The bill arrives, one card goes down, and then the table does arithmetic badly for ten minutes. There are only three sensible ways to split a restaurant bill, and each one has a situation it's right for.
Want the numbers done for you? The split bill calculator splits a single bill item by item, with GST, service charge and tip shared fairly.
1. Equal split: the default
Total divided by the number of people. Right when everyone ate and drank roughly the same, or when the difference is small enough that nobody cares. It takes five seconds and it's what most friend groups should do most of the time.
Rule of thumb: if the most expensive person's share and the cheapest person's share differ by less than the price of a coffee, split equally and move on.
2. Itemised: everyone pays for their own
Right when the differences are big: one person had a steak and three cocktails, another had soup and water. Also right for mixed groups where not everyone knows each other well, because nobody is subsidising a stranger.
The practical problem is shared items: starters for the table, the bottle of wine, the bread. Itemised splits usually turn into method 3.
3. Hybrid: shared items equally, personal items individually
This is the one that handles the real world. Shared starters, the table's wine and the tax and service charge are split among everyone who took part; each main course goes to the person who ate it.
In Ezysplit it's two or three expenses rather than one:
- "Dinner – shared": starters, shared drinks, paid by whoever's card it was, everyone included.
- "Dinner – mains": one bill per noticeably different main if you want to be precise, or lump the similar ones together and exclude the people who had something very different.
- "Dinner – drinks": the bar tab with the non-drinkers excluded.
The non-drinker problem
The person who didn't drink shouldn't pay for a quarter of the wine, and in most groups everyone agrees with that in principle. In practice it gets skipped because splitting the drinks separately feels fussy. The fix is to make it the norm: enter drinks as their own bill with the non-drinkers excluded, every time. It takes ten seconds and the non-drinker never has to raise it.
Tax and service charge
Split these in the same proportion as the food. If you're doing an equal split they're just part of the total. If you're itemising, the simplest fair approach is to split tax and service equally among everyone, because the error is tiny and nobody wants to compute 5% of each person's main. (Technically the person with the pricier meal should pay slightly more tax. Nobody has ever thanked anyone for enforcing that.)
Tipping
Agree the tip as a group before the bill is paid, add it to the total, and it splits with everything else. If one person wants to tip more, they tip more from their own pocket and it stays off the shared bill.
Someone arrives late or leaves early
Late arrivals pay for what they ate plus a share of anything shared after they sat down. Early leavers usually hand over cash or say "put me down for X". Enter their share as a separate bill "paid by" them if they paid cash to the card-holder, so the card-holder is correctly repaid less.
When it's one bill at the end of a long evening
Don't do the maths at the table. One card pays, the payer snaps a photo of the receipt, and the split gets entered in the cab. Everyone sees the same numbers in the morning and settles by UPI. The card-holder is repaid the exact amount, and nobody had to be the person who said "actually I only had the salad".
More guides
- How to split rent fairly with roommates
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- Who pays whom: settling a group with the fewest transfers
- Splitting costs when there's a couple in the group
- Planning a group trip budget everyone can live with
- How to ask a friend to pay you back (without making it weird)
- Splitting costs with friends who earn more (or less) than you
- Should you lend money to a friend? Five rules that protect the friendship