Here's How Much You Should Be Tipping Your Cab Driver

Ever wonder if you’re tipping your cabbie the right amount? Could you be thinning your wallet with too generous of a tip—or unwittingly stiffing the driver?

A publicly available data set detailing every New York City taxi fare in 2013—that’s almost 100 million cab rides—reveals what a good, and bad, tip looks like.

Last year, 55 percent of taxi trips in New York (about 51 million rides) were paid for with credit cards. The database shows both the metered fare and tip amount that the in-cab computers logged for each of these rides. The data also show the metered fare for the 45 percent of rides paid for with cash. Unsurprisingly, the records for cash tips aren’t as complete, so we set the cash transactions aside and zeroed in on the credit card rides.