Did you know that when you tip at checkout on Uber Eats, the amount that you tipped can be passed along to drivers before they accept your order?
When an Uber Eats driver gets a new order request, they see an estimated payout that includes some—but not all—of the tip.
Drivers don’t know how much the full tip is until the order is complete and the one-hour tip settlement period has passed.
But for a few brief hours, Uber changed the Uber Eats app to display the entire tip amount upfront. It’s something that drivers have wanted for years because more information = more control over your earnings.
Check it out below.
The full tip amount was displayed upfront for a brief, glorious moment
And here’s another order with full tip info, upfront. Nice!
No more guessing about the tip amount!
But only a few hours later, Uber began to hide the full tip amount again.
Drivers reported that the order display screen went back to the old system—without any specific tip info and only a message that the upfront estimate ‘includes expected tip.’
Does this mean that full upfront tip info might be coming soon? We’ll have to wait and find out.
How ‘hidden tips’ usually works
When a tip is small—just a dollar or two—the entire tip amount is included in the upfront estimate. But for larger tips, the full tip amount is hidden from the estimate.
An order might say “$10 – includes expected tip” and end up having a $20 tip because the full tip was hidden from the estimate.
Why does Uber hide tip info on the order request screen?
Uber doesn’t display the complete tip amount on order requests because they don’t want drivers to reject orders that don’t have tips.
If you know the entire tip before you accept an order, the best strategy is to reject orders without tips and only accept the ones with good tips.
That would lead to a bad experience for the customers that don’t tip at checkout: Longer wait times for non-tippers and better service for generous tippers.
But Uber strikes a balance by giving you some tip info, just enough to incentivize you to accept a delivery. Without any upfront tip info at all, drivers would only see Uber’s base pay—which can be as low as $2.
App tweaks like this are common
For now, it looks like the unhiding of tip info was a temporary tweak to test a potential new feature. Uber frequently tests new features, usually rolling them out in a few select markets to monitor the outcome.
In the past, Uber experimented with hiding most upfront info on Uber Eats orders, but fortunately that feature didn’t last long.
Unhiding tip info may only be a temporary test, but if we’re lucky, Uber will finally give us the complete info that we’ve always wanted.
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