Do You Tip in Brazil? What the 10% on Your Bill Really Is

Two bodies of law meet on that line of the bill, and mixing them up is how the 10% earned its reputation. Labour law decides what happens to the money once collected. Tax law decides how much of it escapes a state sales tax. Neither tells you to pay.

No Brazilian law makes you pay the 10%

The claim worth testing is narrow: does any Brazilian statute set a 10% service charge? The law everyone points at is the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho (the labour code, or CLT), article 457, and the 2017 statute that rewrote it.

Both were read in full on the government's text server. The labour code uses the word gorjeta 51 times; take a 900-character window on each side of those mentions and the only percentages inside are 20%, 33% and 50%. Not one "10%", and not one "dez por cento", the same figure spelled out. Law 13,419/2017, the statute that governs tipping, holds two percentages in its entire text: 20% and 33%, both ceilings on what the employer may hold back.

The consumer side is emptier still. Brazil's Consumer Code never uses the word gorjeta or taxa de serviço (a service charge). What it gives you is general — article 6, III guarantees clear, prior information about price. Citing it for a right to refuse the charge is paraphrase, not quotation.

Where the number came from, if not from labour law

The 10% is real; it is written somewhere else. States levy ICMS, a sales tax, on a restaurant bill, and the tip rides on that bill. Convênio ICMS 125/11, an agreement among state tax authorities in force since its national ratification on January 9, 2012, lets participating states keep the tip out of that tax base, capped at a share of the bill.

Two things that agreement is not. It is not nationwide: the wording in force from 2017 until early 2026 listed twenty states plus the Federal District, so six of Brazil's twenty-seven federal units were off the list. And it did not invent the number — Santa Catarina laws from 1992 and 1994 already deducted the tip up to 10% of the bill, nineteen years earlier. The agreement codified a custom already running.

One 2026 change is easy to get wrong. Since February 19, 2026, the agreement authorizes 15% for taxpayers in São Paulo and 10% elsewhere. Authorizing is not applying: São Paulo's consolidated ICMS regulation, regenerated on the state tax authority's site on August 26, 2026, still reads 10%.

The rule that says out loud that it is optional

One state has written the answer down. Paraná's consolidated consumer statute — Law 22,130 of September 9, 2024, in force since March 2025 — carries a section on disclosure of the service charge. Article 234 obliges restaurants, bars, hotels and similar businesses that charge it to disclose the percentage and its optional, discretionary nature. Article 235 says where: the words pagamento opcional or pagamento facultativo next to the amount, on the bill and on the menu.

That is consumer law, not tax law, and it covers the whole state, Curitiba and Foz do Iguaçu included. The earlier statute on the subject, Law 21,721/2023, was repealed by the consolidation — quoting it means quoting a dead law.

Foz do Iguaçu, the Iguazu Falls city, has required posters since 2014 — at least 50 by 60 centimetres — saying the 10% "or any percentage charged" is optional payment. The council's phrasing gives the game away: it treated the 10% as already practised, not as something a statute created.

São Paulo reaches the same point from an odd angle: a restaurant working on spontaneous tips only gets its ICMS exclusion recognized if bills, menus or posted notices state that the service is not obligatory.

Who the money belongs to

Article 457, §3 puts both kinds of tip under one name: what you hand the waiter and what the company adds to the bill are the same legal object. From there the rules govern the employer, not you.

The most quoted line on the subject says the tip is not the employer's own revenue. Read the labour code today and you will not find it: the 2017 labour reform overwrote that paragraph four months after it was written, and §4 now defines performance bonuses. The wording left; the rule it stated did not. The STJ, Brazil's highest court outside constitutional matters, has held since 2019 that tips are not the restaurant's revenue, and the federal tax authority said the same in binding rulings in 2024 and 2025.

What the employer may do is hold back part of what it collected, to cover the payroll charges the tip generates — up to 20%, or 33% depending on its tax regime — and only where a collective agreement provides for it. Those two numbers get misread constantly: they cap retention from money already collected, and neither is a percentage charged to you.

Cash into the waiter's hand does not sit outside this. Paragraph 7 subjects the direct tip to the same collective-agreement criteria, and retention is lawful only if that agreement allows it.

On the labour side the question is settled at the top. Precedent 354 of the Superior Labour Court — tips count as pay, but not as the base for notice periods, night premiums, overtime or paid weekly rest — was reaffirmed by the court's full bench on August 29, 2025. Precedent 290, the shorter version still in circulation, was cancelled in 2003.

Taxis, ride apps, hotels and guides

Outside the restaurant, the picture splits three ways.

For taxis and tour guides, tipping is custom and nothing else: the federal statutes governing both professions never use the word, and neither does the national tourism law nor its decree.

For ride apps and delivery, that stopped being true in 2026. Portaria SENACON/MJ 61, of March 24, 2026, requires transport and delivery platforms to display a price breakdown, and one line of it is the share going to the driver or courier, "including tips". Compliance was due by April 23, 2026.

Hotels are named in the tax rules rather than absent from them: the ICMS agreement, São Paulo's regulation and Paraná's consumer law all list them alongside bars and restaurants.

What the bill has to show you

The charge is not allowed to hide, and two unrelated systems demand the same thing. Labour law, at article 457, §6, obliges the company that charges the tip to enter it on the consumption note. São Paulo's ICMS regulation requires the amount itemized on the fiscal document whenever it is charged as an addition to the bill.

Santa Catarina is the most literal. Its ICMS regulation orders the tip registered on the receipt under the description "Gorjeta" and set up as a tax-exempt item — which is why the line arrives with its own name instead of disappearing into the total.

So the routine is short. Read the printed bill, where the charge is a separate line by rule. If you want it off, say so before you pay: nothing read here obliges you to pay it, and in Paraná the restaurant has already said so on its own menu. The 10% is the staff's money, not the house's — declining takes it off the waiter.

Sources

• Presidência da República — art. 457, §§3 to 11. Labour code (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Presidência da República — the tipping statute. Law 13,419/2017 (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Presidência da República — tips never named. Consumer Code (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Governo do Paraná — arts. 234 and 235. State Law 22,130/2024 (accessed August 26, 2026)
• CONFAZ — the ceiling and who joined. Convênio ICMS 125/11 (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Fazenda de São Paulo — art. 37, §4-A, updated August 26, 2026. RICMS/2000 (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Fazenda de Santa Catarina — Annex 2, art. 141-A. RICMS/SC (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Superior Tribunal de Justiça — its case-law summary, September 26, 2024. Tips and taxation (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Receita Federal — not the restaurant's revenue. Ruling Cosit 70/2024 (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Tribunal Superior do Trabalho — Precedent 354 and its 2025 reaffirmation, read in the live register because the court's precedent PDF is frozen at 2018. Precedent search (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Senacon, Ministério da Justiça — the platform rule's tipping line. Technical Note 3/2026 (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Câmara Municipal de Foz do Iguaçu — art. 1. Municipal Law 4,184/2014 (accessed August 26, 2026)

How these guides are checked is on our method page, written by Jeff Bruno in Curitiba. Paying for things starts in money and payments: what a CPF is, how to get one, whether a tourist can use PIX, what changes once you hold one, and getting cash without a local card. The rest sits in all guides.

What we could not verify

• Whether a superior court has ruled on the consumer side. The STJ's case-law search sits behind a reCAPTCHA and a Cloudflare challenge; we did not try to get around it, and read the court's own institutional summary instead. That summary is about tax — whether the restaurant is taxed on the tip — not about whether a customer may refuse it.
• The full text of the 2026 platform rule. The Ministry of Justice's news pages now answer "restricted content" to anonymous requests, and the PDF link on the announcement returns the portal shell. The provision above comes from Senacon's own technical note, which does open.
• How many municipalities require the optional-payment notice. The national legislation index returns exactly one, Foz do Iguaçu. It does not cover the statutes of Brazil's 5,500-plus municipalities, so that is what the index holds, not what the country has.
• Current formal guidance from a state consumer agency. Procon-SP once had a page titled for this exact charge. The URL now returns 404, and the content survives only in the Internet Archive, where it is a 2019 press release rather than a standing rule.