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 the official list of every job in America where tipping counts, and the flight attendant is not on it.

The reason why is the clearest answer anyone has given to the argument you keep having at the coffee counter.

Frontier hands out no free drinks, so if you want a soda you buy one, and the flight attendant turns a tablet around to face you. The screen offers to add fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five percent. A can of ginger ale costs $2.99, so the three buttons read forty-five cents, sixty cents, and seventy-five cents.

Nobody has ever gone home angry about sixty cents. Something about that screen makes people furious anyway, and almost nobody can explain what it is.

Pew asked 11,945 Americans about tipping and 72 percent said it is expected in more places now than five years ago. That is a widely shared feeling, and a feeling is not an argument.

The people who hold those tablets made the argument, and they made it knowing it would cost them money.

Congress passed a tax break in July 2025: work a tipped job and you can subtract as much as $25,000 of your tips from your taxable income every year through 2028. For someone in the 22 percent bracket, that is about $5,500 a year back in her pocket.

That meant somebody had to decide what counts as a tipped job. Treasury and the IRS collected more than 300 public comments, held a hearing in October, and published the answer on April 13, 2026: a list of 71 occupations, each with its own number, running from 101 to 810.

Reading it is a small pleasure. Bagel baker is 110. Wedding officiants and funeral celebrants share 505. The tattoo artist is 609 and the golf caddie is 701. Gas pump attendant was added at the last minute and took 810.

The list is closed, which is the part that matters. If your job is not on it, your tips are ordinary income, taxed like any paycheck.

Code 703 covers recreational and tour pilots, meaning the hot air balloon operator and the pilot who flies the skydivers up. Someone then wrote a line inside 703 excluding regional, national, and international airline pilots from it.

Look for the flight attendant anywhere in those 71 occupations and you will not find him or her. The driver of the shuttle that brought their passengers to the terminal is there at 803. The bellhop who took their bags at the curb is there at 301.

The government drew a border through the airport, and they landed on the far side of it.

A tip is what you pay someone for doing what you asked. The waiter brings the food you ordered and the valet brings back the car you handed over. You wanted something, they produced it, you settled up afterward, and the money travelled in the same direction as the request.

A flight attendant's work runs the other way. They are there to tell you no.

IATA, the trade body airlines file their incident reports with, collected 93,107 of them from more than 140 carriers and published the tally in June. The most common problem on airplanes anywhere in the world is not drunkenness or rudeness. It is passengers refusing to do what the crew has told them to do.

A clock runs underneath all of it. Before an airplane is allowed to carry a single passenger, the manufacturer has to prove that everyone aboard can get out of it in ninety seconds with half the exits blocked. Ninety seconds is about as long as you spend brushing your teeth, and it only works if a few hundred strangers do exactly as they are told, immediately, in the dark, and leave their bags behind.

That is why the job requires a license. Since December 11, 2004, it has been illegal to work as a flight attendant on an American airline without a certificate from the FAA. It is a wallet card that arrives in the mail ten to fourteen days after training ends, and it belongs to her rather than to her employer, the same way your driver's license belongs to you and not to your boss.

So the screen prices the one thing she cannot afford to sell. It gives the woman licensed to overrule you a financial reason to want your approval.

Sara Nelson runs the union representing 50,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines. In January 2019, when Frontier began letting its crews keep the tips from their own sales, she answered in two sentences that nobody has improved on since. Flight attendants are certified for safety, health, and security work. Safety is not variable, and base compensation for a safety job therefore cannot be variable either.

The arithmetic explains why she was willing to leave the money on the table.

Start with sixty cents a soda. To clear a hundred dollars in a month, a flight attendant needs 167 passengers to buy one and tip on it, every single one of them. Set that beside what United's flight attendants ratified on May 12 of this year: base pay up 31 percent, boarding pay worth another seven to eight percent, and $741 million in back-pay checks, roughly $24,700 a head.

For an attendant earning $60,000, an illustration rather than a real case, that raise runs $18,600 a year, or about $1,550 a month, which is a mortgage payment in most of the country and arrives whether anybody buys a soda or not.

To earn the same money off the screen, she would have to sell 31,000 sodas a year and be tipped on all of them, which works out to eighty-five a day with no days off.

Then the tax code takes its cut. Because she is not on Treasury's list, her sixty cents is taxed like wages. The shuttle driver deducts his.

United's was the first raise its crews had seen in six years, and it was not an outlier. For most of the history of the job, flight attendants were not paid until the airplane door closed, so all the time you spend wedging your bag into the overhead bin while she helps you was unpaid labor.

Delta ended that in June 2022 and American followed with a September 2024 contract worth $4.2 billion. All three of those airlines forbid tipping outright.

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

Every airline handed the same bill reached for the same instrument, and none of them reached for the screen.

The junior crew pay first. A former Frontier attendant told The Points Guy that the tipping policy split her cabin in half: the senior attendants drew a decent salary and did not need the money, while the newer hires had come in at a rate low enough that they needed every cent. Under the old pooled system, refusing a tip took money out of a colleague's pocket, which meant refusing was never free.

You pay second, and not in sixty-cent increments. You pay by becoming the part of the payroll that can be skipped.

Everyone at the muffin counter pays third, and pays blind, because their version of the transaction has no license and no ninety-second clock, so nobody in that line can see what is being traded away.

The woman who worked that Frontier cabin for three years had already found her answer, one row at a time. She would ring up the bottle of water, turn the tablet around, 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]