The doorman earns his tips. He holds the door, signs for the packages, hails the cab, and greets every resident by name. But a property runs on a lot of people the average resident never lays eyes on. The porter finishes the lobby before most residents are awake. The handyman is behind a wall fixing a riser. The maintenance crew keeps the heat and hot water going, and the night staff covers the hours when nobody is watching. You cannot hand an envelope to someone you never see.
The standard NYC holiday tipping guides bake this bias right in. CityRealty and other guides put the superintendent at $150 to $300 and the doorman at $75 to $200, then lump porters, handymen, and maintenance together near the bottom at roughly $25 to $75. The people doing the least visible work are the ones the guides tell you to pay the least, assuming residents remember them at all.
It works like a football team. Everyone tips the quarterback, and nobody tips the offensive line, even though the line is the reason the quarterback has time to throw. In a building, the doorman is the face and the back-of-house crew is the line. Right now only one of them gets tipped at the holidays.
Those guides describe what people should do. What they actually do is worse.
In a 2024 roundup of Upper West Side tippers, the pattern repeated down the list: $300 to the super, $100 to the doormen, $50 to the porters. The visible roles pulled multiples of what the back-of-house crew got, nearly every time.
The wider climate is not helping. Bankrate’s 2025 survey found the share of Americans who tip fell across nearly every service category compared with the year before. Fewer people are reaching for their wallets at all, and the staff who were already last in line feel it first.
Then there is the cash problem. Tipping still runs on cash in an envelope, and cash keeps shrinking as a share of how people pay: 31% of payments in 2016, down to 13% by 2025, according to the Federal Reserve. Small everyday purchases moved to cards and phones years ago. So the resident who means well but never has bills on hand, and won’t make a special trip to the ATM, ends up tipping no one. That friction hits the whole staff, and it hits the people who depend on being remembered the hardest.
A resident skipping the porter looks like a resident problem. It is a retention problem, and retention is your job.
The front desk collects the goodwill, and the back of the house comes up short. Residents will not fix that on their own, because most of them have no idea it exists. They tip the person who says good morning and assume the building handles the rest.
That same porter had a line worth pinning above your desk: “The same people who would say hello to me in the morning every day, now they just ignore me.” Feeling invisible during the one week of the year that is supposed to be about appreciation is exactly how you lose good people. And these are not easy roles to backfill. In New York, building service workers are 32BJ union members, around 31,000 of them across the city’s apartment buildings, earning into the $40s an hour under their union contract. Nationally, the median building cleaner earns about $36,000 a year. An experienced super or handyman who knows the building’s quirks is worth far more than that and much harder to replace than a friendly face at the front desk.
When recognition only reaches the people residents happen to see, the people they do not see start looking for properties where the work gets noticed. You feel that in March, when the good handyman gives his notice.
The fix is to stop letting a tip depend on whether a resident happens to cross paths with someone in the lobby. TippingLink, BuildingLink’s tipping product, does that in two ways.
The first is eligible-staff setup. You build the roster of everyone who keeps the building running and mark them all as eligible to receive tips, so the night porter and the handyman are as reachable as the doorman. Residents tip from their phone by credit card or bank transfer, so there is no cash to carry and no envelope to remember. Property staff receive 100% of their tips, with a small TippingLink fee shown at checkout before the resident pays.
The second is tip pooling. If your building already shares tips a certain way, pooling matches it instead of forcing a new system on the staff. You can send a single payout to the property and split it through your own payroll, set a fixed percentage for each staff member that adds up to 100%, or run a hybrid of the two. You can even run a pool and individual tipping side by side. In pool mode, staff does not see individual amounts, and management is not shown individual tip details.
Put those together and recognition follows the org chart instead of the sightline. Everyone who makes the building work is on the list, and the handyman behind the wall gets remembered the same as the doorman at the door. Staff can even send a resident a thank-you note through TippingLink after a tip, which turns a one-time envelope into an actual relationship.
There is an operational payoff for you, too. No cash to collect or hand out, no envelopes stacking up at the front desk, and none of the December logistics of making sure the holiday cash reaches the people it was meant for. The messiest part of the season stops being your problem.
The holidays are the biggest tipping moment of the year, and every piece of this takes lead time. Staff verify their bank through Plaid during setup, so there is no waiting on micro-deposits. Residents need a little runway to get comfortable tipping from their phones. And you want the full roster in the system before the first cold week of December, not during it.
Buildings that want TippingLink working for the holidays should set it up over the summer. When you are ready, you can generate a staff list to share with residents, holiday-themed if you like, so nobody on the team gets left off.
To get it running before the holiday rush, connect with a member of our team for a TippingLink demo.