Most holiday budgets have a line for gifts, a line for food, and maybe a line for travel. Very few have a line for the people who keep your life running the other eleven months: the housekeeper, the babysitter, the dog walker, the guy who plows your driveway at 5 a.m. Then December shows up, the envelopes come out, and a few hundred dollars leaves your checking account that you never planned for.
It’s November 1. That gives you about seven weeks to plan this properly instead of pulling twenties out of an ATM on Christmas Eve.
What other people are actually tipping
Bankrate’s most recent holiday tipping survey, published in December 2025, gives a decent picture of what’s normal. Among people who use each service, 56% planned to tip their housekeeper, 47% planned to tip a childcare provider, and 47% planned to tip a teacher. Further down the list, 37% planned to tip a landscaper, gardener, or snow remover, 27% a mail carrier, and 21% the trash and recycling crew.
The interesting part is the direction. Fewer people planned to tip childcare providers (down from 55% the year before) and teachers (down from 53%). Overall participation slipped a bit. But for the people who did tip, some amounts went up sharply. The median holiday tip for landscaping jumped from $30 to $50, and the median for trash and recycling collectors went from $20 to $25.
So people are getting choosier about who they tip, and more generous with the ones they keep on the list. That’s a reasonable way to handle it, and it’s the approach we’d recommend.
You can read the full breakdown in Bankrate’s holiday tipping survey.
The etiquette numbers, translated into a budget
The Emily Post Institute’s holiday tipping guide is the closest thing to a standard most people have. It calls its figures suggestions rather than rules, and a lot of them are pegged to what you already pay someone, which makes the math easier than it looks.
For a housekeeper, the guide suggests up to one week’s pay, a small gift, or both. For a regular babysitter, up to one evening’s pay plus a small gift from the kids. A live-in nanny or au pair gets up to a week’s pay. A dog walker also gets up to a week’s pay or a gift. For a personal trainer, it’s up to the cost of one session, and for a barber, up to the cost of one haircut.
Then there are the flat-dollar suggestions. Trash and recycling collectors get $10 to $30 each (check your city’s rules first if it’s a municipal crew). Yard and garden workers get $20 to $50 each. Newspaper delivery is $10 to $30. Doormen land anywhere from $15 to $80. For day care, the guide suggests $25 to $70 for each staff member who works with your child.
Here’s how that looks in practice for a made-up but pretty typical household. Say you have someone clean every other week at $160 a visit, a babysitter you book for $80 a night, and a lawn crew of two. Following the guide at the top of each range, you’d be looking at $160 for the cleaner, $80 for the sitter, and $100 for the lawn crew. That’s $340 before you’ve touched the trash collectors, a teacher, or anyone else. Not ruinous, but it’s real money, and it tends to hit the same week as everything else.
The word “up to” is doing a lot of work in those guidelines. Half a week’s pay for a housekeeper is still a generous tip. The guide itself says you shouldn’t feel obligated to go beyond your personal budget.
The mail carrier rule most people get wrong
Every year people tuck a $20 bill into a card for their letter carrier. Every year that carrier has to hand it back, or at least is supposed to.
USPS employees can accept a gift worth $20 or less per occasion, with a cap of $50 in gifts from any one customer in a calendar year. Cash and cash equivalents are banned in any amount. That includes checks, and it includes gift cards issued by a bank or credit card company, because federal ethics rules treat a Visa or Mastercard gift card the same as cash. A gift card to a specific coffee shop or restaurant is fine, as long as it stays under $20. This 10TV explainer walks through the rule and the ethics guidance behind it.
The budget upside here is that your mail carrier line is capped at $20 by law. A $15 coffee card and a note does the job.
Private delivery drivers are a different story. They work for companies with their own gift policies, so if you want to tip yours, it’s worth checking what that company allows.
How to build the tipping line without blowing the budget
Start with a list. Write down every person you’d feel weird not tipping, then cut it. Be honest about who you actually see and rely on. The barber you visit four times a year is not the same as the nanny who’s in your house five days a week. Bankrate’s numbers suggest plenty of people are already trimming their lists, so you’re in good company.
Next, put a number next to each name and add it up. If the total makes you wince, scale everyone down proportionally rather than dropping people at random. Tipping your housekeeper half a week’s pay instead of a full week is a much smaller sting for them than getting nothing.
Then move that total into a separate savings bucket now. If your bank lets you create sub-accounts or savings goals, label one “holiday tips” and set up two or three automatic transfers between now and mid-December. Spreading $300 over three paydays is $100 a pop, which is a lot easier to absorb than $300 in one week alongside gift shopping. If you’re already running a holiday sinking fund, just add the tipping line to it.
Finally, plan how you’ll pay. Some people still prefer cash in a card, and plenty of service workers do too. If that’s you, pull the money from your own bank’s ATM or ask for crisp bills at a branch, rather than paying out-of-network ATM fees in a December rush. Venmo, Zelle, or a check work fine for people you already pay that way, and they leave a record, which helps if you’re tracking spending against your budget.
When the money really isn’t there
Some years the budget doesn’t stretch. That’s fine, and it’s more common than people admit.
The Emily Post guide is surprisingly practical about this. If you can’t afford cash tips, it suggests a homemade gift, and if you’re not crafty, a handwritten note. It also says that if you already tip someone at the time of service (your hairstylist, say), you can skip the year-end tip or give a smaller one. A couple of sentences of real thanks, written by hand, lands better than most people expect.
What we’d avoid is putting holiday tips on a credit card you can’t pay off in January. A $50 tip that ends up carrying interest for six months stops being generous and starts being expensive, mostly for you.
The short version
Decide who’s on your list this week, attach a number to each person, and start moving that money into savings on your next payday. Tip the people you rely on most a little more generously, and give everyone else a smaller tip or a good note. Keep your mail carrier gift under $20 and out of cash. And whatever you spend, make sure you planned it in November so you’re not paying for it in February.
