Bill Split Calculator — Equal, Itemised or Proportional

Split any restaurant bill equally or by exact orders, add the tip, and see what each person owes — instantly, with no signup and no math in your head. Works for groups of 2 to 20 people, any currency, any tip rate.

Equal Is Simple. Fair Is Sometimes Different.

Splitting a bill equally is the default because it is fast and because proposing anything else feels awkward. It is the right answer when everyone ordered roughly comparably. It stops being the right answer the moment one person had a starter, three courses and half the wine while another had soup and tap water.

The argument for equal splitting over many meals is that it averages out — you overpay one week and underpay the next. That works for a regular group and not at all for a one-off gathering of people who will not eat together again.

Tip and Tax: What Gets Charged on What

The order of operations changes the total, and this is where the arithmetic genuinely matters.

Subtotal → the food and drink
+ Tax, calculated on the subtotal
+ Tip, calculated on the subtotal or on the taxed total
= What the group pays

On a 200 subtotal with 10% tax and a 20% tip, tipping on the pre-tax figure gives 200 + 20 + 40 = 260. Tipping on the post-tax figure gives 200 + 20 + 44 = 264. Four units on a 200 meal is not worth an argument, but it explains why two people using different apps get different totals from the same receipt.

The convention worth knowing is that tipping on the pre-tax subtotal is the more common practice, since the tax is not part of the service. Where a service charge has already been added to the bill, an additional tip is discretionary rather than expected — and the charge being on the bill is easy to miss.

Itemising Properly, Including Shared Dishes

The mistake in itemised splitting is handling shared items badly. Assign what each person ordered, divide shared dishes among the people who actually ate them, then apply tax and tip to each person in proportion to their own subtotal rather than equally.

Each person's share =
  (their items + their portion of shared items)
  × (1 + tax rate)
  × (1 + tip rate)

Applying tip and tax proportionally is the step people skip. Splitting the food itemised and then dividing the tip equally quietly transfers money from the light eaters to the heavy ones, which defeats the point of itemising in the first place.

A worked example. Three people: A orders 20, B orders 45, C orders 35, and they share a 30 platter equally. Subtotals become 30, 55 and 45, totalling 130. With 8% tax and an 18% tip on the pre-tax amount, the multiplier is 1.08 plus 0.18 of the subtotal — so A pays 30 × 1.26 = 37.80, B pays 69.30, and C pays 56.70.

The Rounding Problem

Three people splitting 100 each owe 33.333… and no arrangement of coins produces that. Somebody has to absorb the difference.

• Round everyone up and let the payer keep the excess. Three payments of 33.34 total 100.02. Simple, and the payer is marginally ahead.
• Round down and have one person cover the remainder. Two pay 33.33 and one pays 33.34. Exact, and requires someone to volunteer.
• Let the person paying the bill absorb it. They are already carrying the transaction and often the loyalty points.

For a group that eats together regularly, rotating who absorbs the rounding is neater than recalculating it each time. Over a year the amounts are trivial; the friction of deciding each time is not.

The Awkward Situations, Solved

Someone did not drink. Alcohol is usually the largest single distortion on a restaurant bill. Split the drinks separately among the people who had them, then split the food however the group prefers. This is the one adjustment almost everyone accepts without discussion.

Someone arrived late or left early. Charge them for what they had rather than trying to prorate by time. Time-based apportionment sounds fair and is fiddly, contentious, and rarely matches what anyone consumed.

One person is paying for two. Count them as two people, not one. Splitting a bill by heads present rather than by people fed is a common and expensive slip when children are at the table.

A birthday meal. Divide the guest of honour's share among everyone else before splitting, rather than after — the arithmetic is the same but the conversation is easier when it is settled up front.

Doing It at the Table

Two shortcuts cover almost every situation without a phone.

For a tip: ten percent is the decimal point moved one place left. Twenty percent is that doubled. Fifteen percent is ten percent plus half of it again. On a 68 bill: 6.80, then 13.60 for twenty percent, or 10.20 for fifteen.

For the split: round the total up to something divisible by the group size before dividing. A 137 bill among four is awkward; treating it as 140 gives 35 each and leaves a small surplus toward the tip, which is usually the intention anyway.

For splitting shared household costs rather than a single bill, the rent calculator covers dividing rent by room size or income, and the percentage calculator handles any proportional share you need to work out separately.

Bill Splitting Questions