You had dinner at a restaurant and the check has just landed on your table. How much you’ll tip probably seems intuitive: between 18% to 25% of your final bill, depending on the quality of service you received.
But when it comes to a night out at a bar, how much should you tip for drinks in 2025?
Putting a dollar down for each drink you ordered probably sounds familiar to folks who’ve been going out for a while.
And yes, “usually at a dive bar, it’s normal to leave a dollar or two if you order a beer or a well shot,” said Marissa Maldonado, a bartender in San Francisco’s Castro District who’s worked in the service industry for decades.
But in most other situations, Maldonado said, what’s considered a baseline tip at bars has changed since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the bar professionals across the Bay Area that KQED spoke to — with experience across dive, cocktail and sports bars — confirmed that 20% of the total bill has become the standard bar tip in the region.
The transition from “a dollar or two per drink” to a percentage tip has gained momentum in the last five years. More businesses have adopted point of sale technology that lets patrons pay a percentage on their card before heading out, leaving behind the days when you needed to have a cash tip ready.
How we tip has changed, but for folks on the other side of the bar, the value of tipping has not. We looked at the history and data of tipping in the Bay Area — along with the experiences of bartenders — to better understand what’s changed in how and why we compensate service when going out for drinks.
The online consumer discourse around “tipflation” — the idea that customers feel more pressure to tip higher and more often — often points the finger at the widespread adoption of POS technology. But data shows that tipping has actually slumped in recent years.
Before the pandemic, the monthly average tip at food and beverage establishments — known in the industry as F&B — across the region hovered slightly above 14%, at Bay Area businesses that use POS technology from the company Square (data below). This average also includes restaurant workers, who usually receive fewer tips than bartenders, according to Square’s own data.
When COVID-19 restrictions forced bars and restaurants to limit operations in 2020, patrons started tipping more. By April 2020, the average tip at F&B businesses in San Francisco had increased to roughly 16.5%: up more than two percentage points from the previous year.
But after that peak, F&B tipping has slowly decreased. Data from Square shows that the monthly average for the Bay Area in June 2025 was 14.22% — lower than it was at any time in 2019. Nationally, tipping across all F&B establishments has not grown in the past year.
This trend coincides with a decline in consumer confidence — how individual consumers feel about the overall direction of the economy. Tips make about a quarter of what F&B workers make in income, a Square spokesperson said, so lower tips “can signal deeper labor market challenges.” And as tips have declined since the pandemic, grocery prices have gone up by almost 30% and Bay Area rent prices have rebounded.
“Once people felt things were going back to normal [after the height of the pandemic]l, tips started to go down across the board,” said Erika Carig, a bar professional in Santa Clara County for the last decade. “But we are still doing this work.”
“The quality of our service has not gone down,” she said.
For over a century, service industry workers in the United States have depended on voluntary tips from customers to make a living.
After the Civil War, formerly enslaved Black Americans sought jobs across different industries, including restaurants and the growing railroad network. But many employers, knowing that they could easily exploit Black workers, offered a cruel bargain: a job, but with little to no pay. Some businesses even formally built tips into their payment structure.
“Tipping is rooted in a lot of racism,” said Aleka Ross, a San Francisco-based bar professional with service experience on both the West and East Coasts. “Employers didn’t want to pay Black Americans what they were owed … how they got around that was tipping.”
By 1966, it became federal policy to pay service workers less than the minimum wage, as long as tips made up the difference. Businesses could now pay their employees less and customers, in turn, would now be partly responsible for ensuring fair compensation.
And like any other form of income, Uncle Sam wanted his share. For decades, the Internal Revenue Service has expected service workers to report tips in their annual tax returns — and submit extra paperwork.
But big changes could be coming: after Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act earlier this year, the IRS is now considering allowing workers making less than $150,000 to deduct up to $25,000 in tips per year on federal taxes.
In most of the country, the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour, compared to $7.25 an hour in almost all other industries — and employers can even deduct meals and lodging from that amount.
California, however, has its own state-mandated minimum wage of $16.50 an hour. Individual cities like San Francisco — which mandates an hourly rate of $19.18 — go even higher.
“But we still rely on tips to make a livable wage,” said Ila Sangupta, an independent bar professional living in San Francisco. Without tips, Sangupta said, she would not be able to afford to live in the city where she works.
Other bartenders KQED spoke with shared that despite qualifying for minimum-wage rates, they still have to work multiple jobs to cover essential needs, like healthcare coverage or child care. San Francisco requires employers with at least 20 employees to spend a certain amount on workers’ healthcare, but almost everywhere else in California, businesses are only required to provide health insurance benefits when they have 50 or more full-time employees.
And recent data shows that 27.6% of workers nationwide receiving SNAP benefits (also known as food stamps) are employed in the service industry — by far the largest group with this support. And when the recent federal government shutdown affected SNAP funds at the start of November, that also impacted thousands of bar and restaurant workers.
“It’s hard to work in this industry,” said Carig from Santa Clara County, “and not get paid a livable wage.”
Even if there’s still some debate among customers about what kind of tips should be expected at the bar, there are a few core principles bartenders say you can apply to determine what kind of tip is expected — and is fairest.
How fancy are your drinks?
Bartenders KQED spoke with suggested you could first consider how elaborate your drinks were, as this usually tracks with how much time and attention your bartender gave you.
“Does the drink have at least two or more touches? Does it have a garnish? Am I cooling a glass?” Ross said. “I hope the client can understand the service and time I’m dedicating to making a great cocktail.”
How big — and demanding — is your party?
Serving bigger parties also requires more of the bartender’s service.
“A bigger tip sounds great in a situation where you see that we’re taking extra care of you or you have a larger party that has a bunch of different requests,” Sangupta said. “If you’re making 15 espresso martinis, it’s a lot of work for a bartender to do versus 15 vodka sodas.”
If you or your friends were a bit too rowdy, it’s also a good idea to take that into account, say professionals — especially if your bartender had to work extra to accommodate you.
“If you come in drunk with your friends during last call, I don’t mind making you a drink,” said Carig from Santa Clara County. “But people need to be mindful about the way that they’re treating workers and the energy they’re giving to workers.”
“And that shows all the way through to when you sign off on your check,” she said.
What kind of service did you receive?
“Tipping doesn’t go from your pocket to the owner of the establishment,” Maldonado said. “It’s thanking that person who has a smile on their face and giving great service and doing it quickly.”
In this vein, it’s still helpful to think about bar tipping as you do in restaurants — and also factoring in that, like servers, bartenders still deal with unique situations. If you’re at a busy dive bar and your drink is taking a while, keep in mind there may only be one bartender working that night.
… and cash is king.
And while they acknowledged that it’s not always available, most bartenders KQED spoke with mentioned that cash is more convenient for tipping because tips on a card usually are passed on by employers later in the pay period.
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