Tips and Gratuities Notice: The Website Rule

You have probably been told that the tips notice is the laminated card beside the card machine. That is half of the rule. It is the half everyone remembers, and it is the half that will not save you when somebody asks the awkward question.

Since 1 December 2022, a business in a covered sector has had to display its tips and gratuities notice on each online digital platform it uses in connection with that service. Your website is an online digital platform. So is your booking app.

Nearly every owner I talk to has the sign. Very few have the page.

The Half of the Rule Everyone Remembers

The Payment of Wages (Amendment) (Tips and Gratuities) Act 2022 arrived with one headline: employers can no longer keep card tips. That part is accurate. Section 4B requires an employer in a covered sector to distribute electronic tips fairly among employees, and bars the employer from retaining any share, with one narrow exception for an owner who regularly performs substantially the same work as the staff and takes no more than a fair and reasonable amount for doing it.

What that means at street level is simple. The tip that lands in your merchant account is passing through. It is not working capital, it is not a buffer against a slow week, and it is not yours to hold while you think about it.

The same section carries paperwork most businesses skipped. Within ten days of a distribution you must give each employee a written statement showing the total distributed and that person's share. Section 4C then blocks deductions from the tip pot beyond statutory ones and the costs that genuinely arise from paying tips electronically. Not a slice for breakages. Not a handling fee you invented on a Tuesday.

All of that has been covered to death in the trade press. The display obligation has not.

"Each Online Digital Platform" Means Exactly What It Says

The detail sits in a statutory instrument rather than the Act itself, which is probably why it goes unread. The Payment of Wages Act 1991 (Display of Notices) Regulations 2022, signed on 28 October 2022 and operative from 1 December that year, set out where the notice has to appear. Regulation 3 defines an online digital platform as a website or a digital mobile application. Regulation 4 then requires the notice in each location relevant to the employer: at the premises where the service is provided, in at least one further place where customers may pay in person, and on each online digital platform used in connection with the service.

Each. Not one of them. Website and booking app means two.

Regulation 4 also sets a standard for how it appears. The notice must be in such a position, form and manner as to be capable of being easily read by consumers. That phrasing does quiet work. A PDF sitting behind a footer link marked Legal is a document you possess. Whether it is a notice you display is a different argument, and not one I would want to make from the wrong side of an inspection.

I got this wrong myself for years. We built a single footer link for every compliance page a customer might ever need, called it Legal, and treated the problem as solved. It was tidy. It was also read by nobody. Tidy and displayed are not the same word.

One notice, two obligations: the premises and every platform you use for the service.

Four Kinds of Money, Four Different Duties

A customer sees one line on a bill. The law sees four different things, and the words you choose decide which one you are holding.

What the customer pays	Who controls it	What the Act requires	Where it must be explained
Cash tip left for staff	The employee, directly	Outside the fair distribution duty, but your policy on it must be stated	Premises notice and website notice
Tip added by card, phone or app	You receive it first	Distributed fairly and transparently, no employer share beyond the narrow exception	Premises notice and website notice
Mandatory charge not described as service	You	May be retained, provided nothing implies it reaches staff	Notice must state whether any of it is distributed
Any charge described as a service charge	Nobody, once published	Every payment treated as if it were an electronic tip	The wording itself triggers the duty, in any medium

Read the bottom row twice. That is the row that costs money.

The Words "Service Charge" Are a Promise You Cannot Take Back

Section 4D is short and unforgiving. Where an employer describes a charge imposed on a customer as a service charge, or any similar or cognate term, whether in a tips and gratuities notice or in any other medium, or in any other way leads customers to believe that a mandatory charge will be distributed to employees, the employer must treat every payment received under that charge as if it were an electronic tip.

Read "any other medium" as your group bookings page. Your online menu. The brochure PDF a designer built for you in 2021 that nobody has opened since. Your confirmation email template. The charge does not have to be described that way on the bill. It only has to be described that way somewhere.

Consider a guesthouse in Leitrim, a composite of a pattern I have watched play out more than once. A ten per cent service charge went onto group bookings when the site was rebuilt. The money went towards laundry and extra linen. Nobody queried it for years. Then a staff member reads about the Act and lodges a complaint with the Workplace Relations Commission, and the decisive evidence is not something anyone has to dig for. It is a page on the guesthouse's own website, published in its own name, describing the charge in the exact terms section 4D catches. Every euro taken under that heading was legally a tip pot the whole time.

This is the same trap as the rules on what you are allowed to add at a checkout. Whether a charge is lawful and how a charge is described are two separate questions. Businesses lose on the second one far more often.

Two Lines Nearly Every Notice Leaves Out

The Act says what the notice must state: whether tips are distributed to employees, how and in what amounts, and whether any part of a mandatory charge reaches staff. The regulations then add two requirements that most templates I have seen simply do not carry.

First, the notice must include a statement to the effect that the Act requires you to distribute electronic tips to your employees. Not a description of your own policy. A statement of the legal position.

Second, it must state your policy on tips left in any form other than electronic. That is the cash jar. The Act does not dictate how you split cash. It does oblige you to publish what you do.

Both lines take a minute to write. Both are missing from the majority of notices I read. If you are already working through what has to appear alongside a price on your site, add these to the same list and do it in one sitting.

The Sectors That Did Not See This Coming

Most coverage framed this as a restaurant law. The schedule to the application regulations is considerably wider. It captures:

Selling food or drink for consumption on the premises where it is sold
Selling food or drink by casual trading
Commercial overnight accommodation: hotels, guesthouses, hostels, bed and breakfasts, self-catering
Providing guided tours
Non-surgical cosmetic procedures, drafted to include nail care, nail styling, hair care, hair styling, tattoo services, piercing services and skin care
Gaming services at premises used primarily for gaming
Licensed bookmakers
Public service vehicle transport, other than school transport and contracted public bus services

A barber shop is in scope. So is a nail bar, a tattoo studio, a three-room bed and breakfast, a walking tour, a taxi. Almost none of those owner-operators would describe themselves as hospitality. Almost all of them now take tips on a card terminal.

That last point is the engine under the whole thing. The Banking and Payments Federation published its latest payments monitor on Friday, and contactless came in at a shade under 90 per cent of point of sale card payments for the first half of this year, with roughly two thirds of those tapped from a phone rather than a card. Tips followed the money. The pot the Act regulates most tightly is now the pot nearly everything lands in.

There is a second limb worth knowing if you sell through an app. Where a platform lets customers order food for delivery, or book public service vehicle transport, and lets them tip through the platform, that operator carries its own notice duty for the contract workers doing the work. Their obligation is theirs. It does not absorb yours.

Eight prescribed service types, most of which never thought of themselves as hospitality.

What Displaying the Notice Does Not Fix

Publishing a correct notice is not compliance. It is one requirement among several, and it is the easiest one.

The duty that actually generates complaints is distribution. You can have an immaculate page and still lose at the Workplace Relations Commission because the split was not fair in the circumstances, or because staff never got their written statements inside ten days, or because you changed the policy without consulting the people it affects, which section 4B requires you to do before any material change. The notice describes the system. It does not validate it.

One more honest limitation, and it is the one that trips people up. Cash and electronic tips are not treated identically. The fair distribution duty bites on electronic tips, the ones that reach you first. On cash, your obligation is transparency rather than a prescribed method. Businesses that assume the whole pot is regulated the same way tend to either over-promise on the notice or quietly under-deliver against it, and the notice is the document they get held to.

On penalties, failing to display is a summary offence carrying a class C fine, which the Fines Act 2010 caps at 2,500 euro. That number is not what should move you. A complaint, an adjudication published under your business name, and a local paper that finds it: that is the real cost. None of this is legal advice either, and ten minutes with the Workplace Relations Commission guidance, or a short call with your solicitor, is worth more than any article including this one.

When a Simple Site Builder Is Genuinely Enough

I am not going to pretend this requires managed hosting. It does not. If you run a single-location salon with a one-page site, no online booking and no plans for either, Squarespace will hold a tips and gratuities notice perfectly well, and the regulations do not care what your site is built on. A notice is text. Any platform can display text.

The argument for something better starts where the maintenance starts. This is not a launch task you tick off. It is a live statement about how you pay people, and it has to survive a change of policy, a change of staff, a change of pricing, and a change of whoever built the site.

Keeping a Notice That Is Still True Next Year

The failure mode nobody plans for is drift. The notice was accurate the day it went up and quietly stopped being true eighteen months later. The split changed. The mandatory charge came off group bookings. The person with the login left and took the password with them.

That is a hosting problem as much as an HR one. You want to edit the page yourself in a couple of minutes, verify the change in a staging environment before you deploy it, and roll back to last night's backup if somebody deletes the wrong block on a busy morning. An hourly rate and a three-day wait is a strong incentive to leave a wrong notice up.

Web60's 60 euro a year all-inclusive plan covers that side: full WordPress, one-click staging, nightly backups with one-click restore, and an Irish support team you can ring. Describe your business, get a designed site in under a minute, and keep the keys from day one. Getting the compliance wording right is still your job. Being able to change it the same afternoon should not be something you rent back at agency rates.

Conclusion

The rule itself is not complicated. If you take tips in a covered sector, the notice goes on the wall, at a second point where people pay, and on every website and app you use for that service, in a form a customer can actually read. It carries the statutory line about electronic tips and your policy on cash. And whatever you call a charge on any page you publish, you have to mean it.

Open your own site this evening and run a search for the words "service charge". Whatever comes back, you published it, and you already know whether it is still true. That is a ten minute job and it is most of the work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to display a tips and gratuities notice on my website?

If your business is in one of the prescribed sectors, yes. The Payment of Wages Act 1991 (Display of Notices) Regulations 2022 require the notice on each online digital platform used by the employer in connection with the service, and the regulations define an online digital platform as a website or a digital mobile application. It must also appear at the premises and at one further location where customers can pay in person. The requirement has applied since 1 December 2022.

Which businesses in Ireland have to display a tips and gratuities notice?

The schedule to the application regulations covers food or drink sold for consumption on the premises, food or drink sold by casual trading, commercial overnight accommodation including hotels, guesthouses, hostels, bed and breakfasts and self-catering, guided tours, non-surgical cosmetic procedures including nail care, hair care, hair styling, tattooing, piercing and skin care, gaming services at premises used primarily for gaming, licensed bookmakers, and public service vehicle transport other than school transport and contracted public bus services.

Can I keep a service charge in Ireland?

Not if you call it a service charge. Section 4D provides that where an employer describes a charge as a service charge, or any similar or cognate term, whether in a tips and gratuities notice or in any other medium, or otherwise leads customers to believe a mandatory charge will be distributed to employees, every payment under that charge must be treated as if it were an electronic tip. A mandatory charge that is not described that way, and that nothing implies reaches staff, can be retained.

Does the law cover cash tips as well as card tips?

Both appear on the notice, but the duties differ. The fair distribution obligation in section 4B applies to tips received by an electronic mode of payment, meaning card, phone and app payments that reach the employer first. For cash, the obligation is transparency: the regulations require the notice to state your policy on tips left in a form other than electronic. The Act does not prescribe how cash is split, only that you say what you do with it.

What is the penalty for not displaying a tips and gratuities notice?

Failure to display is a summary offence under section 4E, carrying a class C fine. Under the Fines Act 2010 a class C fine is one not exceeding 2,500 euro. Separately, employees can bring complaints to the Workplace Relations Commission about how tips, gratuities or service charges have been treated, and an adjudication officer can order redress. For most small businesses the published adjudication is the more expensive outcome.

Does the tips notice need to be its own page on my site?

The regulations do not prescribe a page structure. They require the notice to be in such a position, form and manner as to be capable of being easily read by consumers. A dedicated page linked from the main navigation, or the notice text placed directly on a booking or menu page, both meet that description more convincingly than a downloadable PDF behind a footer link. If a customer needs several clicks and a pinch-zoom to read it, the display standard is arguable at best.