How Much to Tip for Delivery — DoorDash, Uber Eats, Pizza & More

7 min read · Updated February 14, 2026

The Short Answer

Tip 15-20% or $3-5 minimum — whichever is higher. If it's raining, snowing, you live far from the restaurant, or you're on the third floor of a walk-up apartment, lean toward the higher end or add a few dollars more.

Delivery drivers are using their own cars, paying for their own gas and insurance, and putting wear on their vehicles to bring food to your door. They deserve a real tip, not a token $1.

How Tips Actually Affect Driver Pay

This is the part most people don't fully understand and it's important context for deciding what to tip.

DoorDash

DoorDash pays drivers a base pay of roughly $2-4 per delivery, depending on distance and complexity. Your tip is added on top of that. Drivers see the approximate total payout (base + tip) before accepting an order, though DoorDash sometimes hides the full tip amount on larger tips.

What this means: low-tip or no-tip orders sit unaccepted for a long time because no driver wants to drive 20 minutes round trip for $3. If you don't tip, your food gets cold while the app cycles through drivers who keep declining it. Eventually DoorDash increases the base pay to get someone to accept it, but your food has been sitting on a counter the entire time.

Uber Eats

Uber Eats works similarly — a small base fare plus your tip. Customers can tip before delivery or adjust within one hour after. Drivers see upfront tips before accepting, which influences whether and how quickly your order gets picked up.

Grubhub

Grubhub's model includes a base pay, tip, and sometimes bonuses. Tips are passed through to drivers in full. Like the other platforms, drivers can see the tip estimate before accepting, so no-tip orders are deprioritized.

The Common Thread

Across all platforms, the driver base pay is low — often below minimum wage after expenses. Tips are not a bonus; they're the majority of a delivery driver's income. The apps have effectively shifted the labor cost from the company to you, the customer. You can object to that business model (many do), but the driver standing at your door didn't design it.

Pizza Delivery

Traditional pizza delivery has a longer tipping history than app-based services, and the norms are well-established:

• $3-5 minimum for a standard order
• 15-20% for larger orders
• $5-10+ for very large orders (multiple pizzas, party-sized)

Pizza delivery drivers often earn a small hourly wage plus a per-delivery stipend, but after gas and vehicle costs, they rely heavily on tips. The delivery fee you pay to the pizza shop? Most of it does not go to the driver. It goes to the business to cover insurance and overhead. Your tip is what the driver actually takes home.

A Note on Distance

If you live 15 minutes from the pizza place, your driver is spending 30 minutes round trip on your order. A $3 tip on a $15 pizza in that scenario means the driver earned about $6/hour for that delivery after gas. Tip more for longer distances.

Grocery Delivery (Instacart, Walmart, etc.)

Grocery delivery is harder work than most people realize. Your Instacart shopper is:

• Walking through the entire store selecting your items
• Making judgment calls on substitutions
• Communicating with you about out-of-stock items
• Bagging everything
• Loading it into their car
• Driving to your home
• Carrying bags to your door (sometimes up stairs)

For a service this labor-intensive, tip generously:

• Small order (under $50): $5-10
• Medium order ($50-150): 15-20%, or at least $10
• Large order ($150+): 15-20%
• Heavy items (cases of water, bulk items): Add $3-5 extra

Instacart shoppers can see your tip before accepting the order. A low or zero tip means your order will be picked up by whoever is left, often a less experienced shopper, and it may take significantly longer to be fulfilled.

Pre-Tip vs. Post-Tip: The Debate

App-based delivery introduced something unusual: tipping before you receive the service. This feels backward to many people — how can you tip for service you haven't experienced yet? But there are practical reasons it works this way.

Why Pre-Tipping Exists

Drivers choose which orders to accept based on the expected total payout. If tips were only added after delivery, drivers would have no way to distinguish a generous customer from a non-tipper, and the system would break down. Pre-tipping is the mechanism that makes the gig economy delivery model function at all.

Should You Pre-Tip or Post-Tip?

• Pre-tip a fair amount (15-20%). This ensures your order gets picked up promptly by a motivated driver.
• Adjust after delivery if needed. Most apps give you a window (usually 1 hour) to increase or decrease the tip after delivery. If the driver left your food at the wrong address or was extremely late due to their own actions, you can reduce it. If they went above and beyond — contacted you about a closed restaurant, navigated difficult parking, delivered in a blizzard — increase it.
• Don't pre-tip $0 with the intention of tipping later. The driver doesn't know your intentions. They see a $0 tip and a $3 base pay and decline the order. Your food sits.

Weather, Distance, and Difficulty Factors

These should genuinely affect how much you tip:

Weather

If you're ordering delivery because it's pouring rain, blizzarding, or 100 degrees outside, the driver is out in that weather so you don't have to be. Add $2-5 or bump to 20-25%. This is one of the clearest cases where tipping more is simply the right thing to do.

Distance

Most apps show you the estimated delivery distance. If the restaurant is 10+ miles from your home, the driver's round trip could be 30-45 minutes and several dollars in gas. Tip at least $5-7 for long-distance deliveries, regardless of order size.

Difficulty

Some deliveries are harder than others:

• Apartment complexes with confusing layouts and no parking — tip more.
• Gated communities where the driver has to wait and coordinate entry — tip more.
• Walk-up apartments (3rd floor, no elevator) — tip more.
• "Leave at door" orders with clear instructions and a well-lit porch — standard tip is fine. You're making the driver's life easy.

Large or Complex Orders

Ordering $80 worth of food from a restaurant? Your driver might be making multiple trips from their car to your door with heavy bags. A $5 flat tip on an $80 order is only 6% — below what's fair for the effort involved. Percentage-based tipping makes more sense for larger orders.

When You Can Tip Less (or Nothing)

Being honest means acknowledging that not every delivery deserves a full tip:

• The driver ate part of your order (it happens) — tip nothing, report to the app.
• Your food was delivered to the wrong address due to driver error — reduce the tip, report it.
• The driver was hostile or unprofessional — reduce the tip.
• The food arrived extremely late but it wasn't the driver's fault (the restaurant was slow) — don't punish the driver for this. They can't make the kitchen cook faster.

The Bottom Line

Delivery drivers are doing hard, undervalued work. The platforms take a significant cut of every order, pay low base rates, and rely on your tips to make the job viable for drivers. A fair tip — 15-20% or $3-5 minimum, adjusted for weather, distance, and difficulty — is the cost of getting hot food brought to your couch.

Use our tip calculator to figure out the right amount before you place your next order. And if you're tipping at a restaurant instead, check out our restaurant tipping guide for those norms.