Think fast: you’re invited to a birthday dinner – do you expect to pay for your own meal? This question – who should foot the bill for a birthday dinner – has absolutely blown up on social media.
The way Tinx sees it, if the guest of honor chooses the restaurant where they’ll be celebrating, they should expect to cover the tab for their invitees. “If I invite a group of people somewhere to celebrate me, that’s my treat because I organized it and I’m asking them to come,” the podcast host and content creator said in a TikTok shared on Feb. 1. Others vehemently disagree: the person celebrating their big day should never have to break out their wallet, even for their own meal.
Thomas P. Farley, also known as Mister Manners, believes the debate around this issue stems from the fact that there are many different ways of celebrating a birthday, “each with its own protocol when it comes to who picks up the tab,” he says.
What are these different scenarios – and how can you have a fun celebration without worrying about hurting your guests’ feelings (or busting their wallets)? Let’s dig in.
Scenario 1: Your Birthday, Your Bill
Elena Murzello, a 43-year-old from Vancouver, Canada, swears by Tinx’s rule: if you’re the one doing the planning and inviting, you should cover the costs. For celebratory events, she’s planned intimate dinners and large fetes. For her largest bash, her 30th birthday party, she rented out the Vancouver Aquarium, hired a DJ, and served her 80 guests dessert.
Murzello says paying for her own celebrations is so important to her because she’s aware of the way additional costs can add up when someone RSVPs “yes” to an event. “Ubers can be pricey, as well as a babysitter. This year, I had a couple extend their stay in the city to attend, so they paid for another night at a hotel. If the guest wants to bring me a gift – which is never expected – that can add up, too,” she says. “I want everyone to enjoy the time spent and not have to worry that their attendance is going to break the bank.”
Key to alleviating her guests’ stress is being up-front about what the party will entail and which costs the guests, should they attend, would be responsible for. “I add on the invite what I am covering – for example: dumplings are on me, drinks are on you,” says Murzello, who sends out these details in a message to her guests a week before the event.
According to etiquette experts, Murzello’s approach is almost always the right one. “If I’m hosting you for dinner at my house, I don’t ask you to pay for groceries,” says Daniel Post Senning, the great-great grandson of Emily Post and a co-author of “Emily Post’s Etiquette.” “If I’ve issued a specific invitation to a specific thing, I would expect to pick up the bill.”
Farley agrees: if you are choosing the venue and handling all of the arrangements, “it is far more typical – and appropriate – for the birthday person to pick up the tab for the occasion,” he says. To make it clear to your guests that this will be the case, he suggests including language on the invitation along the lines of: “Please come as my guest for a celebration of my birthday, to be held at [a specific] location.”
La Carmina, a 30-something travel host and blogger, says she’s super appreciative when guests’ cost expectations are made transparent from the outset. “My friends have always been upfront about what is covered or not, so I’m not surprised by any unexpected costs,” she says. “For example, it’s made clear that I should pay for anything I order at a restaurant, or if the party is catered and I should simply come.”
“If anything is vague, I don’t hesitate to ask.”
For example, for an upcoming party, her friend said they would order food for the guests but asked everyone to bring their own beverage and a snack. They then added what they were bringing to a shared spreadsheet to avoid duplicates. “If anything is vague, I don’t hesitate to ask,” says La Carmina.
Scenario 2: You’re the Guest of Honor, Not the Host
In some friend groups, splitting the bill and covering the guest of honor is a given. Bella Graham, a 30-something from Beverly Hills, CA, says that when attending a single female friend’s birthday dinner, she and her girlfriends will always cover their own dinners and jointly split the birthday girl’s bill. “I would never let a woman friend pay for her own B-day dinner,” she says.
Graham says she’s never paid for her own birthday dinner, either. “It’s not anything that I explicitly request, but because of the norms and shared expectations amongst my friend group, it always works out that way,” she explains. “Either my girlfriends will jointly split my bill, or my date will cover my bill.”
She does, however, bring “little gifts” to distribute to her friends at her own birthday celebrations. “I’ve become known for giving out long-stemmed roses and handmade thank-you cards,” says Graham. “I’ll also usually bring a cake and a bottle of my favorite champagne and just pay the corkage fee. The most rewarding aspect of a birthday is having those that I love and respect genuinely show up for me.”
Graham acknowledges that this “what goes around, comes around” approach only works because it’s understood and accepted by her closest friends – and drama has definitely occurred during birthday dinners thrown by people outside of her main social circle. “When you’re dining with people that you don’t know, it’s hard to control the outcome,” she says. “I was invited to a birthday dinner once where guests were expected to split the bill and cover the birthday girl’s dinner – which I was fine with – but an argument broke out when a couple of guests objected.”
Senning concedes that, sometimes, it’s just not in the budget for you to cover the bill for yourself and everyone you want to celebrate with, even if you might want to. To avoid an awkward squabble when the bill arrives like the one Graham experienced, it’s clutch to establish those expectations in advance. “Under no circumstances should the birthday person spring a surprise bill on their friends,” says Farley.
Instead, Farley suggests you include the cost of the event when you extend the invite to your friends in order to make clear that attendance comes with a price tag. For instance, you could say: “Would anyone be interested in going skydiving next month? It’s my birthday, and I think it would be a fun way to mark the milestone. Tickets are $300 each. I know it’s a bit steep, but if you are game to join, it would be great to experience it with as many of you as possible.”
Or, Senning suggests taking a more collaborative approach to planning your celebration. You might send out a group text or email saying: “I’d love to organize a way for us all to get together – anybody have ideas? Was thinking about such and such. What do people think about that?” When you allow the planning process to be a discussion, your guests are given the opportunity to share any restrictions around budget, location, or timing they might have.
Check, Please
As a host or a guest, knowing exactly how to navigate birthday dinner bill etiquette can be stressful. That’s why, ultimately, everyone would do well to communicate and be as explicit as possible about the expectations. “Awkward as these situations can be, they can usually be clarified – and upset feelings avoided – with good pre-party communication and planning,” says Farley.
If you feel in the dark about whether or not you’ll be expected to chip in, Senning suggests making a “very traditional etiquette” move: asking outright when you RSVP. “If there’s ever a question in your mind about what the expectation is, who’s going to pay, how this is going to be covered, talking about it ahead of time is always preferable,” he says. “The RSVP is the natural time to bring up any of those questions.”
“Those conversations can feel difficult because we have reasonable expectations of privacy around things like finances and family,” says Senning. “But it’s also true that having those discussions in an open, candid, honest, forthright manner is important . . . If you would love to go, but you’re not sure if you can [afford to], it’s OK to say that.”
And remember, if you are an invitee, it’s up to you whether or not you decide to attend, says Farley. “No guest should go into debt because pride disallows them from admitting a chosen venue is too expensive for them to afford,” he says.
Ultimately, it’s important to remember what a birthday dinner really is all about. “It’s a party – it should be fun,” says Murzello. “Do not feel pressure to cover something or overextend your budget because you are worried how it will look for one day or night. It’s not worth the stress.”
Maressa Brown is a journalist, author, and astrologer. Her areas of expertise include writing, reporting, and editing lifestyle, pop culture, and parenting content that’s both conversational and substantive. In addition to contributing to POPSUGAR, she writes for a variety of consumer-facing publications including InStyle, Parents, and Shape, and was previously an editor at Cosmopolitan and CafeMom.
