No, never, regardless of whether the employer takes a tip credit. This page walks through the federal rule on its own, separately from the back-of-house/tip-credit question, because the two get treated as one rule constantly and they are not.
Servers and bartenders front-of-house, dishwashers back-of-house and correctly left out of the pool, one shift manager wrongly included, with a $5.12 tip credit taken over four weeks:
| Role | Category | In pool? | Eligible? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Servers (6 × 30 hrs/wk) | Front-of-house | Yes | Eligible |
| Bartenders (2 × 25 hrs/wk) | Front-of-house | Yes | Eligible |
| Dishwashers (2 × 35 hrs/wk) | Back-of-house | No | n/a -- correctly excluded |
| Shift manager (1 × 40 hrs/wk) | Manager/supervisor | Yes | Not eligible |
One manager in the pool is the only violation here -- the dishwashers were correctly left out, so this roster passes the back-of-house test and fails only the manager test. Change any figure and the amount changes with it; run your own roster on the calculator to see your own exposure.
No, never, regardless of whether the employer takes a tip credit. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018 amended the FLSA (29 U.S.C. 203(m)) to say an employer may not keep tips received by its employees for any purpose, including allowing managers or supervisors to keep any portion of them. That is a flat prohibition, not a version of the older customarily-and-regularly-receive-tips test -- it applies whether or not the employer takes a tip credit, which is the detail the back-of-house rule depends on and this one does not.
No. The rule turns on whether the role is classified as a manager or supervisor, not on how many hours that person spends bussing tables, running food, or serving on a busy Saturday. The manager helped on the floor, so it's fine is the single most common way this rule gets broken, because it sounds like the customarily-and-regularly-tipped logic that governs everything else about tip-pool eligibility, and this rule does not use that logic at all.
On the worked example below, servers and bartenders correctly pooled, dishwashers correctly excluded, one shift manager wrongly included, a $5.12 tip credit taken, the front-of-house hours actually pooled are 230 a week. Because a tip credit is taken and the pool has a violation, DOL and the courts that have ruled on this treat the tip credit as forfeited for every front-of-house employee it was taken against: $1,177.60 a week, $4,710.40 across four weeks. That number does not depend on how large a share of tips the manager personally took -- the violation alone forfeits the credit.
No -- they are two independent tests, and confusing them is what this calculator exists to catch. The manager prohibition is flat: never eligible, tip-credit status irrelevant. The back-of-house rule is conditional: cooks and dishwashers are eligible only when the employer takes no tip credit at all. A pool can pass one test and fail the other, and this page is about the one that never bends.