Imagine a guest checks your July menu and sees a $18 burger. They order two, add a couple of beers, and expect a $52 check plus tax and a tip they choose. Instead the bill arrives at $61.20: a 4% "operations charge" and a separate $2 delivery-platform-style service line you added for dine-in, neither of which appeared next to the burger price. Under Florida's new SB 606, that is no longer a judgment call. Starting July 1, 2026, that check is noncompliant — and the fix touches your menu, your website, your POS receipt layout, and your chart of accounts.
Florida calls the fix its "operations charge" transparency rule. It does not ban service charges, auto-gratuities, delivery fees, or card surcharges. It bans hiding them. If you run a public food service establishment in Florida and you add any mandatory fee on top of food and beverage, you now have a specific, font-size-level duty to show it before the guest pays and to break it out again after they pay.
What SB 606 Actually Changed
SB 606 is Senate Bill 606 (2025), signed as Chapter 2025-113. Most of the bill — new rules for removing guests from public lodging and food service establishments — took effect July 1, 2025. The operations-charge provisions were deliberately delayed one year. The legislature amended Florida Statutes section 509.214, and that section becomes enforceable July 1, 2026.
The core move is definitional. Before SB 606, section 509.214 covered only an "automatic gratuity or service charge included in the price of the meal." SB 606 replaces that narrow language with a new term, "operations charge", defined as:
An automatic fee or charge, other than a government-imposed tax, that a customer is required to pay in addition to the cost of the food and beverage purchased. The term includes, but is not limited to, service charges, automatic gratuities, credit card surcharges, and delivery fees.
Two companion definitions were also added for clarity:
- "Gratuity" or "tip" means a sum presented by a customer as a gift or contribution in recognition of service, where payment and amount are at the customer's discretion.
- An operations charge is, by contrast, mandatory. If the guest cannot decline it, it is not a tip — even if you call it a tip.
That distinction drives both disclosure and bookkeeping. A voluntary tip is the guest's money passing through you to staff. An operations charge is your revenue (or your reimbursement for a cost you chose to pass on), even if you later distribute some of it.
The bill also contains two limiting clauses restaurants should note:
- No private cause of action is created under section 509.214 itself. A guest cannot sue you under 509.214 alone for a missing disclosure.
- Fixed-price exceptions: the rule does not apply to a dining plan, package, or fixed-price meal where the total price is disclosed before purchase (think a $55 prix fixe or a bundled catering package with a stated all-in price).
Neither clause is a free pass. Before SB 606, hidden mandatory fees were already potentially actionable under Florida's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (FDUTPA), Fla. Stat. § 501.201 et seq. What changes is evidentiary leverage: FDUTPA asks whether a reasonable consumer would be deceived; SB 606 now gives regulators and plaintiffs a bright-line checklist — font size, placement, line-item separation — to show you did or did not meet it.
Where You Must Disclose — and How
SB 606 is prescriptive about where and how the notice appears. Three surfaces matter before payment, and two matter at and after payment.
1. Menus, Contracts, and Online Ordering
Every public food service establishment that imposes an operations charge must include notice on each applicable surface:
- Food menu — where prices are listed
- Written contract — for banquet, catering, and event services
- Website or mobile application where food and beverage orders are placed — including your own site, a QR-code ordering page, and third-party marketplace listings you control
The notice must state both the amount or percentage of the charge and its purpose. "3% service charge" alone is insufficient if the purpose is not stated. "3% operations charge to offset rising labor and benefits costs, distinct from a gratuity" satisfies both prongs.
Font rule: the notice must appear in a font equal to or greater than the font used for menu item descriptions or the general provisions of the written contract. A footnote in 6-point gray type beneath a menu printed in 10-point black fails. A clearly readable line adjacent to prices, in the same size and weight as the dish descriptions, passes. The same logic applies to contracts — not tucked into an exhibit, but in the body where fees are described.
No-menu fallback: if you do not provide menus, table service, or written contracts (common for counter-service, food halls, and ghost kitchens), the notice must appear in an obvious and clearly readable manner on the menu board or on a sign by the register where the customer pays.
Online, the timing matters as much as the placement. The disclosure must appear before checkout, not added silently on the final screen. Delivery and third-party apps have been the largest source of junk-fee complaints, and SB 606 targets that pattern directly: the fee must be shown where the guest builds the order, not injected at payment.
2. The Bill Presented to the Customer
In addition to the pre-purchase notice, there must be a notice on the face of the bill provided to the customer that an operations charge is included, and the notice must clearly state the percentage or amount. This is the paper or screen bill the server presents or the register displays before payment — not just the post-payment receipt.
3. The Receipt
Each copy of the receipt the customer receives must contain separate lines for:
- gratuity (voluntary tip)
- operations charge
- sales tax
If the operations charge itself includes an automatic gratuity component, that component must be separately stated on the receipt. A single "fees & tips" line that nets them together is noncompliant, even if the pre-purchase disclosure was correct.
That three-line separation is not just a disclosure nicety. It determines how you book the transaction.
Why the Receipt Layout Changes Your Books
When every fee was buried in a single total, many POS systems posted a single revenue line and a single tax line. SB 606 forces a breakout that mirrors how the accounting should have worked all along.
Operations charge vs. tip vs. tax — different accounts, different tax treatment
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Voluntary gratuity / tip: not your revenue. Record it as a liability (Tips Payable) when collected, then relieve the liability when distributed to staff. Tips are not subject to sales tax and are not revenue for sales-tax or income-tax purposes, though they are wages for payroll reporting once distributed.
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Automatic gratuity that is mandatory: Florida and the IRS both treat this as a service charge, not a tip, regardless of label. The IRS has held since Rev. Rul. 2012-18 that any charge the customer cannot avoid is a service charge — i.e., employer revenue that becomes wages only when you pay it out. For sales tax, a mandatory service charge tied to the sale of food is generally part of the taxable sales price in Florida, while a truly voluntary tip is not. SB 606's separate-line receipt makes this visible; your POS must not reclassify a mandatory auto-gratuity as a tip behind the scenes.
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Operations charge (non-gratuity portion): this is revenue — often a separate revenue account like "Service Charges" or "Operations Fees" so you can track margin on the underlying food versus fees. For a typical 3% operations charge on $10,000 of food sales, that is $300 of additional revenue, not a reduction of a cost.
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Credit card surcharge: if you surcharge card payments, the surcharge is also gross revenue (you charged the guest more), offset by the merchant discount fees you pay the processor (an expense). Do not net the surcharge against processing fees; show both gross. Florida caps card surcharges at the cost of acceptance, and Visa/Mastercard network rules add their own disclosure and percentage caps — SB 606's disclosure is additive, not a substitute.
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Delivery fee: same principle — delivery-fee income is revenue, distinct from food sales, important for delivery-channel profitability analysis. If a third-party marketplace collects the fee, reconcile it as gross marketplace sales minus marketplace fees, not as a single net deposit.
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Sales tax: must be its own line. In Florida, sales tax is generally computed on the sales price including mandatory charges. Burying a mandatory charge inside a tax-included total understates taxable sales and invites audit adjustments.
A simple posting example
A $100 food sale with a 4% operations charge ($4), a $6 voluntary tip, and 7% sales tax on the taxable amount ($104 × 0.07 = $7.28):
- Gross food sales: $100.00
- Operations charge revenue: $4.00
- Sales tax payable: $7.28
- Tips payable: $6.00
- Total collected: $117.28
If your POS nets everything into "Sales $110.28 + Tax $7.00," you have misstated taxable sales, hidden a revenue stream you may need to explain to a lender, and lost the ability to report service-charge wage expense correctly.
The Most Expensive Mistakes to Avoid
1. Disclosing once but not everywhere. A correct menu disclosure with no matching website or QR-code disclosure still violates section 509.214(2). Audit every surface where a price appears: printed menus, menu boards, table tents, catering contracts, your website, your ordering app, and each third-party marketplace menu you can edit.
2. Using a footnote font the inspector needs a magnifier to read. The "equal to or greater than menu description font" test is objective. If your menu descriptions are 11-point, your operations-charge line cannot be 8-point. Apply the same standard to digital menus.
3. Calling a mandatory charge a "gratuity" and posting it as tip income. That mislabels revenue as a pass-through, understates sales, and creates payroll reporting errors. If the guest must pay it, book it as operations-charge revenue first, then as wage expense when distributed — with proper withholding.
4. Netting marketplace payout. A $1,000 DoorDash payout that reflects $1,250 in guest-paid food and fees minus $250 in commissions is not $1,000 in sales. Book $1,250 gross sales/fees and $250 commission expense, then reconcile the $1,000 cash. Netting hides the 20% commission rate that determines whether the channel is profitable.
5. Forgetting the bill vs. receipt distinction. SB 606 requires notice on both the bill presented before payment and the receipt after payment, with the receipt carrying three separate lines. Updating only the receipt template leaves the bill noncompliant.
6. Assuming the fixed-price exception covers an a la carte check. A $65 prix fixe disclosed up front is exempt. An a la carte check where you add 18% for parties of 6+ is not — that 18% is an operations charge that must be disclosed per the rule.
A Compliance Checklist You Can Run This Week
Use this as a single-owner operator's punch list; larger groups should run it per location because menus and POS templates often drift.
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Inventory every mandatory fee you charge today: auto-gratuity for large parties, general operations or service charge, kitchen appreciation fee, delivery fee, card surcharge, event service fee, catering staff charge. For each, note amount/percentage and business purpose in one sentence.
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Map each fee to its statutory term. If it is required and added to food/beverage, it is an operations charge under 509.214(1)(b), even if your menu calls it something else. Voluntary tips stay outside the term.
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Rewrite the disclosure sentence to include both amount and purpose, e.g.: "A 3.5% operations charge is added to all checks to offset increased operating costs. This charge is not a gratuity and is retained by the restaurant."
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Update every pre-purchase surface to that sentence in compliant font size: reprint or re-typeset menus; amend catering contract templates; edit website, QR, and app ordering pages; push corrected menus to each third-party marketplace and screenshot the result.
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Update the bill and receipt templates in your POS. Create three distinct receipt lines (tip / operations charge / sales tax) and, if the operations charge includes an auto-gratuity, a fourth sub-line for that component. Test with a live-fire $10 transaction and keep the test receipt.
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Retrain service and counter staff to explain the fee consistently: mandatory vs. voluntary, what it funds, that it is not a tip. Inconsistent verbal explanations undermine a written disclosure that is otherwise compliant.
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Fix the chart of accounts. Create separate revenue accounts for food, beverage, and operations charges; create Tips Payable and Service-Charge Wages Payable liability/expense accounts; map POS tender categories so auto-gratuity does not post to tips payable.
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Validate monthly. Reconcile POS gross sales + operations charges to bank deposits net of processor fees and marketplace commissions; verify sales-tax payable equals taxable sales (including mandatory charges) times rate; spot-check two receipts per week for three-line separation.
How This Connects to Bigger Fee Transparency Trends
Florida is not moving alone. The Federal Trade Commission's pending rulemaking on junk fees, California's SB 478 "honest pricing" law that took effect in 2024, and a wave of state delivery-fee caps (including the New York City third-party commission litigation that has drawn national attention) all push the same principle: the price the consumer sees when deciding to buy must include mandatory charges. SB 606 is Florida's restaurant-specific implementation of that principle, with an unusually concrete POS and receipt mandate.
Expect platform enforcement to tighten in parallel. Third-party ordering services already face consumer-protection scrutiny over drip pricing; a Florida receipt that breaks out operations charges cleanly makes marketplace reconciliation easier and gives you a paper trail if a platform's checkout display does not match yours.
Keep Your Menu, Your POS, and Your Books Aligned
SB 606 rewards operators who treat disclosure as a systems problem, not a wording problem. The operators who will sail through a July spot-check are the ones who made one edit everywhere — same sentence, same font logic, same three-line receipt, same revenue accounts — and saved a dated screenshot and a test receipt to prove it.
That discipline pays beyond compliance. When operations charges, tips, and tax each have their own line and their own account, you can answer the questions that actually run the business: what would margin be without the service charge, which channels bear the highest fees, and whether an auto-gratuity is funding wages the way you intended.
Simplify Your Financial Management
As you update menus, POS templates, and disclosure language for SB 606, it is the ideal moment to clean up the accounting underneath — separate revenue lines, proper tip-versus-wage handling, and monthly reconciliation of marketplace and processor payouts. Beancount.io gives you plain-text accounting that is transparent, version-controlled, and AI-ready, so every fee, tax, and deposit maps to an account you control. Explore the docs to see how version-controlled ledgers work, or try the Fava dashboard for a clear view of revenue by channel. Get started for free and make fee transparency a habit your books keep automatically.