How to split tips by hours: a worked tip pool example

Add up everyone’s hours. Divide the pool by that total to get the pool per hour. Multiply each person’s hours by it. That is the whole method, and the only place it goes wrong is the hours you feed it.

One pool, worked through

A Saturday dinner pool of $912.40, shared by three servers and a busser who left after the rush:

1. Total the hours. 7.5 + 6 + 6 + 3.25 = 22.75 hours.
2. Find the pool per hour. $912.40 ÷ 22.75 = about $40.11 an hour.
3. Multiply by each person’s hours. Jess: $912.40 × 7.5 ÷ 22.75 = $300.79.

Do step 3 from the pool, not from the rounded hourly figure. Multiplying a rounded $40.11 by each person’s hours drifts by a few cents, and the shares stop adding up to the pool.

Pool, split by hours$912.40

• Jess7.5 h $300.79
• Omar6 h $240.64
• Priya6 h $240.63
• Luis3.25 h $130.34

Use the clocked hours, to the minute

Take hours from the time punches in the POS, not from the schedule. Schedules say a busser worked until close; punches say when he actually left. Say Luis’s punch shows 3 hours 14 minutes and someone types the 3.25 hours from the schedule. That pays him 57¢ more than his $129.77, taken from the other three. Pennies here, but on a pool where someone’s punch is off by half an hour, the error is real money taken from the others.

The tip pool calculator takes hours and minutes as 3:14, or a decimal like 3.25.

The leftover pennies

Exact shares rarely land on whole cents. Cut every share in this pool to the cent below and one cent is left over; it goes to Omar, whose exact share was closest to the next cent. The fair rule is to give each leftover cent to the share that lost most to rounding, and to the first person on the sheet when two tie. Then the pool is paid out to the last cent and nobody is more than a cent off their exact share. Whoever does the split should write the rule down once so it isn’t argued every night.

When hours alone isn’t fair

An hours split pays a busser and a server the same per hour. If your house wants servers weighted higher, that’s a tip pool point system, not an hours split with fudged numbers. Points × hours keeps the hours honest and makes the weighting visible.

Who can be in the pool

Under federal law an employer can’t keep any part of employees’ tips, and that includes managers and supervisors (29 U.S.C. § 203(m)(2)(B); the Department of Labor’s Fact Sheet #15). Who else may join a pool depends on your state, so check with your state labor department before you set one up.

Try your own pool

Here is the same pool in the calculator. Change the names, hours and total to tonight’s.

If you hand out tip-outs from your own tips rather than pooling, the tip-out percentages guide works through what those cost.

Every amount in this guide is worked out by the same calculation code as the TipCup app.

Run your own numbers in the tip pool calculator ›