Estimated tips transferred from workers to employers under proposed tip pooling rule, by gender and race/ethnicity (in millions)
| Range | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Preferred estimate (in millions) | Low estimate (in millions) | High estimate (in millions) | |
| Total | $5,842.2 | $522.9 | $13,228.4 |
| By gender | |||
| Women | $4,598.3 | $335.8 | $8,473.3 |
| Men | $1,243.8 | $187.2 | $4,755.1 |
| By race/ethnicity | |||
| White | $3,514.8 | $356.5 | $9,004.1 |
| Black | $480.2 | $31.5 | $778.0 |
| Hispanic | $1,362.3 | $83.6 | $2,133.6 |
| Asian | $382.5 | $38.8 | $1,002.8 |
| Other race/ethnicity | $102.4 | $12.5 | $309.9 |
Notes: The tip pooling rule is a Department of Labor rule that would make it legal for employers to pocket their workers’ tips, as long as they pay those workers at least the minimum wage. The methodology for calculating the preferred, low, and high estimates of tips that would be taken from all tipped workers is described in Heidi Shierholz, David Cooper, Julia Wolfe, and Ben Zipperer, Employers Would Pocket $5.8 Billion of Workers’ Tips under Trump Administration’s Proposed ‘Tip Stealing’ Rule, Economic Policy Institute, December 14, 2017. To get the breakdowns by gender and race/ethnicity, we follow the same methodology, but we do the CPS calculations separately for each demographic group.
Source: EPI analysis of IRS W-2 data, Table 5.A; BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages; Census 2016 Service Annual Survey, Table 2; Exhibit 4.1 in Michael Lynn, “Should U.S. Restaurants Abandon Tipping? A Review of the Issues and Evidence,” Psychosocial Issues in Human Resource Management vol. 5, no. 1 (2017), 120–159; and Current Population Survey microdata