Tipping in Romanian hospitality: how to handle it correctly, step by step

What changed from "money left on the table"

Before the current regime, cash tips lived in a grey area: they went straight into staff pockets and left no accounting trace. The law now requires the amount to be registered in the till on a line of its own, separate from the bill, and treated as taxable income of the employee.

That distinction matters more than it looks. A tip does not become salary — it is not part of the base for social and health contributions. It is taxed separately, at a 10% income rate, and the restaurant's role is to withhold that tax and pass it on.

The practical consequence: your till has to be able to print a receipt with the tip on its own line. If the device or the software cannot do that, this is not an internal process problem, it is a compliance one.

Who decides the amount, and how it reaches the receipt

The guest decides. Not the venue. It can be a fixed sum or a percentage of the bill, and staff may not impose a value — a tip added automatically, without the guest choosing it, is not a tip in the legal sense.

In practice the correct flow is: present the bill, the guest says how much they are leaving, the amount is entered in the till as a separate line, the receipt is issued. The receipt then shows the consumption and the tip as two distinct values.

This is the first place where pay-at-table changes the experience completely. When the guest scans a QR code and picks the percentage on their own phone, the question "would you like to leave a tip?" disappears from the conversation — and at the same time the choice stays demonstrably the guest's, which is exactly what the law asks for.

The 10% and who withholds it

The venue withholds 10% of the tip and distributes the remainder to staff. The employee files nothing themselves for these amounts; calculating, withholding, paying and declaring all sit with the employer.

Order matters: withhold the tax first, then distribute the rest. Distributing the gross amount and recovering the tax later from somewhere else leaves a bookkeeping gap an inspection spots immediately.

Tips are not part of the restaurant's turnover and are not taxed as company income. The company collects them and passes them on — this is the staff's money, merely moving through the till.

The two filings and their deadlines

This is where most venues slip. The withheld tax is declared and paid through Declaration 100, by the 25th of the month following the one in which the tips were collected. It is a monthly obligation, not something you settle at year end.

Separately, the amounts and the corresponding tax are reported per person through Form 205 — the return on income earned by individuals — filed annually, by the last day of February of the following year.

In short: D100 monthly for the money, D205 annually for the per-person record. A venue that does only the first has paid the tax but never attributed the income.

The internal distribution rules nobody writes down

The law requires tips to be distributed to staff on the basis of internal rules. That is not a formality: the document settles who receives, in what proportion, and on what basis.

Usable rules answer concrete questions. Front of house only, or the kitchen too? Are hours worked in that shift taken into account? What happens to a tip left for a colleague who went home mid-shift? Who checks the calculation, and how often is it paid out?

The document protects you in two directions: in an inspection it proves how you calculated, and inside the team it removes the suspicion that the split is arbitrary — the single biggest reason staff would rather keep tips off the till.

Card tips: where it gets harder

With cash, the money is already physically in the venue. On card, the tip arrives inside the commercial settlement and has to be separated back out, which raises three practical questions: how the right amount reaches the fiscal receipt, who absorbs the card fee on it, and when the staff actually get the money.

The fee is the touchiest part. If the processor charges on the whole transaction, a 20 lei tip reaches the staff slightly reduced unless you decide otherwise. That is an internal policy choice and it deserves to be written into the rules rather than left to happen.

Pay-at-table solves the record-keeping half: the guest picks the percentage, the amount arrives already identified as a tip, and it reaches the fiscal receipt without anyone retyping it. What is left to decide stays a management decision, but at least it is no longer also a transcription problem.

The mistakes inspections see most often

A tip added automatically to the bill without the guest choosing it. That is not a tip, it is a charge — and it is treated entirely differently for tax.

Tips taken on card and paid out in cash from the till, with no trace linking the two. The amounts may well be right and you still cannot show it.

D100 filed, D205 forgotten. The tax is paid, but nobody knows whose income it was.

Internal rules that do not exist, or were copied off the internet and describe a split different from the one actually applied. A document that contradicts your practice is worse than no document.

Tax law changes often, and deadlines and forms can move from one year to the next. Treat this guide as a map of the process, not a substitute for your accountant.