The tax must be collected.
It is the only thing as certain as death, they say.
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Tax liability on tips
If you do a job and get paid for it – both in the form of a salary from your employer and in the form of a tip from a particularly satisfied customer, you must declare it to the Tax Agency.
Pia Blank Thörnroos is a tax expert and lawyer at Tax Agency.
– The person receives compensation for performing work and the compensation is therefore taxable for the payee. It doesn’t matter if the tip is given in cash or through an extra amount when paying by credit card or by other electronic means, for example with swish, says Pia Blank Thörnroos.
When you pay at the restaurant, for example, and are offered to leave a tip as an addition to the cost of the product or service, it must be taxed just like any other income.
Tip in the payment machine?
It is increasingly common for restaurants and other providers of services to ask for tips directly at the card machine. All that money first goes to the employer, who then pays out the tip to the staff.
In those cases, the employer must pay the tax before the money is released to the employee.
Work performed
The Swedish Tax Agency emphasizes that even if tips are a voluntary extra payment, they depend on the work performed.
– If you had not done the work, you would not have received a tip. Therefore, it is to be classified as compensation for work performed, for example driving a taxi, and the compensation is therefore taxable, says Pia Blank Thörnroos.
Own responsibility
If the staff receives the tip in cash or by swish, for example, without it passing through the employer, it is the employee’s own responsibility to contact the Swedish Tax Agency to report the compensation.
Then it must be declared instead.
Never the customer’s fault if tax is not paid
The individual employee may realize that it is wise not to pay the tax for his tip. But because your state pension and occupational pension are based on earnings, you actually get less pension if you don’t tax your tip.
For those who pay a tip to the taxi driver or bartender, for example, the tax liability is not affected in any way.
The only ones who don’t have to pay tax
But there is an exception for those liable to pay taxes.
If you work so little that you don’t earn more than SEK 24,238 per year in earned income, you don’t have to pay tax. This means that those who, for example, work extra as a teenager in the summer, or for some other reason, are paid so little a year that they do not reach more than SEK 24,238 in income – including tips, so they avoid the tax.
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