 Now tips are a mess. So if you worked in a place where you are receiving tips, note that it used to be a situation where you could basically, there was a business model that worked quite well for certain types of restaurants and whatnot, where basically someone would be earning just simply tips. And the employer would just basically be making money on say the food earnings, the profit there, and the drinks, and possibly the servers would be earning say tips, for example. But the IRS doesn't like that situation because then the person that's receiving the tips is getting paid directly from a customer that doesn't need to issue them a W-2 or a 1099. So you can see what the IRS would like to do to force the tips to be reported as income is try to get the employer involved in the reporting be responsible for the reporting of the tips. So now you've got different kind of scenarios where the employer might have to involve themselves in the tip process. And if they do, then the question is, are the tips being reported on the form W-2? If they're being reported on the form W-2, then they're being reported as you're paying taxes on them. If they're not, then you still have income from tip income, which the IRS wants a piece of. And so that's the idea. So this should include any tip income you didn't report to your employer and any allocated tips shown in box eight on your form W-2 unless you can prove that your unreported tips are less than the amount in box eight. So again, it's on box eight of the W-2 or unreported tips because you have income. So if they're on the W-2, obviously if they're part of your income in box one, they're gonna be included in income. If they're in box eight, then you have the tip income. And usually when you enter this into the software, it'll help you to determine the line to be put on into the tax software. If you don't have any reported tips, but you did earn tips, then you should be still under the general rules of the code reporting income that has been earned, even if you didn't receive documentation on it. Allocated tips aren't included as income in box one. So again, there's different rules in terms of how the employer is gonna structure the whole tip or their whole business model system set up if they're now having to be involved in the reporting of tips in some way, shape or form. So if they're reporting tips, then as tips, then it won't be basically in box one possibly. So again, you might want it wherever you're working, if it's a restaurant or whatever, you wanna get an idea of the whole tip structure and how the taxes are kind of involved in the tips. And it's a good idea to understand how the taxes are probably distorting the business model that is being used when tips are involved. So see publication 531 for more details, also include the value of any non-cash tips you received, such as tickets, passes or other items of value. So notice that the whole point of a tip, oftentimes, is that you're giving someone value directly for work that's been done over and above possibly. And again, that's hard for the IRS to basically track and tax, but in theory, you should. So even if the tip was in the form of something else, like they gave you tickets to a concert. Oh, like a real concert concert? Or something like that, then you should be reporting that as income, right? So although you don't report these non-cash tips to your employer, you must report them online. Caution, you may owe Social Security and Medicare or Railroad Retirement, our RRTA tax on unreported tips. See the instructions for set schedule two, line five.