The Emily Post Institute's holiday tipping guide has a line for your doorman, your superintendent, your handyman, your garage attendant, and your elevator operator.
It has no line for your concierge.
The guides that do name the role won't separate it either. Brick Underground, StreetEasy, and Corcoran all publish holiday tipping guidance for staffed buildings, and all three fold the concierge into a shared "doorman/concierge" row. You get the doorman's number and you're expected to make it work.
On the dollar amount, that's mostly fair. The two roles land in the same range. What it misses is the thing that separates them: the concierge is the one person on staff you've probably already tipped this year without thinking of it as tipping.
That splits the December question in two.
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The Tipping number, and where it comes from
For a full-service building in an expensive metro, published guidance converges on $75 to $200.
Brick Underground puts "doorman/concierge" at $75 to $200, with a broad range of $50 to $400. Corcoran lands on the same $75 to $200. StreetEasy says $100 and up for doorman, concierge, and front desk.
Outside that world, the number drops hard. The Emily Post Institute puts a doorman at $15 to $80, and since it never names the concierge, that's the closest national baseline you have. A 60-unit building in Charlotte with one person at the desk on weekdays is not a 300-unit tower with a 24-hour desk, and the tips shouldn't match.
Before you write anything down, hold two things in mind. All of these figures are recommendations rather than measurements, because nobody surveyed what your neighbors gave. And Emily Post is explicit that its numbers aren't rules, pointing you instead to your budget, how often you use the service, and your relationship with the person.
Our doorman tipping guide breaks out the super, the porters, and maintenance role by role if you want the rest of the staff. What none of these guides tell you is how much of your concierge's tip you've already paid.
You already tipped this person in June
Think about what your concierge did for you this year.
They took a delivery you weren't home for and held it behind the desk until you got back. They let the dog walker up on a Tuesday when you were stuck at the office. They kept an eye out for a contractor and let them into your unit. They held your dry cleaning. When you were traveling, they were the one reading the instructions you left at the desk and quietly doing the thing you asked for.
Some of those moments came with a folded bill.
That's the part the holiday guides don't account for. A doorman's job is largely presence, and presence gets thanked once a year. A concierge's job is favors, and favors get thanked as they happen.
All four guides say this should change your December number. Emily Post puts it plainly: "if you tip at the time of service, you may forego an end of the year tip, or give a more modest holiday thank you." StreetEasy tells readers who tip through the year not to "feel obligated to give a huge holiday tip." Brick Underground says year-round tippers often go "on the lighter side at year's end."
One line in Corcoran's guide draws the split most clearly: "I will tip my super for each of the jobs he does inside of my apartment during the year, but my holiday tip is for thanking him for the running of the building outside of my apartment."
Apply that split to the concierge, and December gets simple.
You tip in the moment, consistently. The favors are already paid for. Your December envelope is thanking them for the other thing: being reliably at that desk for 12 months. Land at the low end of the range, write a real note, and stop feeling weird about it.
You don't tip in the moment. The envelope is carrying the whole year, including the week they babysat your Peloton box behind the desk. Land at the high end, or above it if the favors were substantial.
You can't remember which one you are. You're in the second group. People who tip in the moment know they do it.
That third case is the common one, and it points to the real problem. Cash keeps no record. You can pick a lane in September and still end up in your kitchen in December with no idea what you handed over in March.
What changes when the building runs digital tipping
TippingLink is BuildingLink's digital tipping platform for residential communities. Whether it's turned on depends on your property's settings, so your building may or may not have it. When it's running, the record-keeping problem mostly goes away.
It isn't just a December product. Residents reach the tipping page through the resident portal, the resident app, or a direct URL the property shares. A thank-you in June takes the same few taps as one in December, which is the difference between "I'd tip him for that, but I have no cash on me" and actually doing it.
You can see what you already gave. The checkout page carries a tipping history. That sounds minor until you're trying to remember whether you tipped the desk for the contractor thing in March. The split only works if you can check your own record, and a shoebox of memories isn't a record.
A message goes with it, and one can come back. You can write one message for everyone you're tipping or a personal line for each person. Staff can send a note back through the platform, and your personal email address isn't shared with them. The handwritten card is the part of cash tipping worth keeping, and it survives the switch.
The office isn't reading over your shoulder. Tip information is privacy-protected, and management isn't shown individual tip details. The exception is a shared tip pool, which must be administered by someone.
On the mechanics: building staff receive 100% of their tips. Residents pay a TippingLink fee on top, shown at checkout before you pay, at 3.5% with a $1 minimum per transaction. Paying by credit card adds a 3% credit card fee. Bank transfer (ACH) doesn't add anything on top of the TippingLink fee. Credit card and bank transfer are the two payment methods.
One thing to ask your management office: whether your building runs individual tipping, a shared pool, or both at once. A property can run both, which means you can put something into the pool for the staff as a whole and still send something directly to the person who's been holding your packages since March. In pool mode, staff don't see individual amounts.
All of that depends on the building having it switched on, and that isn't a resident decision.
If you're the one fielding this question
Every November, someone at the management office gets asked what the right number is. The honest answer is that it depends on the building, which is a bad answer to give a resident standing at your desk.
What you can control is whether residents have an easy way to act once they've decided. That's a fall project, not a December one. Staff enrollment, resident awareness, and the building's own communications all need lead time, and a property that starts in the second week of December has already missed the window.
To get it running before the holidays, connect with a member of our team, or see how it works at tippinglink.io.
Frequently asked questions
In a full-service building in an expensive metro, $75 to $200. Brick Underground and Corcoran both land on that range, and StreetEasy puts doorman, concierge, and front desk at $100 and up. Outside major metros the number drops, and the Emily Post Institute's national baseline for a doorman, which is the closest published figure, is $15 to $80.
A building concierge. Everything here covers residential buildings, and the guides cited are written for staffed condo and co-op communities. Hotel concierge tipping runs on different norms and isn't covered here.
That's what the guides advise. Emily Post says that if you tip at the time of service, you can skip the year-end tip or give a more modest one. StreetEasy and Brick Underground both say the same thing in different words.
On amount, not much. The guides that name the concierge list it on the same line as the doorman. What differs is the pattern, since a concierge does discrete favors that tend to get tipped as they happen, so more of the year's total arrives outside December.
Give at the higher end of the range and write a note. The tip is covering a full year of favors rather than topping up what you already gave.
The guides don't treat it that way. Brick Underground calls Venmo and Zelle "fast, convenient, and contactless," and StreetEasy describes sending tips electronically as increasingly acceptable. If your building has a dedicated tipping platform, that's cleaner for everyone than trading personal payment app handles at the front desk.
