Is your job a qualified tipped occupation?

The test is what the occupation received, not what you received

An occupation qualifies because it customarily and regularly received tips on or before 31 Dec 2024. That is a fact about the job, fixed at a date in the past, and it does not turn on your employer, your shift, your tenure or how much you were actually tipped last year. A newly created tipping arrangement in a job the list does not cover does not bring that job inside it, and a quiet year in a listed occupation does not push you out.

Being in a listed occupation is the first of four conditions, and the other three are where most claims are lost. The tips have to be properly reported — through the tip box on a W-2, a tip report to your employer, an allocation form, or self-employment income on a return. A married filer has to file a joint return; married filing separately bars the deduction outright. And a self-employed tip earner cannot deduct more than net income from the business the tips came from, which is the limit that catches gig drivers with a thin year. Each of these gates is checked in order by the engine, and the methodology page states the order.

One thing the list does not do is make the money tax-free. A qualified tip still pays Social Security and Medicare tax in full, and most states still tax it. What the list controls is whether the tip can be deducted against federal income tax.

A three-digit code, where the first digit is the category

Every entry carries a Treasury Tipped Occupation Code. It is three digits: the leading digit identifies one of 8 categories and the last two identify the occupation within it, so a code beginning with 1 is always food and drink service and a code beginning with 8 is always transport or delivery. The encoded list holds 71 occupations, all 71 of them qualifying — the list is a whitelist, so there is no “not qualified” row to find and an occupation that is absent is simply absent.

The code is not decoration. For tax year 2026 the employer reports it on the W-2 in new box 14b, up to two codes, with total cash tips in box 12 under code TP and qualified overtime under code TT. That is what lets you check a figure against your own paperwork instead of reconstructing it. For tax year 2025 no such boxes existed, so a 2025 amount reaches you as free text on the W-2 or in a separate employer statement, and reconstructing it from pay stubs is the normal case rather than the exception.

A search that finds nothing is not a ruling that your job is excluded

The search box above is deterministic string matching, not judgement. It scores your query against each occupation's title and against 208 hand-written keywords across the 71 entries, ranks by score, and breaks ties by code. There is no fuzzy model behind it and nothing about it can be trained on what you meant. Type a job title nobody thought to add as a keyword and you get nothing back, whether or not the occupation is on the official list.

The regulation is explicit that the job titles listed under each code are illustrative and not exhaustive, and that an unlisted job fitting a code's description falls within it. So the useful question is not whether this search matched your job title. It is whether your work fits the description of one of the 71 codes. Three practical steps, in order: read the codes in the category your work belongs to rather than searching for your exact title; check what your employer actually reported, because a code on your W-2 settles the question faster than any search; and read the official IRS list itself, which is linked from the sources page, before concluding that your occupation is absent.

Where the answer genuinely is no, it is worth knowing what that costs. Tips earned in an occupation the list does not cover are ordinary taxable income: they are reported as normal, they are taxed as normal, and no part of them is deductible. The other three OBBBA deductions are unaffected — an unlisted occupation has no bearing on overtime, on the senior deduction or on car-loan interest, and a household that loses the tips line may still have three others in range.

Where these titles still differ from the official strings

The count and the code ranges in the table above were reconciled against the published list on 15 Aug 2026, and both matched. Several titles did not. Rows outside the entertainment block still carry this engine's shortened singular forms where the official list uses plurals, which is cosmetic, and two differences go further than that: this file reads 506 as a pet caretaker where the official title covers show animals as well, and 103 as a non-restaurant food server where the official title covers beverages too. In both cases the official wording is wider than what you see here, so read the official entry before ruling yourself out on a title.

One earlier defect is worth stating plainly because it shows what this kind of error looks like. The entertainment block was off by one from code 205 onward, so a W-2 carrying code 205 would have been rendered here under the wrong occupation entirely — correct arithmetic performed against the wrong job. It was corrected and the block realigned. That is why the list is versioned and every change to it is dated, and why the unverified flag above stays on until the titles match the published strings as well as the codes do.