The IRS has spoken, and sex work is still on the wrong side of the ledger.
On Friday, the agency released guidance on how to implement the Republicans’ shiny new “no tax on tips” law—part of the sweeping One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is now being spun as a “working families tax cut plan.” The rules confirm what many suspected but some dared to hope against: tips received for prostitution or porn don’t qualify.
“In addition, the proposed regulations provide that amounts received for prostitution services and pornographic activity are not included in the definition of ‘qualified tips,’” the document reads. Translation: if you’re bartending at Applebee’s, your tips are tax-free. If you’re shooting adult content on OnlyFans for a few hundred bucks in tips, the IRS still wants its cut.
The exclusion closes a speculative loophole that had OnlyFans creators wondering whether their tip jars might get a reprieve. After all, the bill’s language seemed broad—“online creators” were name-dropped. Twitch streamers and podcasters made the list, and a whole roster of workers got a nod: waiters, maids, nannies, tattoo artists, golf caddies, plumbers. Even non-radio DJs are in. Pornographers are out.
It’s not hard to see the subtext. Porn has always been treated as an untouchable shadow economy, even when it’s raking in billions and providing safer, digital alternatives to street-based sex work. Lawmakers can tolerate tattoos and caddying, but the minute bodies are naked and explicit, the moral panic kicks in. The IRS, by spelling it out, isn’t just clarifying rules—it’s codifying stigma.
The irony is that OnlyFans has been one of the most successful creator economies of the last five years. In 2023, its creators earned more than $6 billion. The model is as straightforward as it is lucrative: fans tip directly, creators pocket most of it, and the middleman is little more than a server farm. But instead of rewarding efficiency, Washington is reinforcing a hierarchy of whose labor counts as “real” and whose doesn’t.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Big Beautiful Bill is a greatest-hits package of GOP tax cut priorities. The cap on state and local tax deductions, set at $10,000 in Trump’s 2017 tax law, has been raised to $40,000—but only for five years. Overtime pay is now tax-free, fulfilling one of Trump’s campaign promises. Corporations scored permanent goodies: immediate deductions for R&D, full expensing for machinery, restored interest deductibility.
Blue-collar bartenders get relief on tips; white-collar companies get to write off labs and lathes. Sex workers? They get moralized into a separate category.
This is how the American tax code works—not as a neutral calculator, but as a cultural weapon. It rewards behaviors deemed virtuous (work in service industries, research labs, factories) and penalizes those considered shameful, even if the economics are identical. A dollar tipped is a dollar tipped, unless that dollar was slipped to a porn star.
So when the IRS insists porn tips aren’t “qualified,” what it’s really saying is that some jobs, no matter how much they earn or how many mouths they feed, will never be granted legitimacy. The state would rather sanctify the golf caddie than the cam girl.
And as always, the government gets the last tip.