Michael here: The screen is just going to ask you a few questions. 😫

The tip screen on a Frontier flight asks for sixty cents. In April the federal government published a list of every job in America where tipping officially counts, and left the flight attendant off it.

That omission is the clearest answer anyone has given to the thing you keep sputtering about at the coffee counter.

Picture the tablet. Frontier gives away no soda, so you buy one, and the flight attendant hands you a screen to sign. It offers to add 15, 20, or 25 percent. On a $2.99 can of ginger ale: 45, 60, or 75 cents.

Sixty cents. Nobody has ever gone home angry about sixty cents.

Something about that screen makes people furious anyway, and almost nobody can say what. Pew asked 11,945 Americans, and 72 percent said tipping is now expected in more places than five years ago. That is a mood, not an argument.

The woman holding the tablet has the argument. She made it knowing it would cost her money.

In July 2025, Congress passed a tax break: work a tipped job, subtract up to $25,000 of your tips from your taxable income, every year through 2028. In the 22 percent bracket, that is about $5,500 back in your pocket.

Which meant somebody had to decide which jobs are tipped jobs. Treasury and the IRS took 300-plus comments, held a hearing on October 23, 2025, and on April 13, 2026 published the answer: a closed list of 71 occupations, each with a code, numbered 101 through 810.

Bagel baker is 110. Wedding officiant and funeral celebrant share 505. Tattoo artist, 609. Golf caddie, 701. Gas pump attendant was added at the last minute and got 810.

Closed means closed. If your job is not on the list, your tips are just income, taxed like any paycheck.

Code 703 is recreational and tour pilots: the hot air balloon operator, the skydiving pilot. Then, inside 703, a sentence somebody sat down and wrote on purpose. Excludes regional, national, and international airline pilots.

Search all 71 for flight attendant. Not there. The shuttle driver who drove that passenger to the terminal is (803). The bellhop who took her bag at the curb is (301).

The government drew a border, and it runs straight through the airplane.

A tip pays someone for doing what you asked. The waiter brings the food. The valet fetches the car. You want, they deliver, you settle up. The money moves the same direction as the request.

A flight attendant's job runs backward. Her job is to tell you no.

IATA, the airline trade body, collected 93,107 incident reports from more than 140 airlines and published the tally in June. The most common problem on airplanes worldwide is not rudeness or drunks. It is passengers not doing what the crew told them.

There is a clock on it. Before an airplane may carry a single passenger, the manufacturer has to prove everyone aboard can get out in 90 seconds with half the exits blocked. Ninety seconds is about how long you brush your teeth. It works only if strangers do as they are told, immediately, in the dark, and leave the bag.

Which is why the job is licensed. Since December 11, 2004, it has been illegal to work as a flight attendant on a U.S. airline without a certificate from the FAA. It is a wallet card. It arrives by mail in 10 to 14 days. It belongs to her, not the airline, the way your driver's license is yours and not your employer's.

The tip screen asks the person licensed to overrule you to hope, quietly, that you liked her.

Sara Nelson runs the flight attendants' union, 50,000 crew at 20 airlines. When Frontier started letting attendants keep the tips off their own sales in January 2019, she answered in two sentences. Flight attendants are certified for safety, health, and security work. Safety is not variable, therefore base compensation for a safety job cannot be variable.

Here is why she was willing to leave the money on the table.

Sixty cents a soda. To clear $100 in a month, she needs 167 passengers to buy one and tip on it, every single one. Now set that beside what United's crew just won: a 31 percent raise. For an attendant on $60,000 — an illustration, not a real case — that is $18,600 more a year. About $1,550 a month, a mortgage payment in much of the country, and it lands whether anybody buys a soda or not.

To match it on the screen she would have to sell, and be tipped on, 31,000 sodas a year. Eighty-five a day. Every day. No days off.

And because she is not on Treasury's list, her sixty cents is taxed like a paycheck. The shuttle driver deducts his.

Flight attendants historically weren't paid until the airplane door shut. All that time you spend wedging your bag into the bin while she helps: unpaid. Delta broke that in June 2022; American followed in a September 2024 contract worth $4.2 billion.

Then on May 12, 2026, nine weeks ago, United's 30,000 flight attendants ratified by 82 percent: a 31 percent raise, boarding pay worth another 7 to 8 percent, and $741 million in back pay, roughly $24,700 a head. Their first raise in six years.

All three airlines forbid tipping outright.

Frontier has had the screen since fall 2015. Its flight attendants voted 99.6 percent to authorize a strike in September 2024. Their pay was still unsettled at the bargaining table in mid-June.

Every airline handed the same bill reached for the same tool. None reached for the screen.

The junior crew pay first. A former Frontier attendant told The Points Guy the policy split the cabin: senior attendants drew a decent salary, newer hires had come in at a rate low enough that they needed every cent, and under the old pooled system refusing a tip pulled money out of a colleague's pocket.

You pay second. Not sixty cents. You pay by becoming the part of the payroll that can be skipped.

Everyone at the muffin counter pays third, and blind, because their version has no license and no 90 seconds, so nobody can see the trade.

The woman who worked that Frontier cabin for three years found her own answer, one row at a time. She would ring up the water, hand over the tablet, and let the screen do its work on nobody.

"I used to pretend that I took tips but I would swipe to the next page and refuse the tip."

Feedback, thoughts, suggestions? Hit the reply!

Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company, home of Massif & Kroo. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine, writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation.

Connect: mikewildes.com | Email: [email protected]