Bill Split Calculator: Tip, Rounding and Shares | Cash Book

This calculator runs entirely in your browser: nothing you type is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere, and it keeps working with the connection off. It does the arithmetic at the end of a meal that everyone can do and nobody wants to do while the card machine is waiting. Type the bill, the number of people and the tip you actually intend to leave, and it returns one number per person. Two extra controls handle the situations that make a simple division awkward: rounding, for when people are paying in cash, and a field for the people who are putting in a full share while the rest cover what is left.

How to use it

1. Put in the bill as printed, including tax and anything the restaurant has already added, such as a service charge or an Italian coperto. Adjustments are easier to argue about once the even split is on screen.
2. The headcount is everyone who is paying, which is not always everyone who was at the table. A guest you invited, or a colleague whose meal goes on an expense claim, comes out of the headcount and usually out of the bill as well.
3. The tip field opens at 10 because it has to open at something. It is a placeholder, not a recommendation, and in most countries it is wrong in one direction or the other. The next section is about what to put there instead.
4. Exact rounding is right for a card split, where cents cost nothing. Round up to the nearest 1 or 5 when the table is settling in cash and nobody wants to count coins. The calculator will tell you what that collects on top of the bill.
5. Leave people paying a full share at zero for an even split. Set it to one or more when that many people are putting in the full share shown above and everyone else divides what is still owed.
6. The big number is each person's share. Beneath it sit the tip, the bill plus tip, and the two notes: the surplus rounding collects, and what the remaining payers owe each.

Tipping is a local custom, not a rule

The tip field is the only part of this calculator that cannot be right by default, because tipping is a local convention that has almost nothing to do with arithmetic. The same 20 percent that is unremarkable in one country is a misunderstanding in another. It is worth knowing roughly where you are before the card machine arrives.

In the United States, federal law lets an employer count a portion of an employee's tips toward the minimum wage as a tip credit, so the cash wage paid directly to a tipped worker can sit below the standard minimum, with tips expected to make up the difference. That is why a tip in an American restaurant is treated as part of the price rather than an optional extra. Payment terminals routinely suggest percentages starting at 18 or 20, sometimes calculated on the post-tax total. The percentage is still yours to choose. What sits behind the expectation is a wage rule, not a mood.

France and Germany work the other way round, and they work that way for the same reason: the price on the menu is already complete. French prices are shown service compris, with service and tax included, and the official tourism site puts the built-in service charge at roughly 15 percent. An extra 2 or 3 percent, or just leaving the small change, is a customary gesture after a particularly good meal. German menu prices likewise include service and VAT, which is what "Bedienung inklusive" means. The common practice there is to round up when paying, usually by a few percent, and to say the rounded figure to the server as you hand over the money or the card. The tip is part of the transaction rather than something left behind on the table.

Japan is simpler still. The Japan National Tourism Organization says plainly that tipping is not customary, and an offered tip is more likely to cause confusion than pleasure. You pay what the bill says. A staff member may well follow you out into the street to return money you tried to leave. Thanks are the expected gesture, and the correct value in the tip field is zero.

Two more cases matter because the charge is already on the paper. British restaurants frequently add a discretionary service charge, often around 12.5 percent, to the printed bill; since the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 and its statutory code of practice, employers must pass tips to workers without deductions and keep a written policy on how tips are handled, which makes it easier to know the charge reaches staff. Discretionary still means discretionary, and it can be removed on request. In Italy the coperto is a flat per-person cover charge printed on the menu, covering the table setting and bread rather than service, and some places list a servizio percentage instead or as well. Neither is a tip. Both are already inside the total you type, which means adding a percentage on top is tipping twice. Read the bottom of the menu before you sit down, not the bottom of the bill afterwards.

None of this is fixed, and none of it is a judgement about any country. Conventions shift, and they differ between a counter and a tasting menu in the same street. The useful habit is to look once when you arrive somewhere new, set the tip field to that number and stop thinking about it. The sources at the end of this page are the primary ones: a labour department, a government guidance page and two national tourism bodies.

Rounding, and who it actually helps

Rounding is the small feature people use most, and the one that is most often misunderstood.

When a share comes out at 23.76 and six people are paying in cash, exactness is a liability. The table spends four minutes making change that nobody will keep. Rounding each share up to the next whole unit, or the next multiple of five, turns the problem into handing over notes. That is the entire benefit, and it is a real one.

The cost is that rounding only ever moves in one direction. Every share goes up, so the money collected exceeds the bill by the rounding on each share multiplied by the number of people. Four shares rounded up by 24 cents collect about a euro too much, which nobody minds. Six shares rounded up to the next multiple of five can collect twenty or thirty too much, which is no longer a rounding error; it is a tip that nobody agreed to leave, or a small windfall for whoever is holding the card.

This is why the calculator states the surplus in plain words under the result. Once the figure is visible, the table can decide what it is for. Three sensible answers exist: it becomes the tip, in which case set the tip percentage to zero and let the rounding do the work; it goes back to whoever paid the deposit or booked the table; or it is handed back and the shares are taken exactly. What should not happen is that it disappears silently into the pocket of whoever settled the bill, because that is the sort of small thing people remember for years.

Rounding down is not offered, and that is deliberate. A downward round collects less than the bill, so somebody has to cover the gap, which puts back the exact negotiation the rounding existed to avoid. People do ask for it. The answer is still no.

One other thing worth saying about the inputs, because it accounts for most of the confused emails about this page. The headcount field is people paying, and the commonest wrong answer is the number of people at the table. Two adults, a toddler who ate three chips and a friend whose meal is going on an expense claim is a headcount of two, not four. Get that wrong and every figure below it is wrong, quietly and plausibly, which is the worst way for a number to be wrong.

When an even split is the wrong answer

An even split is a good default and a bad religion. It trades a small unfairness for speed, and most of the time that trade is worth making. Some of the time it is not.

The clearest case is the person who had three courses while everyone else had one plate. That gap is large enough to notice the next morning. The fix is not itemisation, it is subtraction: take the extra courses off the bill, have that person pay for them directly, then split the remainder evenly here. One adjustment, thirty seconds, no spreadsheet.

Drinks cause more real unfairness than food ever does, because a shared wine order can run to a third of the bill and somebody at the table drank water. Same move. Subtract the drinks total, split the drinks among the people who had them, split the food evenly. Two rows of arithmetic instead of fifteen.

Deposits are the sneakier one. A booking fee, a deposit paid weeks ago, a train ticket somebody bought for the group: all sunk by the time the bill arrives, and all easy to forget. Add the deposit to the bill before splitting, then treat whoever paid it as having already contributed, either through the people-paying-a-full-share field or by subtracting what they put in from what they owe now. Bring the earlier payment into the same calculation instead of promising to sort it out later. Later is where money between friends goes to die.

A shared holiday with uneven nights is not a bill-splitting problem at all. It is a per-night problem. Divide the accommodation by total person-nights rather than by heads, then multiply by the nights each person actually stayed. Groceries and shared meals work better per day, counted only on the days people were there. The arithmetic stays simple as long as you resist folding two different units into one number.

There is also a cost to over-optimising. A table that recalculates to the cent, every time, converts an evening out into a reconciliation exercise, and the person doing the recalculating usually ends up looking like the problem. The generous version is to take the even split when it is within a few units and reserve the adjustments for gaps that are obviously large. If the same imbalance keeps recurring with the same people, that is a conversation to have somewhere other than the end of a meal.

Four bills, settled

Start with a straightforward dinner: a bill of 86.40 for four, with a 10 percent tip. The tip is 8.64, the total 95.04, each share 23.76. Switch rounding to the nearest 1 and each share becomes 24.00. Four of those collect 96.00 against a total of 95.04, so the note reports a surplus of 0.96. Nobody needs to think about that for long.

The second example is the shape most real splits take. A bill of 148.50 for six with a 12 percent tip: tip 17.82, total 166.32, an exact share of 27.72. Round up to the nearest 5 and the displayed share is 30.00. Now set people paying a full share to 2. Those two hand over 30.00 each, which is 60.00, leaving 106.32 for the other four, or 26.58 each, and the note says exactly that. A couple of people put in a round note, everybody else covers the rest.

Rounding can also do the tipping. Take the same 86.40 for four, set the tip to zero and rounding to the nearest 5. The total stays 86.40, the exact share is 21.60, the rounded share is 25.00. Four shares collect 100.00 and the note reports a surplus of 13.60, a little under 16 percent of the bill. The rounding has become the tip. If that is what you meant, it is the tidiest way to do it, because the tip ends up visible on the surplus line instead of buried in the arithmetic.

Then the case with nothing to decide. A bill of 8,400 in Japan for three people, currency symbol set to ¥, tip at 0, rounding exact. Total 8,400, each share 2,800. No surplus, no note.

Logging your share in Cash Book

Once the split is settled, the last step is the one that actually keeps a budget honest: recording what you personally paid. Cash Book has no shared budget, no household mode and no group ledger, because it is built to track one person's money. That constraint turns out to be useful here. The number you log is your share, not the bill.

The fastest route is the voice logger. Tap the coral mic circle on Home, say "twenty four euros dinner at Beshamel", and it becomes one transaction with the amount, the note and a tag, which you can edit before it settles. One line, a few seconds, while you are still putting your coat on. The guide to logging expenses by voice covers the phrasing that parses most reliably, including dates and several transactions in one breath.

If you would rather type, the quick keypad is three taps: the black plus button, the amount, a tag chip in the footer. Adding a tag such as eating out at that moment is what makes the number findable later, and tags and categories is where those chips are set up and grouped. Shared meals are also the classic discretionary spending line, which is exactly the sort of thing that is invisible until it is tagged.

One case deserves its own note. If you paid the entire bill and the others are paying you back, log the full amount as an expense and then record each repayment as income against the same tag, so the net effect on your month is your share and your cash flow still reflects what actually left and re-entered your account. Repayments in cash are the ones most likely to evaporate; how to track cash spending is about that specific leak. If the repayments arrive by bank transfer, Accounts keeps the balance on the right card or account rather than blending everything into one pot.

Finally, if splitting bills is a regular part of your week, it is worth seeing the total rather than the individual evenings. The hours of work calculator reprices a typical share in the time it took to earn, the small purchases calculator turns a repeated amount into a monthly and annual figure, and the daily spending allowance calculator shows what is left to spend before the next dinner is booked. For bills with tax broken out separately, the VAT calculator separates the net amount from the tax, and if someone is paying you back across borders, the IBAN validator checks the account number before the transfer goes out. The general routine sits in how to track expenses on iPhone.

A split bill is one division and two adjustments. Do the division here, make the adjustments out loud, and log your own line before you get home.

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