Delivery tip calculator

Methodology

This tool runs the Kindhow Scale, version 1.0, in its baseline-and-adjustments form — the same shape as the mover tip calculator. What is different here is the source. Every other tipping tool on this site starts from a figure and adjusts it with reasoning the publication never mentioned. Emily Post’s delivery row names the adjustments itself — and prices none of them.

The formula

what the courier is tipped, one delivery:

  restaurant, via an app   10% of the food subtotal   sourced (Emily Post)
  pizza, from the shop     $2 a pizza                 sourced (Emily Post)
  groceries                10% of the order + $5      judgment — nobody
                                                      publishes this one

  + snow, a storm, real heat   $3    judgment
  + a walk-up, per flight      $2    judgment
  + a long way out             $3    judgment
  + a big or heavy order       $3    judgment
  + late at night or a holiday $3    judgment

  fees on the receipt          $0    sourced — the delivery, service and
                                     small-order fees are the app's
  delivering in New York City  $0    sourced — the minimum pay rate is
                                     paid with tips on top, not instead

  ─────────────
  = never below $3, rounded to whole dollars
    and the sum prints Emily Post's ceiling for your order, so you can
    see when our adjustments have carried you past what anyone published

The published band — sourced

The Emily Post Institute’s General Tipping Guide prices home delivery in one sentence, and prices it two different ways in that one sentence: “10-15% of the bill, $2-5 for pizza delivery depending on the size of the order and difficulty of delivery.” A restaurant order is a fraction of the bill; a pizza is dollars apiece. That is why the number box in the form changes what it is asking for when you change the order type — it is the source’s own structure, not a UI convenience.

We start at the floor of the band rather than the middle of it, which is the opposite of what most calculators do. The reason is that everything this tool adds on top is ours, and starting low is what makes each of those additions visible as a separate line rather than hidden inside a number that was already generous before you told it anything.

The ceiling is printed, not enforced — and that is a decision

Tick a blizzard and three flights of stairs on a $45 order and this tool returns $14, which is 31.1% — above Emily Post’s 15% ceiling of $6.75. The sum under the ledger says so, in those words, rather than quietly pulling the number back inside the band.

The salon tip calculator does the opposite: it rounds to a giveable amount and then steps back inside 15–20%, because there the thing pushing the figure out of the band was our own rounding, and letting rounding break a published range would make its sourced tag a lie. Here the thing pushing you out is weather and stairs — difficulty Emily Post explicitly says the figure varies on, having declined to say how far. Clamping would suppress our reasoning rather than protect theirs. So this tool discloses instead: the ceiling is a line in the sum, the excess over it is its own line, and the plain sentence above the ledger names it as our call.

The fees are not a tip — and the platform says so

A delivery receipt is mostly charges that sound like they cover the person at your door. They do not. DoorDash’ own consumer fee page describes the delivery fee as “a fixed fee per order that varies by merchant”, the service fee as “a variable fee that helps cover the cost of facilitating your delivery”, and the small order fee as one charged “to enable us to make small transactions worthwhile to fulfill.” Of the single line on the receipt that is not theirs, the same page is unambiguous: “Every dollar you tip goes to your Dasher. Dashers receive 100% of customer tips.”

The general rule behind that is federal. 29 CFR 531.55(a) says “a compulsory charge for service, such as 15 percent of the amount of the bill, imposed on a customer by an employer’s establishment, is not a tip”, and 531.55(b) puts such sums into “the employer’s gross receipts.” It is the same authority the salon tool uses on a salon’s service fee, and the same argument the mover tool and the hotel tool make about a stair charge and a resort fee. Enter your fees and the ledger gains a line at $0 that stays visible, because seeing the zero is the point.

One thing this does not mean: that the courier is unpaid without you. DoorDash publishes a base pay that “will range from $2-10+” per offer, higher for offers that take longer, travel further, or are “less popular with Dashers”, with tips paid “on top of base pay and promotions.” We report that rather than arguing from it. In particular, this tool does not model the widely repeated claim that the amount you enter before ordering decides whether anyone accepts the job — no platform publishes what a courier sees before accepting, so we have no source and make no line out of it.

New York City, and only New York City

Tick the New York City box and the ledger gains a second $0 line. NYC’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection sets a minimum pay rate for app-based delivery workers — $22.13 an hour since 1 April 2026 — and customer tips are not counted toward it. The apps pay the rate; your tip sits on top of it by design.

We do not reduce the tip for it, and that is a house call worth stating plainly. The rate is a floor on a worker’s on-the-clock time across a pay period, not a price for your particular fourth-floor walk-up in the rain, and the law was written with tips assumed on top rather than as a substitute for them. The line is here because the fact is genuinely useful in the other direction: outside New York City there is no equivalent floor anywhere in the United States.

Where the judgment is

Every figure in this table is ours. Emily Post’s row names the two axes — “the size of the order and difficulty of delivery” — and puts a dollar figure on neither, so each of these is flat, visible, and tagged house judgment on its own ledger line. Untick any of them and watch the total move; a visitor who disagrees with three of ours and leaves with their own number has used this tool correctly.

Two more house numbers. The result never falls below $3, because under that it stops reading as a tip — Emily Post’s own pizza floor is $2, and a $9 coffee order at 10% is ninety cents. And the total rounds to whole dollars, not to the site’s $5 giveable step: this is the second tool to opt out of that, after the hotel tipping list, and for the same reason. These amounts live between $3 and $15. Rounding a $3 tip up to $5 would be a 67% opinion dressed as arithmetic.

Two things this tool deliberately does not do

No regional adjustment. Every other tipping tool here nudges its figure by the regional price level. This one does not, for the same reason the salon tool does not: a percentage of a bill is already regional, because the bill is. A $45 order in San Francisco is a smaller dinner than a $45 order in Little Rock, and 10% of each is the adjustment. Applying a second one on top would count the same fact twice.

No grocery figure presented as published. Emily Post’s row prices food arriving from a restaurant. We could find no publication we would cite that prices a grocery run, so the grocery path borrows the restaurant band and its baseline line tags itself house judgment rather than passing as a published figure — the same move the graduation gift calculator makes for the levels U.S. News does not cover. A $90 grocery order comes out at $14 here, and every dollar of it is ours.

What this tool will not do

• It will not tell you a tip is required. It is customary in the US and it is not owed. Every line here can be unticked or overridden, and a delivery that arrived cold an hour late is a fair reason to give less.
• It cannot read your receipt. The fee box reports what you type into it. If a charge on your order is ambiguous — a “driver benefits fee” in a city that mandates one, say — the tool has no way to know whether it reached anybody, and the honest answer is that the app’s own fee page is the place to check.
• It does not model the platform’s side of the transaction. What a courier is paid per offer, how offers are assigned, and whether declining them costs anything are questions for the platform’s own documentation. We quote what DoorDash publishes and do not extrapolate from it.
• It is US-only. The band is American, the fee descriptions are from a US platform page, and the minimum pay rate is one city’s. Delivery tipping elsewhere is frequently different and sometimes absent entirely.

Sources

• The Emily Post Institute — General Tipping Guide — the Home Delivery row: the 10–15% band, the $2–$5 pizza figure, and the clause naming order size and difficulty as what they vary on.
• DoorDash Help Center — What fees do I pay? — what the delivery, service and small-order fees are for, and that 100% of tips go to the Dasher.
• DoorDash Help Center — How is Dasher pay calculated? — base pay of “$2-10+” per offer, and that tips are paid on top of it rather than counted into it.
• 29 CFR 531.55 — Examples of amounts not received as tips — the federal rule that a compulsory charge imposed by the establishment is not a tip.
• NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection — Delivery Workers (minimum pay rate) — the minimum pay rate for app-based delivery workers, and that tips are not counted toward it.

Informational only, not professional advice. The Kindhow Scale is a published model, not a standard, and the lines marked house judgment are our reasoning and nothing more. Nothing here is tax, legal or employment advice: the wage regulation and the New York City rate are quoted to explain what a charge on your receipt is and what a courier is already paid, not to tell you, a courier or a platform how to treat either. Last reviewed: August 2026. Scale version 1.0. Figures that come from a publication are re-checked against their source on a monthly cycle; when one moves, the version number moves with it.