How we verify

The short answer

Every rule on TipMax Answers comes from a primary source: the government agency, law, or regulation itself. We save the exact wording we relied on, date it, and show that date on the page. If a source doesn’t settle a question, the page says so instead of guessing.

Who writes this

TipMax Answers is written by the team behind TipMax, for the people who earn tips: servers, bartenders, baristas, and the coworkers they tip out.

What counts as a source

  • For law and tax: the IRS, the U.S. Department of Labor, federal regulations, and state and provincial government agencies.
  • For study and skills pages: published research, linked by its DOI.
  • Pay estimates (the BLS in the US, Job Bank in Canada) are shown as estimates, labelled, and never used as a statement of what the law requires.
  • We don’t cite blogs, forums, or other apps as a source for a rule.

How a page gets checked

  1. Each claim is matched to a primary source, and the passage it relies on is saved word for word with its URL and the date we read it.
  2. Numbers on state and province pages come from one fact store, so a table and a page can’t disagree.
  3. Where a source is silent or a rule is still being decided, the page says what’s still open in its “Last verified” section.
  4. When we check and find nothing published, we record that too, with the date.
  5. Every page shows the date it was last verified. When a rule changes, it goes in What changed.

What we don’t publish

  • Average tips, “typical” tip-out rates, or rankings of cities or states. No government source publishes them, so we don’t make them up.
  • A separate page for a state whose rules are the same as the federal ones. Those states share one page, with a row each.
  • Tax savings for your situation. Our calculators show estimates from the numbers you enter.

Corrections

If you think something is wrong or out of date, email chris@entermaurs.com with the page and the source. We re-check it against the source and update the page and its date.

TipMax Answers explains public guidance in plain English. It isn’t legal, tax, or accounting advice.