Data study — computed from our own files
Tipping map: 80 countries compared
We compared tipping norms across 80 countries: restaurants, cafés, hotels and taxis, plus an expected/not-expected flag, ranked by the restaurant percentage — the situation travelers ask about most.
Highest-tipping countries
20%
United States for restaurants (then Canada at 18% and South Africa at 15%)
Lowest-tipping countries
0%
14 countries expect no restaurant tip — including Belgium, China, Denmark, Fiji
Full comparative table
Ranked by restaurant percentage, descending. 0% means a tip is not the local custom — not that service is poor. 41 countries have a tracked city we can link to a dedicated tipping calculator.
Methodology (every figure reproducible)
- Input: src/data/travel/tipping.json — 80 countries, each with restaurants/hotels/taxis/cafes percentage fields plus an is_tipping_expected flag.
- Ranking: descending by restaurants.percentage, ties broken by the average of the four percentages, then alphabetically. No new numbers or weights were invented.
- Links: each country links to its tracked city in destinations.json (same country name; only 3 spelling differences between our two files are aliased: UAE/USA/Bosnia). A tipping calculator is generated for every tracked city.
- Percentages represent the customary expectation in everyday situations as recorded in our dataset — not a legal requirement anywhere.