8 Things Americans Tip For That Locals Don’t

Tipping abroad, country by country: what Japan, South Korea, France, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Iceland actually expect from you.

Photo by حامد طه on Unsplash

At home the math runs on autopilot. The check comes, you find 20%, you sign.

Pew Research put numbers on that autopilot. In August 2023 it asked 11,945 American adults where they tip, and 92% said they always or often tip at a sit-down restaurant. 78% tip for a haircut. 70% for a drink at a bar, 61% for a taxi. A quarter tip for a coffee. And 72% said tipping is now expected in more places than it was five years before.

There’s a reason the habit is so deep. Under federal law, a tipped worker in the US can be paid a cash wage of $2.13 an hour, as long as tips bring them up to the $7.25 minimum. So at home the tip isn’t really a bonus. It’s part of somebody’s pay.

Pack that habit and fly it somewhere else, and it lands in places that never built their wages around it. Sometimes the extra money gets a confused smile. Sometimes you’ve simply paid for the service twice.

I didn’t want travel-forum folklore on this, so I went to the people whose job is to tell visitors what to do: the official tourism boards of eight countries…