If you live in a building with staff, holiday tipping is not one decision. It is five or seven decisions, made at once, in December, with no clear guidance and a strong suspicion that your neighbours know something you do not. It is also, for most people who face it, the single largest tipping expense of the year.
The published advice does not help as much as it should, because the numbers vary enormously depending on who wrote them. That variation is not sloppiness. It is real, and understanding where it comes from is most of the work.
Why the numbers disagree by a factor of three
General personal-finance guides tend to put a doorman somewhere around $20 to $100. New York real-estate sources routinely say $75 to $200, with supers at $150 to $300 and some residents going well past that. Both sets of numbers are accurate for the buildings their authors have in mind.
Dense doorman-building markets — Manhattan above all, plus parts of Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco — have an established tipping culture with amounts that have been rising for decades and are widely discussed among residents. Most of the country does not. A building with a part-time maintenance person in a mid-sized city is not operating under the same expectations, and applying Manhattan figures there would be strange rather than generous.
So the first question is not "how much" but "which kind of building am I in". If your building has a full-time doorman on multiple shifts, a live-in super and a staff list posted in the lobby every December, you are in the higher range. If it does not, you are not.
Typical ranges by role
The table below shows the range commonly cited in dense doorman markets. Outside those markets, expect figures at the lower end or below.
| Role | Dense-market range | What they actually do for you |
|---|---|---|
| Superintendent / resident manager | $150 – $300+ | The 11pm leak, the contractor access, the thing nobody else can fix |
| Doorman / concierge | $75 – $200 each | Packages, deliveries, visitors, the shift you see daily |
| Porter | $25 – $50 each | Rubbish, common areas, the work you never see happen |
| Handyman / maintenance | $25 – $50 each | Repairs inside your unit |
| Garage attendant | $25 – $75 | If you park there regularly |
Two adjustments apply across every row. Tenure matters — a super who has run the building for a decade is generally tipped more than one who started in spring. And contact matters more than title: the doorman on your usual shift who has signed for two hundred parcels this year is not in the same position as the one you have met twice.
The arithmetic problem, and how to solve it
Here is where people get caught. A building with four doormen, two porters and a super is seven envelopes. At mid-range figures that is comfortably over a thousand dollars, which is not a number most households have set aside for December.
The way out is to decide the total first and divide it afterwards, rather than pricing each person individually and discovering the sum. Set what you can spend. Give the largest share to the super, the next largest to the doormen you actually see, and smaller amounts to everyone else. A defensible split of a smaller budget is better than an indefensible refusal to engage with the arithmetic.
It is also worth knowing that in some buildings staff pool holiday tips and divide them among themselves. Where that is the arrangement, one envelope to the building is the norm and individual envelopes can complicate the split. The super will tell you if you ask, and asking is not rude.
Renters versus owners
Renters often assume holiday tipping is something owners do. It is not — building staff serve everyone in the building, and the expectation applies to whoever lives there. That said, it is common for renters to tip somewhat less than owners in the same building, and nobody finds that surprising.
How to give it
Cash in a card, handed over in person, in the first half of December. Put the person's name on the envelope — staff work shifts, and an unlabelled envelope left at the desk may not reach the person you meant. If you will be away, leave the envelopes with the super or the front desk with names clearly written.
Write something specific in the card. Building staff receive a great many envelopes in December and very few sentences that indicate the giver noticed anything in particular. The sentence is remembered after the amount is spent.
If you tip nothing
Nothing happens, formally. Holiday tips are discretionary and no one is entitled to them. But it is worth being honest that in dense doorman buildings the practice is deeply established, staff do notice, and the relationship is a long one. If money is the constraint, a smaller envelope with a note is the version of this that works. Silence is the version that does not.
Sources
Ranges reflect figures published by New York real-estate and consumer outlets covering the 2025 holiday season, alongside general personal-finance guidance for markets without doorman buildings. These are conventions rather than rules and vary considerably by city, building and tenure.