Somebody asks this in every shopper group, every week, usually phrased as "is $5 on a $180 order normal or am I crazy."
The honest answer is annoying, so let's get it out of the way. There is no published average. Not from Shipt.
Shipt declines to say
Go look at their own help page on how much to tip. It tells members they can tip at checkout, in cash at the door, or in the app afterward, and that 100% of it goes to the shopper.
It does not suggest an amount. No percentage, no dollar figure, no "most members tip around."
That's a choice, and it explains a lot about the job. The company that sets your base pay has decided not to tell customers what the rest of your pay should look like.
So where do the percentages come from
You've seen 15% to 20% quoted as the standard. Sites like Ridester and a dozen other gig blogs publish that range, and it gets repeated until it sounds official.
It isn't. It's a third party's recommendation, assembled from self-reported numbers and comparisons to restaurant tipping. Same for the per-hour tip averages that float around. No primary source exists because the only entity with the actual data is Shipt, and Shipt isn't publishing it.
Which means when a shopper says the average tip is $X, they're quoting a blog quoting a survey. Including me, if I gave you a number here.
Percentage is the customer's unit and it's the wrong one for you
Here's the deeper problem with the whole question. Percentage is measured against order value, and order value has almost nothing to do with your work.
Two orders from last month.
The small one. $38 basket, 9 items, member 2.5 miles from the store. Base pay $11. Fifteen minutes shopping, six minutes each way, three at the door. Half an hour, five miles round trip. They tipped 20%, which is $7.60. At 76 cents a mile the driving cost $3.80, so I netted $14.80. That's $29.60 an hour.
The big one. $210 basket, 58 items, member 11 miles out. Base pay $18. Seventy minutes shopping because a 58-item list means aisle backtracking and three substitution texts. Nineteen minutes each way, five at the door. An hour and fifty-three minutes, 22 miles round trip. They tipped 10%, which is $21. Driving cost $16.72. Netted $22.28. That's $11.83 an hour.
Read those two again. The customer who tipped $21 looks three times as generous as the one who tipped $7.60. The order paid me less than half as much per hour.
A percentage tells you how a member feels about the total on their receipt. It tells you nothing about item count, aisle chaos, stairs, parking, or the unpaid drive back.
What "good" means from the shopper's side
If you want a working definition, it isn't a percentage. It's whether base plus tip clears your vehicle cost and leaves an hourly rate you'd accept.
Run it once and you'll never unsee it. Take the round trip mileage, multiply by the IRS rate for the period you drove in, and subtract that from base plus tip. Then divide by the real clock: from when you started shopping to when you're back where the next order will come from.
For 2026 that rate was 72.5 cents a mile through June 30 and 76 cents from July 1. The IRS has revised it mid-year before, so check the current figure rather than trusting a number you memorized.
That arithmetic reframes the question. "Is $5 good" becomes "$5 on an eleven mile run is negative, and $5 on a two mile run with $14 base is a fine half hour."
Averages hide the shape
Even your own average will lie to you if you only look at the mean.
Two shoppers both averaging $10 a tip. The first gets $9 to $11 on nearly every order. The second gets $0 half the time and $20 the other half.
Same average. Completely different job. The first one can plan a week. The second one is gambling every time an offer comes in, and the winning orders are subsidising a pile of losses that felt terrible in the moment.
The distribution is the useful thing, and it's per-address. Some doors are reliable elevens. Some are reliable zeros. Lumping them into one number throws away the only information that would have helped you decide.
The number worth knowing
Forget the national average. It doesn't exist, and if it did it wouldn't tell you whether to take the offer currently counting down on your screen.
What's worth knowing is what this address has tipped you before, in dollars, across every visit. That's a number nobody publishes and nobody can, because it's yours. It only exists if you kept it.
Auto Tip Map is an Android app that saves every order, tip, and address automatically, including tips that land hours after delivery, so your own tip history is the number you check instead of a percentage somebody guessed at.