Florida's Operations Charge Law (SB 606) Takes Effect July 1, 2026: How Restaurants Must Disclose Every Service Fee

You add a 3% "operations charge" to keep menu prices stable while covering higher labor and credit card costs. A customer pays, leaves, and posts the receipt online the next morning. Under Florida's new law, that single undisclosed line item — not the amount, but the fact you didn't explain it before the order and break it out on the receipt — can become a deceptive-practice claim with attorney's fees attached.

Florida Senate Bill 606, signed June 2, 2025 and effective July 1, 2026, rewrites Section 509.214 of the Florida Statutes. It doesn't ban service charges, automatic gratuities, or kitchen fees. It does force you to tell customers exactly what you're charging, why, and to prove it on every menu and every receipt. If you run a restaurant, cafe, bar, ghost kitchen, catering operation, or food truck that adds anything mandatory on top of the menu price in Florida, this guide is your compliance checklist — and your bookkeeping playbook.

What Actually Changed: From "Automatic Gratuity" to "Operations Charge"​

The old rule​

For decades, Florida Statute § 509.214 said only one thing: if you include an automatic gratuity or service charge in the price of a meal, you must note it on the food menu and on the face of the bill. That's it. No guidance on font size, placement, online ordering, contracts, purpose, or receipt formatting. Enforcement was uneven, and the most common violation — a fee that appeared only at checkout — lived in a gray area.

The new rule​

SB 606 (Chapter 2025-113) amends § 509.214 to create two distinct legal categories and attaches specific disclosure duties to the second:

"Gratuity" or "tip" remains what customers think it is: a sum presented as a gift in recognition of service, where both the decision to pay and the amount are entirely at the customer's discretion. Suggested tip calculations on a receipt (15%, 18%, 20% with a blank line) are still gratuities, because the customer chooses.

"Operations charge" is the new umbrella term. It means any automatic fee or charge that is mandatory, not at the customer's discretion, and not a government-imposed tax. If the house decides the amount and the customer cannot remove it, it's an operations charge. The statute and the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) guidance treat these as operations charges:

• Automatic gratuity for large parties (e.g., 18% for parties of 6+)
• Service charges, "operations fees," "venue fees," "kitchen fees," "wellness charges"
• Mandatory delivery charges added by the restaurant (not the third-party delivery platform's fee)
• Mandatory credit-card surcharges or "non-cash adjustment" that the restaurant elects to impose
• Banquet, catering, or private-event service charges

What is not an operations charge: sales tax, a voluntary tip the customer fills in, or a fee imposed by a government entity. The distinction matters because an operations charge is business revenue first, not a tip — with payroll, tip-credit, and sales-tax consequences discussed below.

The law still does not prohibit you from charging an operations charge. The change is entirely about transparency: you must disclose it the right way, in the right places, before the customer orders, and itemize it correctly afterward.

The Four Disclosures You Must Get Right​

Think of SB 606 as a before-and-after test. Every mandatory fee must pass both.

1. Disclose before the order — on every surface where prices appear​

You must provide clear and conspicuous notice of each operations charge in all of these places, as applicable to your business:

• Physical menus and menu boards — wherever prices are listed
• Written contracts — catering agreements, banquet event orders, private-dining contracts
• Online ordering platforms — your own website, app, and any third-party marketplace where the customer can place an order before seeing the final bill

A footnote on the back of the menu, a line buried in terms-and-conditions, or a charge that appears only on the final payment screen does not satisfy the statute. DBPR guidance emphasizes "before the customer orders," not before the customer pays. Screenshots of your online checkout flow are now compliance evidence.

2. State the amount and the purpose​

The old law required only that you say an automatic gratuity is included. SB 606 requires you to state:

• The dollar amount or percentage of the charge (e.g., "$2.50", "3%", "18% for parties of 6 or more"), and
• The purpose of the charge — what it is for

"We add a 3% operations charge" is no longer enough. "We add a 3% operations charge to cover increased operating costs" or "A 5% service charge supports back-of-house wages and benefits" satisfies the purpose element. Vague language like "additional fees may apply" fails both prongs.

If you charge more than one mandatory fee, disclose each one separately. A 4% kitchen fee and a 3% credit-card surcharge are two disclosures, not one combined "7% fee."

3. Make it conspicuous — same size, same place​

The disclosure must be:

• Displayed where prices are listed, not on a separate disclosure page
• In a font at least as large as the font used for the price itself
• Contrasting and readable — no light-gray 6-point type under a drink list

Practically, that means directly under or next to each price-bearing menu section, not at the very bottom of a multi-page menu. For digital menus, the notice must appear without requiring the customer to scroll past the order button or click "more info."

4. Itemize it on the receipt — on its own line, separated from tip and tax​

Every bill and receipt must now break out operations charges with precision:

• Each operations charge appears on its own line item, labeled to match the menu disclosure
• The operations charge line is separate from sales tax and separate from the gratuity/tip line
• The receipt must not fold the operations charge into a lump-sum "total" that hides what the customer paid for

A compliant receipt sequence looks like this:

Subtotal (food & beverage)     $100.00
Sales tax (7%)                  $  7.00
Operations charge (3%)          $  3.00
Automatic gratuity (18%, 8-top) $ 18.00   ← if applicable, separate line
Tip (voluntary)               $______     ← blank line customer fills in
Total                         $128.00

An operations charge disguised as a "tip" line, or a single "fees" line that merges kitchen fee + credit-card surcharge, violates the receipt reform.

Why "It's Just Disclosure" Still Hits Your Payroll and Taxes​

The legal label on a fee determines how you must handle the money behind it. SB 606 draws a clean line between tips and operations charges, and that line maps directly onto IRS and wage-and-hour rules most restaurant operators already struggle with.

Automatic gratuity is a wage, not a tip​

The IRS has been consistent since Rev. Rul. 2012-18 and reaffirmed in FS-2017-08: if the customer does not have the choice to determine who receives the payment or how much to pay, the payment is a service charge, not a tip.

Consequences for bookkeeping and payroll:

• It's wages first. An automatic 18% large-party charge is business revenue when collected. When you distribute it to employees, you do so as wages through payroll.
• Withhold correctly. Service-charge distributions are subject to federal income tax withholding and both the employee and employer share of FICA. They are reported in Box 1 of Form W-2 (Wages), not Box 7 (Social Security Tips) or Box 8 (Allocated Tips). You report them on Form 941 as regular wages.
• No tip credit. In Florida, employers may take a tip credit of up to $3.02 against the state minimum wage, but only against voluntary tips. You cannot apply the tip credit to an operations charge or use it to satisfy minimum-wage or overtime obligations through a tip pool. The Eleventh Circuit (which covers Florida) has held that service charges distributed to employees are wages that may be counted toward wage obligations, but they are not tips for tip-pool or tip-credit purposes.
• Overtime math changes. Because service charges are wages, they are generally included in the employee's regular rate of pay for overtime calculations under the FLSA, unlike voluntary tips.
• Not eligible for new tip-tax breaks. The much-discussed federal deduction for tip income does not apply to service-charge wages.

A common mistake: running auto-gratuity through the tip pool as if it were reported tips, taking the tip credit, and reporting it in the tip boxes. That misclassification understates payroll tax and overstates the tip credit — exactly the kind of error a wage audit finds quickly.

Sales tax follows the same logic in Florida​

Florida generally does not impose sales tax on a voluntary, separately stated tip that the customer can adjust or refuse. A mandatory operations charge that the customer cannot avoid is part of the sales price and is subject to sales tax alongside the food and beverage it attaches to. Folding a taxable operations charge into a "gratuity" line does not change its taxability, and during a sales-tax audit the state will recharacterize it.

The catering and delivery wrinkles​

• Catering and banquet service charges that are mandatory are taxable as part of the catering charge. If you separately state a voluntary gratuity for catering staff that the client can adjust, that portion may be excluded — but you must keep the two categories distinct on the contract and invoice.
• Restaurant-imposed delivery charges (your $3 delivery fee, not the marketplace's fee) are operations charges. Third-party delivery platform fees you pass through may also qualify if you make them mandatory rather than optional.

Your SB 606 Compliance Checklist (Do This Before July 1)​

Use this as a working list with your manager, designer, and POS administrator in the same room.

Menus and pricing

1. Inventory every mandatory fee you charge today — large-party auto-gratuity, kitchen fee, service charge, delivery fee, credit-card surcharge. If the customer cannot remove it, list it.
2. For each fee, write a one-sentence purpose statement. Keep it factual: "to offset credit-card processing costs," "to support non-tipped kitchen wages," "to cover packaging and delivery operations."
3. Update every physical menu, table tent, prix fixe sheet, and menu board. Place the disclosure where prices appear, in type at least as large as the price font. Remove vague footnotes.
4. Update every digital surface — your website ordering page, app, Toast/Square/Clover online menu, DoorDash/Uber Eats/Grubhub storefront description — so the disclosure appears before the add-to-cart action, not at payment.

Contracts

5. Amend catering, banquet, and private-event templates to state each operations charge, its amount/percentage, and purpose on the face of the contract. Have the client initial the fee line.

POS and receipts

6. Create distinct POS items or surcharges for each operations charge. Do not reuse the generic "service charge" button for multiple fee types.
7. Configure receipts to print each operations charge on its own labeled line, separate from sales tax and separate from the voluntary tip line. Test a reprint and verify the labels match the menu exactly.
8. Ensure the tip line is clearly voluntary and blank (or zero) by default. Do not pre-fill a tip amount that mimics an operations charge.

Payroll and accounting

9. Map each operations charge in your POS to the correct general-ledger account (see bookkeeping section below). Confirm payroll categorization: service-charge distributions = wages (Box 1, Form 941), not tips.
10. Train front-of-house to answer "Is this a tip?" accurately: "That's a mandatory operations charge that goes to the house and, if distributed, is paid as wages. Any additional tip is voluntary and goes directly to staff." Inconsistent verbal explanations undermine written compliance.

Documentation

11. Save before-and-after photos of every menu, PDFs of contracts, and dated screenshots of every online checkout flow. For delivery platforms you don't control, export your merchant storefront settings showing the disclosure text.
12. Keep an itemized sales report that ties each day's operations-charge collections to the corresponding GL entries and payroll distributions.

What Happens If You Don't Comply​

SB 606 itself is enforced by the DBPR's Division of Hotels and Restaurants as part of routine food-service inspections and complaint investigations. Beyond licensing consequences, the real exposure is under Florida's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (FDUTPA), § 501.201 et seq.

Even before SB 606, an undisclosed mandatory fee could be challenged as a deceptive practice if a reasonable consumer would not expect it or could not discover it before paying. SB 606 upgrades that claim: failing to disclose in the manner the statute requires is now a violation of a specific statutory disclosure mandate, not just a general argument about deception. In practical terms, the business either disclosed the amount, purpose, and placement the way SB 606 requires, or it did not — a much cleaner factual test.

Under FDUTPA, a prevailing consumer can recover actual damages and, critically, reasonable attorney's fees and costs under § 501.2105. Fee-shifting changes the economics of even a small-dollar hidden-fee claim and is why a $4 undisclosed operations charge can support a demand letter that costs far more to defend than the fee itself. The statute does not require proof of intent to deceive — only that the practice was deceptive or unfair.

Separate from state law, the broader enforcement trend is toward "all-in" pricing. The FTC's junk-fee rulemaking and California's and other states' hidden-fee laws all push in the same direction as SB 606: mandatory charges must be disclosed up front. Aligning Florida operations now positions you for multi-state compliance if you operate across state lines or through national delivery platforms.

How to Book an Operations Charge So Your P&L Doesn't Lie​

Disclosure fixes the customer-facing problem. Clean bookkeeping fixes the management and tax problem. Most restaurants that add service charges make the same GL mistake: dumping everything into "Food Sales" or burying it in "Tips Payable," which makes food cost percentage, labor cost, and taxable sales all look wrong.

Set up three separate homes for the money​

In your chart of accounts, create distinct accounts at the same level as your revenue accounts:

• 4005 Operations Charge Revenue — Kitchen / Service / Venue (one sub-account per fee type if you charge more than one)
• 4006 Automatic Gratuity / Service Charge Revenue (if you impose large-party auto-gratuity as an operations charge)
• 2110 Tips Payable — Voluntary Gratuities (liability, not revenue — money you hold for staff)
• 2120 Service Charge Wages Payable (liability for operations-charge amounts you intend to distribute through payroll)

When a check closes, the POS-to-GL posting should be:

Dr  Cash / Card Receivable        128.00
  Cr  Food Sales                          100.00
  Cr  Sales Tax Payable                     7.00
  Cr  Operations Charge Revenue             3.00
  Cr  Auto-Gratuity Revenue                18.00

Nothing from an operations charge touches Tips Payable. Only voluntary amounts the customer writes on the tip line post to Tips Payable. That separation is what lets you reconcile sales tax, payroll, and tips without manual adjustments at month-end.

When you distribute the charge to staff​

If you keep the operations charge as house revenue (for example, a 3% kitchen fee retained to fund back-of-house wages), it stays in Operations Charge Revenue and flows to net income. No payroll entry beyond your normal wage expense.

If you distribute all or part of an operations charge to employees — say, pooling a large-party service charge among servers and cooks — the distribution is wages:

Dr  Service Charge Wages Payable   18.00
Dr  Payroll Tax Expense             1.38  (employer FICA, approx)
  Cr  Cash                                   16.XX
  Cr  Payroll Tax Payable                     2.XX

The gross amount goes through your payroll provider as regular wages, subject to withholding, and appears in Box 1. Do not code it as tip income for purposes of the tip credit or Form 8027 tip reporting.

Reconciliation that catches drift​

At least weekly, reconcile three reports that should tie:

1. POS operations-charge sales report — total collected by fee type
2. Payroll register — service-charge wages paid, by pay period
3. GL detail — Operations Charge Revenue and Service Charge Wages Payable activity

Collected ≠ distributed is normal if you retain a portion, but the difference should be an intentional policy, not an unexplained plug. Unexplained growth in Service Charge Wages Payable usually means a POS mapping error where a voluntary tip is being coded as an operations charge, or vice versa.

Sales-tax reporting​

Report mandatory operations charges in your Florida sales-tax base for the period collected, in the same filing as the food and beverage sales they accompany. If your POS can flag an item as taxable vs. non-taxable, verify that every operations-charge surcharge is flagged taxable. During month-end close, your sales-tax payable roll-forward should footing to: (taxable food + taxable beverages + taxable operations charges) × applicable rate.

What to Do If You Already Charge Fees​

If you currently add any mandatory fee — even a longstanding large-party gratuity — treat SB 606 as a mandatory menu and systems project, not a wording tweak:

1. Audit today's fees this week. Print a day's receipts and ask: would a first-time customer know about every mandatory line before ordering? If a fee appears only on the receipt, it fails the new test, even if customers have "always paid it."
2. Decide whether to keep each fee. Some operators are removing low-value fees entirely and raising menu prices 2-3% instead, finding that transparent pricing reduces disputes and simplifies bookkeeping. If you keep a fee, commit to disclosing it fully — half-disclosure is still a violation.
3. Pilot the new receipt with staff. Run test checks through the POS for dine-in, takeout, catering, and delivery. Verify each operations charge prints on its own labeled line, separate from tip and tax, and that the voluntary tip line remains blank for the customer to complete.
4. Brief your team once, in writing. Distribute a one-page "What we charge and what to say" sheet that lists each fee, amount, purpose, where it's disclosed, and the exact answer to "Is this a tip?" Keep a signed acknowledgment in the employee file.
5. Keep the receipts — literally. Retain menus, contract templates, POS configuration exports, and online screenshots with dates. If a customer later claims a fee was hidden, your dated evidence that the disclosure was in place before the order is your strongest defense.

For delivery specifically, confirm that both your in-store POS and each third-party marketplace show the same disclosure. A fee disclosed on your printed menu but not on your DoorDash storefront is non-compliant for orders placed there.

Simplify Your Financial Management​

As you update menus, reconfigure your POS, and retrain your team for SB 606, there's a natural moment to clean up how you track every mandatory charge behind the scenes. When operations charges, voluntary tips, and sales tax flow into the right GL accounts — and from there cleanly into payroll and tax filings — month-end stops being a reconciliation puzzle and starts being a management tool you can trust.

Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in. Your ledger is version-controlled, auditable, and AI-ready, so a change to your fee structure is a few lines of text, not a migration. Get started for free and see why operators and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.