The 20% default — where it came from and why it stuck.

In 1955 the standard restaurant tip was 10%. In 1985 it was 15%. By 2010 it was 20%. The ratchet has gone one way for seventy years.

The 1955 edition of the Emily Post Etiquette book — fifty years after the original — devotes most of its restaurant chapter to who orders for whom, who lights the cigarette, and how to summon a waiter (eye contact, never a snap). Tipping gets one paragraph. The recommended amount: "ten percent of the bill, or fifteen percent for exceptional service in a fine establishment." That last clause is the seed of everything that followed.

• 195510% standard, 15% exceptional — per the Post family etiquette book of the era.
• 198515% standard, 20% exceptional — the New York Times dining section's recommended math in this period uses 15% as the example default.
• 201018–20% standard, 25% exceptional — Zagat's annual survey of NYC diners pegs the average tip at 19.0% in 2010.
• 202420% standard, 25%+ exceptional — Square aggregate data shows median full-service tip at 19.4%; Bankrate respondents who tip 20%+ are now a majority.

How the ratchet works

The customary tip moves up in roughly thirty-year cycles, and it moves up the same way each time: through the "exceptional" category. In the 1955 model, 15% was for exceptional service, which meant the upper percentile of restaurants and the upper percentile of meals. As more diners ate at more restaurants more often, the "exceptional" category broadened — fine dining became normal, normal dining became standard, and the 15% number leaked downward to become what you tipped at a Friday-night sit-down.

Once 15% was the standard, "exceptional" jumped to 20%. Same mechanic, same drift, thirty years later. By the time the New York Times' Frank Bruni was writing his dining column in the late 2000s, the recommended example math used 20% as the baseline. The 2024 number is 20%, with the new "exceptional" category sitting at 25% — and the touchscreen prompts at coffee counters trying, prematurely, to move 25% into the default slot. (See the tipping-fatigue piece.)

Why it doesn't ratchet back down

The structural answer is the federal "tipped minimum wage." Since 1991, federal law has frozen the cash wage for tipped workers at $2.13 per hour, with tips expected to bring total compensation up to the standard minimum. The standard federal minimum has been $7.25 since 2009. That fifteen-year freeze is, in real terms, a fifty-percent inflation-adjusted pay cut — and the only mechanism in the system for compensating is the tip percentage. As wages stagnated, the customary tip absorbed the difference.

In the eight states that have abolished the tipped minimum (Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and most recently Michigan in 2025), full minimum wage is paid before tips. You might expect the customary tip to drop. It hasn't. Restaurant menu prices in those states absorbed the higher wage cost, and the 20% norm survived. Once the ratchet clicked, it stayed clicked. Servers in California earn more in cash wages than servers in Texas, and their guests still tip the same percentage.

The 2026 question

Whether the next ratchet — from 20% to 22% or 25% — is happening right now is genuinely contested. The Bankrate, Pew, and Square data each tell a slightly different story, and reasonable observers disagree about whether the touchscreen prompts will eventually drag the median up or whether the customer-side resistance documented in 2024-25 will hold the line at 20%.

My read is that the line will hold at sit-down restaurants, because the historical mechanic — the "exceptional" category broadening to become standard — doesn't apply when the broadening is driven by the merchant rather than by the diner. The 25% preset on the bakery iPad is a software default, not a vote by the dining public. The Emily Post Institute, for what it's worth, still lists 15–20% as the recommended range and has not added a fourth bullet at 25%.

If the line is going to move, it will move the way it always has: by the most attentive 20% of diners gradually tipping more, by the etiquette press catching up five years later, and by the floor finally rising in the third decade. The history says you'll see it coming for a generation. There is no reason in the 2026 data to think we're past the first decade of that move.

The takeaway

The customary 2026 tip in the US is what the guide and the restaurant page say it is — 18–22% pre-tax, with 20% the obvious default. Don't tip 25% because the screen says to. Don't tip 15% because you read a tweet about "tipping fatigue." Tip 20% because that's where the line is, and the line has been moving slowly for a hundred years. If you wait long enough, it'll move again — but probably not this year.

Sam Levenson built TipCalc and writes about service, money, and the small ways software changes the way we behave at the register.