Practices · Observable
Inflated default tips
The lowest suggested tip on the screen is 20% or more, or the highest is 30% or more. Every major point-of-sale vendor ships lower defaults.
The three or four buttons on a tip screen are set by the business, not the payment company. Square ships 15, 20, and 25 percent. SpotOn ships 15, 18, and 20. Toast, Clover, and Stripe leave the numbers to the merchant. None of them caps the values.
Defaults move behavior. A study of 13 million New York City taxi rides found that raising the buttons from 15/20/25 to 20/25/30 increased the average tip by about 10 percent and increased the share of riders who left nothing by about half.
This record lists the exact percentages reporters say they saw, with the date. It does not say whether a business should set them differently.
Spot it on your receipt
- Write down all three or four percentages before you tap.
- Note which one was already highlighted when the screen appeared.
- Check whether the percentages were computed on the subtotal or on the total after tax.
- Take a photo of the screen. The percentages are the record.
Figures
Square's default suggested tips are 15%, 20%, and 25% (or $1, $2, $3 on bills under $10).
Source: Square support
Raising taxi defaults from 15/20/25 to 20/25/30 raised tips about 10% and raised no-tip rides about 50% (Haggag and Paci, 2014).
On the record
Locations with a published claim that fits
Ordered by the number of independent reports behind the claim, keeping only claims where at least one linked report describes this practice.
No published record fits this practice yet.
Law
The federal baseline
No federal law requires or forbids a tip prompt at checkout. If money collected as a "tip" is retained by the business rather than paid to workers, the federal tip-ownership rule and federal and state deceptive-practice laws may apply.
Source: FTC Act §5; FTC v. Amazon (Amazon Flex), 2021 · Verified 2026-09