Restaurant Bill Split Calculator

Reading the bill before you split it

An Indian restaurant bill has four layers, and they stack in a fixed order. The calculator asks for each one separately because that order is what most people get wrong.

• Food and drinks total. The subtotal before anything is added. On most bills it is the line just above “service charge”.
• Service charge. 5 or 10 percent on most bills. Pick “None” if the bill has no such line, or if you asked for it to be removed.
• GST. 5 percent at a standalone restaurant, 18 percent at a restaurant inside a hotel where any room costs more than ₹7,500 a night. A dhaba or a chaat stall with no GSTIN on the bill charges none.
• Tip. Cash left on the table, outside the bill. Leave it at zero if you are not tipping; most tables in India do not.
• Split between. The number of people paying. Leave it blank and the tool assumes one.

The formula is short:

service charge = food × service %
GST            = (food + service charge) × GST %
total          = food + service charge + GST + tip
each person    = total / people

The line to look at is the second one. GST is charged on the food plus the service charge, not on the food alone. That single detail is why the rest of this page exists.

Service charge is optional, and has been since July 2022

The Central Consumer Protection Authority issued guidelines on 4 July 2022 saying no hotel or restaurant may add a service charge automatically, may not collect it under another name, may not make it a condition of entry, and may not fold it into the food bill and charge GST on the total. The restaurant associations (NRAI and FHRAI) went to court. The Delhi High Court upheld the guidelines on 28 March 2025.

So the position today is simple. A service charge on the bill is a request, not a levy. You can ask for it to be struck off before you pay, and the restaurant is supposed to do it without an argument.

In practice, the argument happens. The bill arrives with “service charge 10%” printed in the same font as GST, the waiter says “it is company policy”, and most tables pay it rather than make a scene at a birthday dinner. If you do want to decline it, say so when you ask for the bill, not after the card machine has been brought. If the restaurant refuses, the National Consumer Helpline is 1915 (also on the NCH app and WhatsApp), and a complaint can go to the district consumer commission.

Whether you should decline it is a different question. Service charge, where it is actually distributed, is pooled and shared with the kitchen and the cleaning staff, who never see a cash tip. I decline it at places that add it silently and pay it at places where the staff have clearly earned it. That is a personal rule, not advice.

Why declining it saves more than the 10 percent

Take the calculator’s defaults: a food bill of ₹2,400 at a standalone restaurant, 10 percent service charge, 5 percent GST, no tip, four people.

Line	Amount
Food and drinks	₹2,400
Service charge @ 10%	₹240
GST @ 5% on ₹2,640	₹132
Total	₹2,772
Each person (4)	₹693

Now the same bill with the service charge removed:

Line	Amount
Food and drinks	₹2,400
GST @ 5% on ₹2,400	₹120
Total	₹2,520
Each person (4)	₹630

The service charge line said ₹240. Declining it saved ₹252, because ₹12 of GST was riding on top of it. The tool shows this as “what the service charge really costs”. It is a small number on a ₹2,400 bill and a large one at a hotel.

The same meal inside a five-star

Switch the GST option to 18 percent and leave everything else alone. The bill becomes ₹3,115, each person pays ₹779, and the service charge now costs ₹283 once its GST is counted, on a food total that has not moved. Hotels with rooms above ₹7,500 a night are also the places most likely to print a service charge, so the two effects arrive together.

Drop the service charge to 5 percent instead and the total is ₹2,646. The difference between 5 and 10 percent on a ₹2,400 bill is ₹126 including the GST on it, which is roughly the cost of one extra starter.

GST rates, and where they come from

The 5 percent rate for standalone restaurants comes without input tax credit, which is why a restaurant cannot offset the GST it pays on rent and ingredients. The 18 percent rate inside hotels comes with credit. Both are charged on the food, not on the MRP of packaged items: a bottle of water should be billed at its printed MRP with no GST added on top, because GST is already inside the MRP.

The ₹7,500 test is on the room tariff of the hotel, not on what you paid for dinner. A coffee shop in the lobby of a hotel with one ₹8,000 suite is an 18 percent restaurant even if you never went upstairs. Since 1 April 2025 the test looks at the room value the hotel actually charged in the previous financial year (or a declaration it files to opt in), so a hotel can move between 5 and 18 percent from one April to the next.

Alcohol is outside GST entirely. Beer, wine and spirits carry state VAT instead, at a rate that varies by state (Maharashtra, Karnataka and Delhi are all different), and it is sometimes printed as a separate “VAT on liquor” line with its own service charge. This calculator does not model that. If the bill has drinks on it, split the food and the alcohol as two separate bills, or accept that the tool’s total will be low by the VAT amount. The GST calculator can pull the GST back out of any single line if you want to check what the restaurant did.

Tipping and paying, the Indian version

Tipping here is nothing like the American 18 to 20 percent. It is cash, it is a flat amount, and nobody expects it. ₹50 to ₹100 on a table of four at a mid-range place, ₹200 or so at a hotel, more if a waiter went out of their way. The card machine will sometimes prompt for a tip; it goes wherever the restaurant decides, which is usually not to the person who served you.

On Swiggy and Zomato the in-app tip goes to the delivery partner, in full, and the restaurant does not see it. A ₹20 tip on a rainy evening is a different thing from a 10 percent line on a printed bill.

Once the total is agreed, UPI has removed everything hard about splitting except the arithmetic. One person pays the restaurant, the others send their share on GPay or PhonePe before leaving the table. The per-person figure the tool shows is a straight equal split. If one person ordered a ₹900 steak and another had dal and roti, an equal split is the wrong tool; add up each person’s items, and put each subtotal through the calculator with the party size set to 1 to get their share of the service charge and GST.

For a quick “what is 10 percent of this” in your head, the percentage calculator is faster than this page. And if the restaurant is running a Diwali or Zomato Gold style discount, the discount calculator tells you what the food total becomes before any of the layers above are added, since the service charge and GST are both applied to the discounted amount, not the menu price.