explained gets accepted; a decision that is imposed loses you your best waiters. And if you are digitising the dining room at the same time, deal with tipping alongside the QR code menu, not six months later.