How Much to Tip Instacart and Grocery Delivery Shoppers
Grocery delivery feels like magic right up until the app asks you for a tip and defaults to a suspiciously small number. Five percent stares back at you, and you are left wondering whether that is generous, stingy, or somewhere in between. The honest answer is that the default is low on purpose, and the person about to shop your entire list and haul it to your door is counting on you to do better. This guide gives you the fair number for Instacart, Shipt, Walmart and Amazon Fresh, with real dollar examples, plus the rules that actually decide whether your order gets picked up fast and shopped with care.
Here is the short version, because most people just want the number: tip your Instacart shopper 15 to 20 percent of the order total, with a minimum of about $5 even on a small order. The 5 percent the app suggests by default is really the floor, not a fair rate. It made sense when tipping was a small bonus on top of good wages, but on gig grocery apps the tip is the majority of what your shopper actually earns, and 5 percent of a normal cart barely covers the gas. On a $75 order, 5 percent is under $4, while a fair 18 percent is around $13.50. That gap is the whole story.
What makes grocery delivery different from ordering a burrito is that your shopper does two full jobs. They walk your entire list, pick produce by hand, message you about substitutions when something is out of stock, wait in the checkout line, and only then load everything into their own car and drive it to you. A restaurant delivery driver just picks up a sealed bag. So the fair tip for grocery delivery leans a little higher, and the details of your order (weight, bag count, stairs, distance, weather) matter more than they do almost anywhere else.
Drop your grocery total and a percentage into the free Waldev Tip Calculator and it works out the tip and the final amount instantly, so you can set a fair number in the Instacart app without doing the math in your head. This guide gives you the rules; the calculator gives you the figure in a second.
What this guide covers
The quick answer, with real dollar examples
Let us put numbers on it, because “15 to 20 percent” is easy to say and easy to lose track of when you are staring at a tip slider. Picture a normal weekly grocery run that comes to $120. The app’s default 5 percent tip would be $6. A fair 15 percent tip is $18, and 20 percent is $24. The difference between the default and a fair tip on that order is somewhere between $12 and $18, which is real money to a shopper who might spend 45 minutes shopping it and another 20 minutes driving it to you. From your side it is the price of a couple of coffees. From their side it is the difference between the order being worth doing and being a money-loser.
Scale it down and the percentage starts to break, which is exactly why the flat minimum exists. On a small $30 order of a few odds and ends, 15 percent is only $4.50. That is thin for someone who still has to drive to the store, shop, and drive to you, so the sensible move is to round up to a $5 minimum at least, and honestly $6 to $7 is kinder for the effort involved. Scale it up and the percentage does the heavy lifting for you: on a big $250 stock-up order, 15 percent is $37.50 and 20 percent is $50, which correctly reflects that a giant cart is a much bigger job than a small one.
So the rule you can actually remember is this: start at 15 to 20 percent, never go below about $5, and nudge upward when the order is heavy, awkward, far away, or delivered in miserable weather. If you want the precise figure without doing decimals in your head at the door, the Waldev tip calculator turns any order total into a clean tip in one tap, and the broader how much should you tip guide puts grocery delivery in context next to every other service.
The grocery-delivery rule: 15 to 20 percent of the order, minimum about $5, and higher for heavy loads, many bags, stairs, long drives, or bad weather. Treat the app’s 5 percent default as the floor to climb off of, not the target.
Why the 5% default is misleading
The number that trips everyone up is that pre-filled 5 percent. It looks official, as if the platform studied the market and decided 5 percent is correct. It did not. Instacart has suggested a low default tip for years, and that default has functioned as the platform’s minimum rather than its recommendation. The gap matters because most people anchor to whatever number is already in the box. When the box says 5 percent, plenty of customers tap through without changing it, and the shopper ends up with a few dollars for an hour of work.
To see why 5 percent falls short, it helps to understand where a shopper’s money comes from. For each order, Instacart pays the shopper a batch payment, which is often modest, sometimes just a few dollars for a small order. Your tip is added on top, and on the majority of orders the tip is the larger of the two numbers. That is not an accident of the market; it is how the model is built. The customer-facing fees you pay (the delivery fee, the service fee, the optional priority fee) largely go to Instacart to run the platform, not to the person shopping your list. So when you leave 5 percent because “the fees already cover it,” you are leaving the actual worker with very little.
Compare it to a restaurant, where a server is at least paid a base wage, however small, and the tip is a bonus on top of the food you already paid full price for. Grocery delivery flips that. The tip is not a bonus, it is the core of the pay. This is the single most important thing to internalize about tipping any gig-app worker, and it applies to DoorDash, Uber Eats, and the whole food-delivery category just as much as Instacart. Once you see the tip as the wage rather than the garnish, 5 percent stops looking like a reasonable default and starts looking like what it is: the bare minimum the app will let you leave.
The Instacart and grocery-delivery tip chart
Here is the reference most people are really after: what a fair tip looks like at different order sizes, in actual dollars, so you can eyeball your cart and know instantly whether the number in the app is in the right zone. These figures assume a normal delivery with no unusual difficulty; the next sections cover when to push higher.
| Order total | App default (5%) | Fair tip (15%) | Generous tip (20%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| $30 (small order) | $1.50 | $5 (rounded up) | $6 |
| $50 | $2.50 | $7.50 | $10 |
| $75 | $3.75 | $11.25 | $15 |
| $100 | $5 | $15 | $20 |
| $120 (weekly run) | $6 | $18 | $24 |
| $150 | $7.50 | $22.50 | $30 |
| $200 | $10 | $30 | $40 |
| $250 (big stock-up) | $12.50 | $37.50 | $50 |
The pattern is easy to read once it is laid out: the app default is roughly a third of a fair tip across the board. On the small $30 order the percentage produces too little, which is why the $5 minimum kicks in and rounds it up. On everything from $75 up, sticking to 15 to 20 percent lands you on a number that respects the work without you having to think about it. If the exact math is annoying at the door, the tip calculator handles it, and there is a fuller side-by-side of the percentages and what each one signals in the main tipping guide.
Fast grocery-tip math:
10% of the order = move the decimal one place left.
15% = that 10% figure, plus half of it again.
20% = that 10% figure, doubled.
Example on a $90 order: 10% = $9, so 15% = $13.50 and 20% = $18.
The $5 minimum and why small orders need it
Percentages are fair on medium and large orders, but they quietly fail on small ones, and this is where a lot of undertipping happens without anyone meaning to. Think about what a shopper actually spends to fulfill a $20 order of milk, eggs, bread, and a couple of snacks. They drive to the store, park, find four or five items, wait in line, pay, walk to the car, drive to your address, and carry the bag to your door. A strict 15 percent tip on that $20 order is $3. That does not come close to covering their time and fuel, because the effort of a small order is not much less than a medium one; the driving and the trip overhead are the same.
That is the entire reason a flat-dollar minimum exists alongside the percentage. Below roughly $35 or $40, the percentage produces a number too small to be fair, so you round up to a floor of about $5, and a little more if the store is far or the order still needed real effort. A good way to think about it: you are not just tipping on the value of the groceries, you are paying for a person to make a dedicated trip on your behalf. A trip has a baseline cost no matter how little you buy. The same logic drives the minimum on restaurant delivery, where a $4 to $5 floor is standard even on a tiny order.
Small order, short distance. A $25 order from a store two miles away still deserves a $5 minimum. The percentage says $3.75; round it up, because the trip cost the shopper the same as a bigger one.
Small order, long distance. A $25 order from a store 10 miles out deserves more like $7 to $8, because the driving is now the dominant cost of the job, not the shopping.
Tiny “I forgot one thing” order. A single-item run is almost all trip and no shopping. Tip $5 to $7 flat; the percentage is meaningless when the order is $6.
Shoppers see your tip and choose orders by it
This is the mechanic that changes everything about how you should think about the tip, and most customers have no idea it exists. When Instacart offers an order to shoppers, it shows them a preview: the store, roughly how many items are on the list, the batch pay Instacart is offering, and the estimated tip. The shopper sees all of that before they decide to accept. In practice that means your tip is not a thank-you at the end. It is the bid that gets your order picked up in the first place.
Put yourself in the shopper’s shoes for a second. Two orders pop up at the same time. One is a 20-item list with a $15 tip attached; the other is a 25-item list with the 5 percent default that works out to $3. Which one gets grabbed first? The well-tipped one, every time, and the low-tip order sits in the queue. If your tip is low, the likely outcomes are a longer wait for someone to accept it, a shopper who is rushing through several stacked orders at once, or, at busy times like a weekend afternoon or a snowstorm before a holiday, no one taking it for a long stretch. A fair upfront tip is genuinely the fastest way to get your groceries shopped promptly and carefully.
This is also why the advice to “tip in cash instead” backfires for grocery delivery. A cash tip is invisible in the app preview, so it cannot make your order attractive to shoppers deciding whether to accept it. We will come back to cash below, but the headline is simple: to get good service, the tip has to be visible up front, which means it has to be in the app. This same visible-tip dynamic drives the acceptance of orders across gig platforms, and it is why the delivery-driver tipping guide stresses the upfront tip so heavily.
When to tip more: heavy orders, many bags, stairs, distance and weather
The base 15 to 20 percent assumes an average delivery. Grocery orders are anything but average, and several very common situations make the job much harder without changing the dollar total of the groceries at all. In those cases the percentage alone underpays, and the fair move is to add a few dollars on top. Here is how to think about each one.
Cases of water, bags of dog food, cat litter, canned goods, a big produce haul: these are brutal to carry, and a 40-item order can weigh 60 or 70 pounds. When your cart is heavy, add roughly $2 to $5 on top of the percentage. A $100 order of mostly heavy items is fairly tipped at $20 plus a few dollars, not a flat 15 percent.
Even light groceries become a chore when there are 10 or 12 bags to carry in one or two trips. Bag count is a hidden difficulty the percentage does not capture, so a large multi-bag order earns a bump. If your shopper is making two or three trips from the car, that effort deserves recognition.
Carrying groceries to a third-floor walk-up is a completely different job from setting them on a ground-floor porch. If you are up a flight or more with no elevator, add a few dollars, and consider noting it in the delivery instructions so the shopper knows what they are signing up for. Stairs plus a heavy order is the single most under-tipped combination in grocery delivery.
If the nearest store carrying your items is 10 or 15 miles away, the drive eats most of the shopper’s time and fuel. Distance justifies pushing to the top of the range or beyond, because the trip cost is high relative to the order.
Rain, snow, ice, and extreme heat all make delivery slower, riskier, and more miserable. Tipping extra in bad weather is one of the clearest cases of a tip doing what it is meant to do. Add several dollars when someone is trudging through a storm to bring you groceries you did not want to go out for either.
You can stack these, and you should. An order that is heavy, many-bagged, up two flights, and delivered in a downpour has earned well above the standard percentage, because every one of those factors compounds the effort. There is no formula that captures it perfectly, but a good instinct is to picture doing the delivery yourself in those conditions and tip what would have made it feel worth it. The same “adjust for difficulty” logic runs through every service in the complete tipping guide, and it matters more for grocery delivery than almost anywhere else.
Changing your tip after delivery, and the tip-baiting problem
Instacart lets you adjust your tip after the order arrives, and knowing the exact rules protects both you and your shopper. You can increase your tip for up to 14 days after delivery, which is perfect for rewarding a shopper who went above and beyond, found every substitution you would have wanted, and carried everything up without being asked. If someone did a genuinely great job, bumping the tip afterward is a kind and easy gesture, and it is worth doing.
You can also lower or remove your tip, but only within a short window of about two hours after delivery. This exists for real service failures: melted ice cream, a bag left at the wrong door, groceries that clearly sat in a hot car. Even then, the fair path is to contact Instacart support first, because a lot of problems that feel like the shopper’s fault are not. Out-of-stock items, bad substitutions dictated by what the store had, and delays caused by the app are usually outside the shopper’s control, and Instacart can often issue a credit or refund without you having to claw back the pay of a person who did nothing wrong.
The reason the “lower” window is short and monitored is a practice called tip baiting. A customer sets a large, eye-catching tip to make their order the most attractive one in the queue, a shopper accepts it and does the work, and then the customer strips the tip down to zero after delivery. It is a genuinely nasty move because it exploits the exact mechanic that gets orders shopped well, and it drew enough outrage and even a congressional inquiry that Instacart added guardrails. Customers who repeatedly and egregiously bait-and-remove tips can face penalties on their accounts. The takeaway for an honest customer is simple: set a tip you actually intend to pay, adjust it upward for great service, and only reduce it for a real problem you could not resolve through support.
Don’t punish the shopper for the store’s mistakes. If items were out of stock, substituted poorly because that is all the store had, or delayed by the app, that is not your shopper’s doing. Removing their tip over it is effectively unpaid labor for them. Contact Instacart support for a refund or credit and leave the tip alone.
Instacart vs Shipt vs Walmart vs Amazon Fresh
Instacart is the biggest name, but it is far from the only way groceries reach your door, and the tipping norms differ in small but important ways across the services. Here is how the main players compare, so you know what to do no matter which app you opened.
| Service | How tipping works | Fair tip |
|---|---|---|
| Instacart | In-app tip, shopper sees it before accepting; adjustable (up 14 days, down ~2 hours) | 15–20%, min ~$5 |
| Shipt | In-app tip after delivery, or cash; shopper does not see it before accepting the same way | 15–20%, min ~$5 |
| Walmart delivery (Spark) | In-app tip after delivery; 100% goes to the driver | 15–20% or a few dollars |
| Amazon Fresh / Whole Foods | In-app tip, often a ~$5 default you can raise; adjustable ~24 hours | 15–20% or ~$5–$10 |
| Store pickup (any brand) | You collect it; associate loads the car | Not expected; often not allowed |
| Standard Amazon package driver | Salaried employee; no customer tip | $0 (not tipped) |
A few nuances are worth calling out. Shipt works much like Instacart from the customer side and the same 15 to 20 percent, $5-minimum logic applies. Historically Shipt did not surface the tip to the shopper in the same pre-accept preview that Instacart uses, but the fair-tip math is identical because the shopper is doing the same two-part shopping-and-driving job. Walmart’s own delivery is fulfilled by Spark drivers, and the app lets you tip after delivery with all of it going to the driver, which we cover in detail just below. Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods delivery behaves like the others, with an in-app tip you can adjust for about a day after the order lands.
The big dividing line across all of them is whether a human made a dedicated trip to shop and deliver for you. When they did (Instacart, Shipt, Walmart delivery, Amazon Fresh) you tip. When they did not, because you drove to the store and picked it up yourself, you generally do not. That distinction is the key to the next two sections, and it is the same principle that separates a tipped delivery from grocery pickup you handle on your own.
If a driver brings your groceries, you tip. If you collect them yourself at the curb, you usually don’t. The grocery pickup tipping guide settles the curbside question, and the complete tipping guide covers every other service in one place.
Do you tip Walmart delivery and Walmart pickup?
This one causes real confusion, because Walmart operates two very different services that people lump together, and the tipping answer flips between them. The deciding question is always the same: did a person drive your groceries to your home, or did you go get them yourself?
For Walmart delivery, where a driver brings the order to your door, tipping is expected and appreciated. Walmart fulfills much of its own delivery through Spark, its gig-driver network, and its own grocery app, and the app lets you add a tip after delivery with 100 percent of it going to the driver. The same 15 to 20 percent, roughly $5 minimum standard applies. On a $130 Walmart delivery, a fair tip is around $20 to $26, more if it was heavy or went up stairs. If you order Walmart groceries through Instacart instead (Walmart is available on Instacart in many areas), you are really tipping an Instacart shopper, and everything earlier in this guide applies.
For Walmart store pickup, the answer is different: tipping is not expected, and Walmart’s pickup associates are generally not permitted to accept tips. With pickup, you drive to the store, park in a designated spot, and an employee brings your order out and loads it into your car. That employee is a regular hourly Walmart associate, not a gig worker relying on tips, and company policy typically bars them from taking one. A sincere thank-you is the right gesture here. If you tried to hand a pickup associate cash, many would have to decline it. This is the same reasoning that makes curbside grocery pickup generally tip-free across brands.
Walmart in one line: tip the delivery driver 15 to 20 percent (or a few dollars minimum), and do not worry about tipping a store-pickup associate, who usually cannot accept one anyway. Delivery equals a tip; pickup does not.
Tipping Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods and your Amazon driver
Amazon is another place where one company runs several services with different tipping rules, and getting them mixed up leads to either awkward over-tipping or accidental under-tipping. Split it into groceries versus packages.
Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods delivery are grocery services, and they work like the rest of the category. When you check out, Amazon offers an in-app tip, often defaulting to around $5, which you can raise. A fair tip is 15 to 20 percent of the order, or roughly $5 to $10 for a normal load, pushed higher for cases of water, a big haul, many bags, or stairs. As with Instacart, you can usually adjust the tip for a window after delivery, commonly up to 24 hours, so you can reward a shopper who nailed a tricky order. The person delivering your Amazon groceries made a dedicated trip on your behalf, so the same shopping-and-driving logic applies and the tip is genuinely part of their pay.
Standard Amazon package delivery is a different animal, and here you do not tip. The drivers who bring your everyday Amazon boxes, whether in a branded van or as Amazon Flex, are paid as employees or contracted at a set rate, and there is no customer tipping built into regular package delivery. Occasionally Amazon runs a promotion where saying “thank my driver” triggers a small bonus, but that bonus is funded by Amazon, not taken from you. So when a box lands on your porch, a wave is all that is expected. The line is clean: Amazon groceries delivered to your door get a tip; Amazon packages do not. This mirrors how the wider tipping guide treats mail carriers and package couriers, who are typically salaried and not customarily tipped.
Cash tips: do they actually help?
Cash comes up constantly with grocery delivery, and the honest answer has two parts, because cash is both better and worse than an app tip depending on what you care about. On the plus side, shoppers keep 100 percent of a cash tip, it reaches them instantly, and it is not tangled up in the app’s accounting. Handing a shopper a few bills at the door after a great delivery is always welcome and never wrong.
The catch is the one we hit earlier: a cash tip is invisible when it matters most. Because the shopper cannot see cash in the pre-accept preview, tipping only in cash does nothing to make your order attractive, so your groceries may sit unclaimed or get grabbed last by someone juggling several orders. If you replace a fair app tip with “I’ll tip cash at the door,” you are quietly making your own order the least appealing one in the queue, and the service usually suffers for it. Worse, the shopper has no way of knowing your cash is coming, so they cannot factor it into whether to accept.
The best of both worlds is straightforward. Set a fair tip in the app so your order gets picked up quickly and shopped with care, and then, if the shopper does a great job, hand over a few dollars in cash on top as a bonus, especially on a big, heavy, or stairs-heavy delivery. That way the visible tip does its job of attracting good service, and the cash rewards the human directly for effort you appreciated. The general tradeoffs between cash and card tips hold here too: cash is great for the worker, but only the in-app tip drives the acceptance and quality of gig-delivery service.
Common grocery-delivery tipping mistakes
Even people who mean well fall into a handful of predictable traps with grocery delivery, and avoiding them makes your tipping fairer and your service better at the same time. Most of them come from treating grocery delivery like a restaurant order or like store pickup, when it is really its own thing.
Do
Set a visible in-app tip of 15 to 20 percent with a $5 floor, bump it for heavy loads, stairs, distance, and bad weather, increase it afterward for great service, and route out-of-stock or substitution complaints through support instead of the tip.
Don’t
Don’t leave the 5 percent default and call it fair, don’t assume the delivery fee reaches the shopper, don’t tip cash-only and expect fast service, don’t tip-bait, and don’t strip a tip for problems the shopper couldn’t control.
The most common mistake is simply accepting the 5 percent default because it is already in the box. It is the platform’s floor, not a recommendation, and tapping through it leaves your shopper with a few dollars for real work. The second is assuming the fees you paid are the tip; they are not, they go to Instacart, and the person who shopped your list sees almost none of it. The third is the cash-only trap, where a well-meant plan to tip in cash makes your order the least attractive in the queue. And the fourth, the one that stings shoppers most, is removing a tip over problems (out-of-stocks, bad substitutions, app delays) that were never the shopper’s fault. Handle those through support, and let the person who did the driving and carrying keep their pay.
Get those four right and you are tipping better than the large majority of grocery-delivery customers, which, given how the pay model works, translates directly into faster acceptance and more careful shopping on your orders over time. For the precise figure on any order, the tip calculator removes the math, and you can browse the rest of the tipping tips for every service you tip in a normal month.
How much to tip Instacart: frequently asked questions
How much should you tip an Instacart shopper?
Aim for 15 to 20 percent of your order total, with a floor of about $5 even on a small order. The 5 percent the app suggests by default is really its minimum, not a fair rate, because it ignores that your shopper is doing two jobs: shopping for your groceries and driving them to your door. On a $75 order, 5 percent is under $4, while a fair 18 percent is about $13.50. Push toward or past 20 percent for heavy orders, lots of bags, stairs, long distances, or bad weather.
Why is Instacart’s default tip only 5 percent?
Instacart’s app has defaulted to a low suggested tip, historically 5 percent, for years. Five percent works out to almost nothing on a normal grocery order, so most shoppers and gig-work advocates treat it as a floor rather than a recommendation. A fair tip for a shopper who selects your items and delivers them is closer to the 15 to 20 percent you would leave a restaurant server, with a $5 minimum so tiny orders still pay for the trip.
Do Instacart shoppers see the tip before they accept the order?
Yes. When a batch is offered, the shopper sees the store, the number of items, the pay Instacart is offering, and the estimated tip before they accept. Because tips make up the majority of a shopper’s earnings on most orders, a low or zero tip can leave your groceries sitting while better-paying orders get claimed first. A fair upfront tip is the single biggest thing that gets your order picked up quickly and shopped with care.
Can you change your Instacart tip after delivery?
Yes, within limits. You can lower or remove your tip for up to two hours after delivery, and you can increase it for up to 14 days. This exists so you can reward a great shopper or adjust for a genuine problem. Instacart added guardrails after complaints about tip baiting, where a customer sets a large tip to win a shopper and then strips it away afterward, and accounts that repeatedly do this can be penalized. Lower a tip only for a real service failure, and take it up with support first for things like out-of-stock items that were not the shopper’s fault.
Do you tip Walmart grocery delivery?
Yes, if a person delivers to your door, tipping is expected and appreciated, generally 15 to 20 percent or a few dollars minimum. Walmart’s own delivery through the Walmart app and Spark drivers lets you add a tip in the app after delivery, and 100 percent of it goes to the driver. Walmart store pickup, where you never interact with a driver and an associate loads your car, is the exception: tipping is not expected there, and Walmart’s pickup associates are generally not permitted to accept tips.
How much do you tip an Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods delivery driver?
Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods grocery delivery let you add a tip in the app, and the default is often around $5, which you can raise. A fair tip is 15 to 20 percent of the order or roughly $5 to $10 for a normal load, more for heavy cases of water, many bags, or stairs. You typically have up to 24 hours after delivery to adjust the tip. Standard Amazon package delivery by a regular Amazon driver is different: those drivers are salaried employees and you do not tip them, aside from occasional promotional ‘thank my driver’ bonuses Amazon funds itself.
Should you tip your Instacart shopper in cash?
You can, and shoppers keep 100 percent of cash, but it will not help your order get accepted, because the shopper cannot see a cash tip when deciding whether to take the batch. The best approach is to set a fair tip in the app so your order is attractive up front, then optionally hand over a few dollars in cash at the door as a bonus for great service, especially on a big or heavy delivery. Cash on top is always welcome; cash instead of an app tip can leave your order sitting unclaimed.
Is the Instacart delivery fee the same as a tip?
No. The delivery fee, service fee, and any priority fee go to Instacart, not to your shopper. Your shopper is paid a small amount of batch pay from Instacart plus your tip, and on most orders the tip is the larger share. That is why skipping the tip because you already paid a delivery fee leaves the person who shopped and drove for you earning very little. The fees keep the platform running; the tip pays the human doing the work.
The quick version
Tip your Instacart or grocery-delivery shopper 15 to 20 percent of the order, with a minimum of about $5, and treat the app’s 5 percent default as the floor to climb off of. Your shopper does two jobs, shopping and driving, and the tip is the bulk of their pay, not a bonus. Because shoppers see the tip before they accept, a fair upfront number is what gets your order picked up fast and handled with care. Push higher for heavy loads, many bags, stairs, long drives, and bad weather. Walmart and Amazon Fresh delivery follow the same logic; store pickup and standard Amazon package drivers are not tipped.
For the exact tip on any order total, run it through the free Waldev Tip Calculator. From there, compare notes with the food-delivery driver guide, the grocery pickup guide, and the complete tipping guide, browse more tipping tips, or head to the full business calculators collection on the Waldev homepage.
Note: The tipping ranges on this page reflect common customs and platform policies in the United States as of 2026 and are provided for general informational purposes only. Tipping is voluntary, and app policies, default tips, and adjustment windows can change. Always check the current terms in the app you are using and adjust for the quality of service you received.
Gigs Done Right breaks down Instacart’s default tip, the shopper’s pay model, and how much to leave for different orders. Read the Instacart tipping guide →
ClimbtheLadder details Instacart’s 5 percent default, minimums, and the window customers have to change a tip after delivery. See how much to tip an Instacart shopper →