CashoutGlossary / Back of house (BOH)
Back of house (BOH)
The kitchen side of a restaurant: cooks, dishwashers and prep staff. Under federal law a required tip pool can include them only with no tip credit.
Back of house is the kitchen and the work guests don't see: line and prep cooks, dishwashers, expo and kitchen managers. These jobs usually aren't tipped by customers directly, which drives how tip rules treat them.
- Tip pools. Under federal law, an employer may require servers to share tips with cooks and dishwashers only if every worker in the pool gets a cash wage of at least the full federal minimum wage. If the employer takes a tip credit, the pool is limited to employees who customarily and regularly receive tips.
- Tip allocation. The IRS treats cooks as indirectly tipped employees, and indirectly tipped employees never get allocated tips on Form 8027.
- No Tax on Tips. The IRS list of tipped occupations includes chefs and cooks (code 105), food preparation workers (106) and dishwashers (108). The final rules point out that the list includes jobs like cooks and dishwashers that may not deal with customers, and tips received through a tip pool can be qualified tips.
A common mistake for kitchen staff is not reporting pool money. Tips you get from coworkers are income, and you report them to your employer like any other tips. Once they're reported, they can count toward the No Tax on Tips deduction.
Related terms
Front of house (FOH) · Tip pool · Qualified tips · Treasury Tipped Occupation Code (TTOC) · Service charge
