People have often asked “what is the culture for tipping in Scotland?” When I say people, I mean primarily Americans as they are the travellers who are most conscious of the difficulties of the service industry and the most conscious of how important tipping can be. This is partly why they are not so secretly my favourite and I wrote an entire article about why Americans are welcome in Scotland (give it a read, it’s quite good).
But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend other countries also care about how much they are tipping when they visit Scotland and also want to know the proper tipping etiquette. Regardless, it’s still handy to know!
Let’s explore together.
The obvious bias
As a tour guide who works primarily on a Pay What You Think It’s Worth basis (tours here), I have an obvious interest in people properly understanding this issue. In fact, this is not the first time I’ve written about it in the context of the tour guiding industry.
But what about for other industries?
The shortest answer
10%
10% is fine across literally everything you feel needs a tip.
Longer answer for tipping in Scotland
There is a minimum wage in Scotland. Currently it’s above £12 an hour for those over 21 and slightly lower for those who are younger.
If your serving staff seems young, feel free to throw them some extra money to make up the difference. But 10% is generally accepted as fine for tipping in Scotland.
Our minimum wage laws are the same across all sectors, including housekeeping and waiting. It is basically pretty liveable for someone working full time, though some employers do sneaky things to not pay for hours they probably should – such as having split shifts in hospitality which is not true freedom but is also not paid. At any rate, 10% seems pretty reasonable for a tip.
One thing you might see in restaurants when they bring your bill is that a service charge has been included. This is due to people tipping much less during Covid, since they switched to takeaways and delivery, and then when they returned they were paying in cash. This has had the impact to this day that many have not returned to previous tipping standards, of between 10 and 20%. The service charge tends to be about 10% on the bill, you can ask it removed if service was especially bad, but generally you are not expected to tip on top of this.
Apparently some bars have started adding service charges to simple drinks as well. If a bar is asking for 12.5% a drink which I’ve seen reported, that’s entirely too much. Be aware as well, I’ve heard about cheeky waiters adding “tourist tax” to bills. This is a con, the tourist tax under discussion is on hotels not on drinks service.
For more expensive services such as paid tours or multi-day adventures, tipping is not always expected but deeply appreciated, and 10% is fine. The basic idea for why this specifically might be a very good idea is the fact that most tour guides are self-employed. There is an opportunity cost to learning all of the facts we might need and dedicating ourselves to telling people about them, that cost is that we cannot often have other jobs. The higher cost on this sort of activity is to reflect the fact that during the busy months of April to September, we need to make enough to see us through Winter. Once again, I’d venture 10% adequate to tip a tour guide on a pre-paid tour.
Conclusion
As should be pretty clear, 10% is appropriate for tipping in Scotland. This is true across most industries and functions as a very fine rule of thumb. If service is especially good, then feel free to pay much more than this and nobody will complain. Still, nobody will chase you about with a claymore, one of the big Scottish swords, if you do not pay them more. In fact, most of us will be pretty delighted.
The writer of this piece expects he might get some angry fanmail from people who think he should increase it a little.
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