Do You Tip for Grocery Pickup and Curbside Orders?
You pull into the numbered parking spot, pop the trunk, and a friendly employee wheels out a cart and loads your groceries in under two minutes. Then comes the small, nagging question that a surprising number of people sit on in their cars: am I supposed to tip this person? The honest, reassuring answer for most curbside and grocery pickup at major stores is no, and not because anyone is being cheap. It is because the store built the service that way on purpose. This guide explains exactly why, walks through the policy at every major chain, and shows you the handful of pickup situations where a tip actually is expected.
Here is the short version, because most people just want to know before the trunk closes: at the big grocery and retail chains that run curbside pickup, the person loading your car is a regular hourly store employee, and the store either forbids them from accepting tips outright or simply never gives you a way to leave one. Walmart, Target, Kroger, Publix, Costco and Sam’s Club all fall into this camp. There is no tip line in the app, no card reader at your window, and in several cases a written company rule telling associates to politely decline cash. So for standard grocery pickup, you do not tip, and skipping it is not rude in the slightest.
Where it flips is delivery. The moment a person is not a store employee but an independent gig worker who chose to shop for your order and drive it to your door, tipping is back on the table and genuinely expected. That is the difference between Instacart delivery and Instacart pickup, between a Walmart Spark driver and a Walmart curbside associate, between Kroger delivery and Kroger’s own in-store pickup. This one distinction, employee versus gig driver, explains almost every confusing tipping situation in the grocery world, and once you see it clearly you will never have to guess in the parking lot again.
When you do owe a tip, on a grocery delivery or a food order, drop the total into the free Waldev Tip Calculator and it works out 10, 15 or 20 percent instantly, including a per-person split. This guide tells you whether to tip; the calculator gives you the number the moment you do.
What this guide covers
The short answer, sorted by how you got your groceries
Grocery ordering has splintered into half a dozen flavors over the last few years, and the tipping rule is different for each one, which is exactly why people get confused. The fastest way to cut through it is to ignore the store name for a second and ask a single question: did a store employee hand me the order, or did a gig worker drive it to me? If it was a store employee at a pickup spot, you do not tip. If it was a gig worker who came to your home, you do. Almost everything else is a footnote to that rule.
Curbside pickup, drive-up, and in-store pickup are all the same thing from a tipping standpoint. You placed an order online, a store worker shopped for it and staged it, and you drove to the store to collect it yourself. Because you did the driving and the worker is a salaried or hourly employee of the store, there is no gratuity involved, and the major chains reinforce that by leaving any tip option out of the app entirely. When a company wants you to tip, it makes it easy; when there is no tip button anywhere in the flow, that absence is the answer.
Delivery is the opposite. Whether it is Instacart, Shipt, DoorDash, Amazon Fresh, or a store’s own delivery arm like Walmart’s Spark network, a person is being dispatched to shop and drive to your address, they are usually paid per-order gig rates rather than a full hourly wage, and the app puts a tip field right in front of you at checkout. That tip field existing is the signal. In those cases you tip the way you would any delivery driver, and we cover the exact amounts further down. For the broad rules across every kind of tipping, the full how much should you tip guide puts grocery pickup in context alongside restaurants, rides and everything else.
The one-question rule: Store employee at a pickup spot means no tip. Gig worker at your front door means tip 10 to 20 percent. If the app never shows you a tip line, the store has already answered the question for you.
Do you tip Walmart pickup? No, and here’s the policy
Walmart pickup is the single most-searched version of this question, so let us settle it plainly. You do not tip Walmart curbside or pickup associates, and it is not a matter of etiquette preference. Walmart has an explicit company policy that its store employees, including the associates who bring your online grocery order out to your car, are not permitted to accept tips. If you hand one of them cash and they take it, they are technically supposed to turn it over to a manager rather than pocket it. So the well-meaning gesture of pressing a five-dollar bill through the window can actually put the worker in an awkward spot, forcing them either to refuse you or to surrender the money later.
The reasoning Walmart gives lines up with how most large retailers think about this. Allowing tips can create an incentive for associates to give faster or friendlier service to customers who tip and slower service to those who do not, which undermines the promise that pickup is a consistent, free convenience for everyone. It can also breed competition and friction among coworkers over who gets the tipping customers. And it keeps Walmart clear of the payroll and tax complexity that comes with classifying a role as tipped. From the company’s point of view, the cleanest solution is a flat no-tips rule, and that is what it runs.
The Walmart app reflects this. When you check out for a pickup order there is no tip prompt anywhere, no suggested percentages, no line to add a gratuity when you check in from the parking lot. Compare that to the Walmart delivery flow, where a tip field appears because a Spark driver, an independent contractor rather than a store employee, is bringing the order to your home. That contrast inside a single company is the clearest possible illustration of the whole principle: the store employee cannot be tipped, the gig driver can. If you frequently order Walmart delivery, the tipping norms mirror other delivery apps, and our delivery driver tipping guide covers the right amount.
Heads up: Because a Walmart pickup associate may have to surrender any cash you give them, insisting on a tip is not the kindness it feels like. If you genuinely want to reward great service, a top-marks rating on the post-pickup survey and a quick word to the associate that you will mention them are worth more to their standing at work than money they cannot keep.
Why most stores don’t let you tip pickup staff
To really trust the no-tip answer, it helps to understand the machinery behind it, because it is not arbitrary. The core reason is worker classification. In the United States, tipping is baked into the pay structure of specific jobs. A restaurant server, a bartender, a delivery driver, a hairstylist, these are roles where the employer is legally allowed to pay a lower base wage on the understanding that customer tips will bring the worker up to and past the regular minimum. That is the entire economic logic of tipping: it fills a deliberate gap in the base pay. If you want to see how that plays out across the tipped economy, the tipping etiquette guide lays out which jobs are structured that way and why.
A grocery pickup associate is not one of those roles. They are paid the store’s standard hourly wage for a retail position, front to back, with no assumption that tips will supplement it. There is no gap to fill, which means a tip is not part of their compensation and the store has no reason to build one in. When a worker already earns their full wage from the employer, adding tips on top introduces problems rather than solving them: it makes pay unpredictable, it can look like the company is offloading wage responsibility onto customers, and it complicates taxes and payroll. So retailers simply keep these roles firmly in the non-tipped column.
On top of the classification issue, big chains care enormously about consistency and brand promise. Curbside pickup was marketed as a frictionless, free perk to win customers away from competitors, and a tip prompt at the end of that experience would sour the free feeling that makes it attractive. There is also the fairness angle inside the store. If tipping were allowed, the associate who happened to work the busy Saturday lot could out-earn the one stuck on a slow Tuesday, or worse, staff might jockey to serve the cars most likely to tip. A blanket no-tip rule removes all of that. It is genuinely simpler for the worker, the customer, and the company, which is why it has become the industry standard for employee-run pickup.
There is one more practical layer worth naming: the modern backlash against tip-screen creep. Shoppers are increasingly worn out by being asked to tip at counters and kiosks where no real service happened, and stores know it. Keeping pickup tip-free sidesteps that fatigue entirely and avoids the awkward tablet-spin moment at a service people specifically chose because it was easy. In a climate where a large share of Americans say tipping has gotten out of hand, not asking is good customer relations.
The store-by-store grocery pickup tipping table
Here is the reference most people are really after: a clear breakdown of whether tipping is allowed, expected, or built into the app at every major chain that offers grocery pickup, plus the delivery contrast where it exists. Treat “no tip option” as the store telling you outright that a tip is not part of the deal. As always with tipping, these reflect current U.S. norms and company policies as of 2026, and delivery arms can change which third party fulfills them.
| Store / service | Who brings your order | Tip for pickup? | Tip for delivery? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Walmart Curbside / Pickup | Walmart employee | No — policy bars tips | Yes — tip the Spark driver in-app |
| Target Drive Up | Target employee | No — no tip option, staff can’t accept | Yes — Shipt driver, tip in-app |
| Kroger Pickup | Kroger employee | No — no tip line | Yes — often Instacart, tip the driver |
| Publix Curbside | Publix / Instacart shopper | No — not offered for pickup | Yes — tip the Instacart shopper |
| Costco / Sam’s Club Pickup | Warehouse employee | No — employees not tipped | Varies by third-party partner |
| Albertsons / Safeway Pickup | Store employee | No — no prompt for pickup | Yes — tip the delivery driver |
| Whole Foods / Amazon Pickup | Amazon employee | No — no tip option | Yes — Amazon Fresh delivery tip screen |
| Instacart Pickup | You collect it yourself | No — no tip field on pickup | Yes — 10–20%, $5 minimum for delivery |
| Restaurant / grocery takeout | You collect it yourself | Optional — $0 to a couple dollars | N/A |
Notice the pattern running down the “tip for pickup” column: it is no, all the way down, right up until you reach delivery on the right. That is not a coincidence, it is the whole point. Every service where a store employee stages and hands off your order sits in the no-tip category, and every service where a gig worker drives it to you sits in the tip category. Restaurant and grocery takeout that you drive to collect is the one soft spot, where a small optional tip is fine but never required, and we cover the nuances of that in the dedicated takeout and carryout tipping guide.
Target Drive Up: employees, no tip prompt
Target Drive Up works almost identically to Walmart, and the answer is the same: no, you do not tip. The team members who bring your order out to the car are Target employees earning an hourly wage, and Target does not provide any mechanism for customers to tip them. There is no tip line in the Target app when you check out or when you tap “I’m here” from the parking lot, and staff are not set up to accept cash gratuities. Target has leaned hard into Drive Up as a signature free convenience, and a tip request would cut directly against that positioning.
Where Target does involve tipping is delivery through Shipt, the same-day delivery service Target owns. When you order for delivery rather than Drive Up, a Shipt shopper does the shopping and brings your order to your door, and the app lets you tip that person, with the tip going to the shopper. So once again, the split inside a single retailer is clean: the Target employee at the curb is not tipped, the Shipt driver at your door is. If you ever move between the two, just remember that the presence or absence of a tip screen is Target telling you which situation you are in.
Occasionally a Drive Up worker will do something above and beyond, like helping wrangle a huge order while you have a sleeping baby in the back seat, and people wonder whether that changes things. It does not change the policy, but it is a nice moment to offer sincere thanks and, if you want, a shout-out in the survey Target sends. Those surveys feed into store metrics that genuinely matter for employees, arguably more than a few dollars they are not supposed to take. We will come back to these non-cash ways to say thank you near the end.
Kroger, Publix, Costco and the rest
The remaining major chains all follow the same employee-based logic, with small wrinkles worth knowing. Kroger pickup, branded in various regions and fulfilled by Kroger associates who shop your list and load your car, is a free or low-flat-fee service with no tipping option and staff who are not tipped. The important asterisk for Kroger is delivery: Kroger home delivery is frequently fulfilled through Instacart or a similar partner, and those delivery orders do let you tip the driver. So a Kroger customer might correctly tip nothing on Tuesday’s pickup and 15 percent on Friday’s delivery, and both are right.
Publix curbside is interesting because Publix partners with Instacart for the shopping, but for curbside pickup specifically there is no tip charged or prompted, since you collect the order yourself. Publix delivery through Instacart, on the other hand, follows standard Instacart tipping, where the shopper who delivers is tipped. Costco and Sam’s Club keep it simple: their warehouse employees handling pickup are not tipped, consistent with the members-first, low-frills model, and any delivery is handled by third-party partners whose own tipping rules apply.
Albertsons, Safeway, Whole Foods and Amazon round out the picture the same way. In-store or curbside pickup staffed by employees carries no tip; delivery driven to your door by a gig or contract worker carries the usual tip. Whole Foods pickup, run through Amazon, has no tip option, while Amazon Fresh delivery presents a tip screen. If your grocery ordering flows through the Instacart platform specifically, whether under a store’s banner or Instacart’s own brand, the mechanics of how batch pay and tips interact are worth understanding, and the full Instacart tipping guide breaks them down in detail.
Instacart is the one platform where the same account can produce a no-tip pickup order and a tip-expected delivery order. The Instacart tipping guide explains exactly when the tip field appears, how much to leave, and why pickup never asks for one.
Instacart pickup vs delivery: the clearest example
If you want a single, crisp illustration of the whole employee-versus-gig principle, Instacart is it, because both options live inside one app and the tipping behavior flips depending on which you pick. With Instacart delivery, a shopper accepts your batch, walks the store gathering your items, checks out, and then drives the groceries to your home. Because that person is doing the physical delivery to your address and is paid gig rates that lean on tips, the checkout screen shows a tip field with a suggested amount, and the norm is 10 to 20 percent with a five-dollar floor.
With Instacart pickup, the shopper still gathers and bags your order in the store, but then you drive to the store and collect it yourself. There is no delivery leg, so the app does not present a tip option at all. This trips up thoughtful people who feel that the shopper still did work and deserves something, and the reasoning is fair, but the platform has structured pickup as a lower-cost, no-tip service, and there is simply no field to leave a gratuity in. If you flip a delivery order to pickup during checkout, you can watch the tip line vanish from the summary, which is the app quite literally showing you the rule in action.
The takeaway is that the tip follows the delivery, not the shopping. Shopping alone, when you complete the journey yourself by driving to the store, is treated as part of the base service you already paid the pickup fee for. Driving your groceries to your door is the part that gets tipped. Hold that line and Instacart, Shipt, and every store-branded version of the same platform become easy to read: see a tip field, it is delivery, tip it; see no tip field, it is pickup, do not worry about it.
Curbside vs delivery, side by side
Because the entire question hinges on this one contrast, it is worth laying the two modes next to each other so the difference is impossible to miss. The columns below are not really about the store, they are about the worker and the economics behind the job, which is what actually determines whether a tip belongs.
Curbside / in-store pickup
A store employee shops and loads your car. They earn a full hourly wage. You drive to and from the store yourself. There is no tip line in the app, and at chains like Walmart and Target the staff are barred from accepting cash. The correct tip is nothing, and skipping it follows the store’s own rules.
Home delivery
A gig or contract worker shops and drives the order to your door. They are paid per-order rates that assume tips. The app shows a tip field at checkout. The correct tip is 10 to 20 percent with a roughly five-dollar minimum, more for heavy orders, long distances, stairs or bad weather.
The gap between these two is not about how hard the worker labored on any given day. A curbside associate on a brutal August afternoon may work harder than a delivery driver on an easy run, and that can feel unfair. But tipping in the United States is tied to how a job is classified and paid, not to a case-by-case effort score. The delivery driver is paid in a way that structurally depends on your tip; the curbside associate is not. Respecting that structure is what makes tipping coherent instead of a guilt tax applied unevenly. For the bigger philosophy on where tips genuinely belong and where prompts can be declined, the etiquette guide is the companion piece to this one.
When a “pickup” order actually does deserve a tip
Not every order with the word pickup attached is tip-free, so it is worth spelling out the genuine exceptions rather than leaving you to guess. The unifying thread is the same as always: tip when a non-employee gig worker performed a service that is structured around tips, or when a food service worker did meaningful extra labor on your behalf. Here are the situations where reaching for a tip is appropriate even though “pickup” is in the name.
Restaurant takeout with real service. If you order food to collect and a staff member custom-packed a large or complicated order, curated it, or clearly went out of their way, a small tip of a dollar or two, or roughly 10 percent, is a kind gesture. It is optional, not obligatory, and a simple grab-and-go bag needs nothing. The carryout guide covers exactly where the line sits.
A gig worker who delivered, even a short distance. If your “pickup” was actually a delivery brought to your car or door by an Instacart, Shipt, DoorDash or Spark worker, that is delivery, and you tip it. The label some apps use does not change the fact that a driver came to you.
Small local shops that invite tips. An independent bakery, butcher, or farm stand that fulfills an online order may have a genuine tip jar or a tip line run by the owner. Here a small tip is welcome because the business itself chose to accept it, unlike a big-chain employee who cannot.
Catering or bulk order carry-out. When you pick up a large catering tray order that staff assembled, boxed, and helped load into your car, a flat tip of a few dollars up to 10 percent recognizes the real effort, similar to how you would treat a big custom takeout order.
Outside of those, standard curbside grocery pickup at a major chain remains firmly no-tip. The presence of an official tip field in the app is your green light; its absence is a red one. When you are unsure, that single test, does the app or the business actually offer a way to tip, resolves it correctly almost every time.
Worked dollar examples
Numbers make this concrete, so let us run a few realistic scenarios that show how the same shopper spending the same money ends up tipping very differently depending on how the order reached them. These are the everyday situations people actually find themselves in.
You order $180 of groceries for Walmart pickup and an associate loads all fourteen bags into your SUV in three minutes flat. The correct tip is $0. Walmart policy bars the associate from accepting one, and there is no tip line in the app. A genuine thank-you and top marks on the survey are the right way to reward the fast, friendly loading.
You place the identical $180 order for Walmart delivery instead, and a Spark driver brings it to your kitchen. Now a tip field appears. At 15 percent you would tip about $27; a 10 percent tip is $18. Because it is a big, heavy order, tipping toward the higher end, around $27, is fair, especially if there were stairs.
A Target team member brings a $60 Drive Up order to your car in the rain and loads it quickly. The tip is $0. Target provides no tip option and employees cannot accept cash. If the service was great, leave a five-star response in the follow-up survey instead.
An Instacart shopper hand-picks $95 of groceries, texts you about a substitution, and carries eight bags up to your second-floor apartment. Standard tipping is 10 to 20 percent, so $9.50 to $19. Given the stairs and the careful substitution, $15 to $19 is the generous, appropriate call.
You order the same $95 of groceries for Instacart pickup and drive to the store to collect it. There is no tip field and the correct tip is $0. The shopping is bundled into the pickup service you paid for; the missing delivery leg is why no gratuity applies.
You call in a $48 family dinner and a staffer packs four containers, bags the sauces separately, and adds napkins and utensils. A tip here is optional; a couple of dollars or roughly 10 percent, about $5, is a nice acknowledgment of the extra packing. A simple single-item pickup would warrant nothing.
Line these up and the logic is undeniable. The same person, spending the same money, correctly tips zero on pickup and a real amount on delivery, purely because of who completed the last leg and how that job is paid. If you want the exact figure on any delivery order without doing the mental math, run the total through the Waldev Tip Calculator, which handles the percentage and the split in a second.
Delivery tip shortcut:
10% of the order = move the decimal one place left.
15% = that 10% figure, plus half of it.
20% = that 10% figure, doubled.
Example on a $95 delivery: 10% = $9.50, so 15% ≈ $14 and 20% = $19.
Curbside pickup at a major chain: tip = $0.
How to thank curbside staff when you can’t tip
A lot of people ask this follow-up, and it is a good instinct: if I appreciated the service but cannot tip, how do I actually show it? The good news is that the things that help a curbside or Drive Up worker most are free, and in several cases they matter more to the employee’s standing at work than cash they are not allowed to keep. Here is what genuinely lands.
Ace the survey
The post-pickup survey that stores text or email feeds directly into performance metrics. A five-star rating with a specific compliment, ideally naming the associate, carries real weight with managers and can influence hours and advancement.
Make the load easy
Clear your trunk before you arrive, park straight in the numbered spot, and pop the hatch as they walk up. Removing friction from their job is a small kindness that a busy associate on their fortieth car of the shift genuinely notices.
Just be kind
A warm thank-you, patience when the lot is slammed, and treating the worker like a person rather than a vending machine cost nothing and improve their day more than most customers realize. Grace is underrated currency.
If you want to go further for a store you use constantly, a positive note to the store’s management or a mention in a Google review that names great curbside service can reach the whole team. None of this violates any policy, all of it is welcome, and together it accomplishes what a tip would in a job where tips are off the table. For workers who genuinely rely on tips, like the delivery drivers on the other side of this comparison, the best thanks really is a fair tip, and the delivery driver guide covers what fair looks like.
Common grocery pickup tipping mistakes
Even careful shoppers stumble into a few predictable traps around pickup and delivery tipping, and naming them makes the whole thing easier to get right. Most of these come from applying one mode’s rules to the other, or from good intentions that accidentally cause a problem.
Do
Tip delivery drivers a real amount regardless of any delivery or service fee, since that fee usually goes to the platform, not the worker. Check whether the app shows a tip field, treat its presence as your signal, and default to no tip for employee-run curbside. Reward great pickup service through the survey.
Don’t
Don’t press cash on a Walmart or Target employee who may have to surrender it. Don’t assume a delivery fee reached the driver as a tip. Don’t feel guilty skipping a tip when there is no tip option, and don’t tip twice by adding cash on top of an in-app tip you already left the delivery driver.
The subtler mistake is letting the free, no-tip nature of pickup bleed over into how you treat delivery. Because curbside trained you that groceries can arrive with no tip, it is easy to under-tip or skip tipping a delivery driver who genuinely depends on it, which is a different job with different economics. Keep the two clearly separate in your head: pickup is a free store service you complete yourself, and delivery is a tipped gig service someone performs for you. Getting that boundary right means you never overpay at the curb and never shortchange the driver at your door. When a tip is owed, the tip calculator removes the guesswork entirely.
Grocery pickup tipping: frequently asked questions
Do you tip Walmart pickup?
No. Walmart’s pickup and curbside associates are hourly store employees, and Walmart’s policy prohibits them from accepting tips. If you insist, the employee is required to hand the money to a manager rather than keep it, so pressing a tip on them can create a problem rather than a reward. The service is designed to be free, with no gratuity built in and no way to add one in the app or at the car. The only Walmart role where tipping applies is home delivery, where a Spark driver brings your order to your door and can accept a tip in the app.
Do you tip for grocery pickup at the store?
Generally no. At major chains like Walmart, Target, Kroger, Publix, Costco and Sam’s Club, the person who loads your groceries into the trunk is a store employee, and these retailers either forbid tips or simply do not build a tipping option into the experience. There is no tip line at curbside and no prompt in the app, which is the store’s way of telling you a tip is not expected. Pickup is priced as a free or flat-fee convenience, and the workers are paid an hourly wage rather than a tipped one.
Why can’t you tip grocery pickup employees?
Because they are classified as regular hourly employees, not tipped workers. Retailers like Walmart and Target set a company-wide no-tipping policy for store staff to keep service consistent for every customer, avoid competition among associates for tips, and steer clear of the wage and tax complications that come with tipped positions. A tipped worker such as a restaurant server is paid a lower base wage on the assumption that tips fill the gap. A curbside associate is paid a full hourly rate up front, so there is no gap for a tip to fill.
Can you tip Instacart for pickup orders?
No. Instacart pickup orders do not include a tipping option because you, not a shopper, do the driving. The Instacart shopper gathers and bags your items in the store, but you pick them up yourself, so there is no delivery leg to tip for. Tipping on Instacart applies only to delivery orders, where a shopper both shops for your groceries and brings them to your door. If you switch a delivery order to pickup, the tip field disappears from the checkout screen. Our Instacart tipping guide covers the details.
Do you tip Target Drive Up or Kroger pickup?
No to both. Target Drive Up is staffed by Target employees who are not permitted to accept tips, and there is no tip prompt in the Target app. Kroger’s in-house pickup, where a Kroger associate shops for you and loads the car, is a free or low-fee service with no tipping option and employees who are not tipped. The distinction to watch is delivery: Kroger home delivery, often fulfilled through Instacart, does let you tip the driver, and that tip goes to the person who brings the order to your door.
Is it rude not to tip for curbside pickup?
Not at all. When a store does not offer a tip option and its policy bars employees from accepting tips, choosing not to tip is simply following the rules the store set. Curbside associates do not expect a tip and are not counting on one to make their wage, unlike a delivery driver or a restaurant server. A friendly thank-you, having your trunk cleared and ready, and a good survey response are the gestures that actually help these workers, since a positive review can matter more to them than cash they are not allowed to keep.
When should you tip for a pickup order?
Tip on a pickup-style order only when the person is an independent gig worker who chose to shop and deliver, not a store employee, and when the app actually provides a tip field. That mostly means delivery, not true curbside pickup. If you order groceries for delivery through Instacart, Shipt, DoorDash or a store’s own delivery service, tip the driver 10 to 20 percent with a five-dollar floor. For takeout food you drive to collect yourself, a tip is optional and usually a dollar or two at most. If there is no tip line and staff cannot accept tips, no tip is the correct answer.
Do curbside pickup workers get paid more instead of tips?
They are paid a standard hourly wage rather than a lower tipped wage, which is the trade-off behind the no-tip model. A tipped employee in most states can be paid a reduced cash wage as long as tips bring them up to the regular minimum. A curbside or pickup associate does not fall under that system; they earn their store’s normal hourly rate for the role, the same whether the parking lot is busy with tippers or not. That is why the store can confidently tell staff to decline tips: the wage does not depend on them.
The quick version
For standard grocery pickup and curbside at the big chains, the answer is no, you do not tip. Walmart, Target, Kroger, Publix, Costco and the rest staff these services with hourly employees, and they either forbid tips outright or leave any tip option out of the app entirely. Not tipping is following the store’s own rules, not being cheap. The rule flips only for delivery, where a gig worker drives your order to your door and the app shows a tip field. There, tip 10 to 20 percent with a roughly five-dollar minimum, and more for heavy orders, stairs, distance or bad weather.
The single test that resolves almost every case: if the app offers a tip line, tip it; if it does not, the store has already told you no tip is expected. For the exact amount on any delivery order, including a per-person split, use the free Waldev Tip Calculator. From there, dig into the Instacart guide, the delivery driver guide, and the takeout guide, read the master how much should you tip overview, browse more tipping tips, or explore the full business calculators collection on the Waldev homepage.
Note: The tipping guidance on this page reflects common U.S. customs and major-retailer policies as of 2026 and is provided for general informational purposes only. Company policies, delivery partners, and app features change over time and can vary by location. Tipping is voluntary; always follow the specific store’s policy and check whether the app provides a tip option before assuming one is expected.
Reporting on Walmart’s rule barring store and curbside associates from accepting customer tips, and how the policy is applied. Read about Walmart’s no-tip policy →
Bankrate’s tipping culture survey tracks how Americans feel about tip prompts and where tipping is and isn’t expected. View the Bankrate tipping survey →