To tip or not to tip?

Complaining about having to tip is never a good look. If you’re a high-rolling City boy, it makes you look broke (how embarrassing even to have noticed that £500 service charge slapped on your bill!). For the more progressively minded, it risks coming across as callous and uncaring — if you’ve read about the low pay and precarious conditions faced by hospitality workers, leaving a gratuity can feel like a moral obligation, a pro-social act of noblesse oblige. But while the desire not to appear tight-fisted runs deep, it’s been put to test in recent years by the meteoric rise of tipping culture in the capital.

This is a measurable phenomenon: a 2024 study by fintech company SumUp found that the average British tip had increased by 54% in bars and pubs and 13% in cafes and restaurants compared to the previous year. It’s also becoming more common to receive an automatic service charge at the end of a meal, and customers are increasingly being asked to tip in establishments where this was never previously expected, such as cafes, pubs and bars. This phenomenon has yet to spread across the entirety of the hospitality sector: you’re more likely to encounter it in trendier establishments with a wealthier clientele than in greasy spoon cafes, takeaway joints and traditional boozers, even if the work involved is much the same.

With Americans remaining the largest and most profitable contributors to the British tourism industry, there is the sense that the rise of tipping culture is a sly form of US imperialism, just like Sabrina Carpenter and smash burgers. Over the pond, you’re expected to tip just about everyone who provides you with a service: not just hospitality workers, but taxi drivers, hotel doormen, bellhops, housekeepers and porters, hairdressers, nail technicians and coat-check staff. In recent years, customers have started being invited to tip at convenience stores and even self-check out registers (don’t robots deserve to feel appreciated for their hard work, too?). 

While London isn’t quite there yet, there’s some truth to that its etiquette around tipping is beginning to resemble the US. “Tipping for me was automatic growing up in New York — I had to unlearn when I moved to London, and now I’m having to remind myself to do it again,” says Rae, a Manhattan native I speak to who has been living in Southwark since 2019. Still, though, when a group of American customers at the pub I worked in left behind not a crisp twenty pound note but a laminated sheet of “fun facts” about Minnesota, I wished they’d imported their cultural norms a little more aggressively.