Tipping by situation

When the job matters more than the country

The country directory answers "I'm going to Portugal, what's normal there?" This directory answers a different, equally common question: "I just had my apartment painted / my dog groomed / my furniture moved — is a tip expected here at all, and if so, how much?" Some situations, like moving-day tipping or tipping a home-service technician, carry their own established norms that hold roughly steady across many countries, which makes it faster to compare the situation directly rather than hunting through several country pages for the same category.

The situations that trip people up most

A handful of situations generate a disproportionate share of the "wait, am I supposed to tip this person?" searches: holiday and year-end tipping for regular service providers (a mail carrier, a building superintendent, a regular hairdresser), tipping on delivery apps where a default percentage is already suggested by the app itself, and one-off service workers most people only interact with once — a moving crew, a tour guide, a spa therapist. Each of those gets its own page here rather than being folded into a country page, because the underlying question genuinely isn't "which country am I in," it's "what is this specific relationship, and how often does it recur."

How this differs from a country page

A situation page generally gives a baseline range that applies broadly, then flags the countries or contexts where that baseline shifts meaningfully — it's the mirror image of a country page, which gives you the full local picture for one place. If you already know both your country and your situation, the country page will usually have the more precise answer; if you're dealing with a situation that recurs across your life regardless of where you are, start here instead.

One-time services vs. ongoing relationships

Some situations here are genuinely one-off — a single moving crew, a single tour guide on vacation — where the tip is a clean, self-contained decision made once. Others describe an ongoing relationship with someone who provides the same service repeatedly, like a regular house cleaner or a hairdresser you see every few weeks, where the etiquette question shifts from "what's the right one-time amount" to "what's sustainable to give every time, and does that change around the holidays." The situation pages that cover recurring relationships address both the routine amount and the separate question of year-end or holiday tipping, since those two numbers are rarely the same.

When an app already suggests a number

A growing share of these situations now happen through an app that presents a default tip percentage before you even think about it — food delivery, rideshare, and some home-service booking platforms all do this. The suggested default isn't always aligned with what's actually customary for that specific service, and it can shift over time as the platform changes its own defaults for business reasons unrelated to etiquette. Where that gap matters, the relevant page says so rather than assuming the app's number is automatically the right one.