Splitting Restaurant Bills Fairly: The Rounding Problem Nobody Solves

A 100.00 bill between three people is 33.33 each — and 0.01 missing. Most tip calculators hide that fraction. A good splitter tells you what to do about it, which is exactly what the Tip & Bill Splitter is built around.

Three rounding strategies, three philosophies

• Exact keeps shares mathematically unrounded; the displayed per-person figure is honest but the collected total can land a cent short.
• Round up charges each person the next whole cent. The group never collects less than the receipt — the 10.00/3 case becomes 3.34 × 3 = 10.02, with the 0.02 surplus disclosed.
• Nearest uses standard rounding. Cheap to compute, can land either side.

The tool computes all of this in integer cents. Floating-point money math is the classic bug here: 0.1 + 0.2 !== 0.3 in IEEE 754, and per-person amounts multiplied back can drift. Cent-safe arithmetic means the numbers you copy into the group chat reconcile with the receipt exactly.

Tips: percentage, custom, or both

A 15–20% tip is the default in most of the world, but service-included restaurants make a fixed tip more sensible. When the custom field has a value it overrides the percentage — no ambiguity about which one wins, and the summary labels which mode produced the number.

What about splitting unevenly?

The tool splits evenly by design — that's the 90% case. For itemized splitting (you paid for the salad, she paid for the wine), do the rough split in your head first, then use per-person rounding to settle the cents.

Limitations, honestly

• The splitter does not itemize orders or track who paid for what.
• Currency display is formatting only; the math is currency-agnostic.
• Banker's rounding is deliberately not offered — "never short" is a simpler contract.

For everything else on the money side of a meal — VAT-inclusive receipts, tip-included pricing abroad — the Discount & VAT Calculator handles the tax direction, and the Currency Converter converts the total with an offline rate snapshot.