Break-Even Calculator

How many covers a day does your venue need just to stand still? Full fixed and variable cost model for UK pubs, restaurants, cafes, bars and takeaways — VAT handled properly, and nothing hidden behind a signup.

Your figures stay in this browser. Nothing is sent to us unless you download the report.

Give us your venue type, floor area, rateable value and roughly what you take a head, and we will fill in the rest from published UK figures — with the rule behind every one shown, so you can argue with it. Anything you have typed yourself is left alone.

What this actually means

Put in an average spend per cover and your monthly fixed costs, and this paragraph will explain your numbers back to you in plain English.

Only used to pick which published benchmarks you are measured against.

Business rates differ in each nation.

Internal trading area. Used to estimate energy.

Free to look up at gov.uk/find-business-rates.

Seats you can fill in one service.

What you actually average. Drives your margin of safety.

Lunch and dinner is two. All-day trade is one.

Split matters: it decides how much of your cost of goods comes off the food GP and how much off the drink GP.

Hospitality is on the 20% standard rate. The pandemic reduced rates of 5% and 12.5% ended on 31 March 2022 and have not been reinstated. A temporary 5% rate for children's meals eaten in and for family-attraction tickets ran from 25 June 2026 and expired on 1 September 2026; it never applied to adult meals, drink or hot takeaway. Checked 9 September 2026.

Source: HMRC / GOV.UK, VAT rates and temporary reduced rate guidance, 2026

Everything you pay for people in a month, including employer National Insurance, pension and holiday. If your figure is just gross wages it is roughly a fifth light — switch to build it role by role and the tool works the on-costs out for you.

Break-even chart

Revenue climbs with every cover; total costs start at your fixed costs and climb more slowly. Where they cross is break-even. Hover or drag across the chart to read any point.

Where every £1 of net sales goes

Fixed costs, per month, per day, per service

Add your fixed costs above and this fills in.

Which lever actually moves the needle

One change at a time, everything else held still.

Changing your covers cannot move the break-even point — it moves how far above or below it you sit, which is why those two rows show no change in the first difference column.

Your three scenarios side by side

Each scenario is a full, separate set of figures. Differences are measured against Current.

How you compare

Against published UK figures for a restaurant. Every range below is sourced and dated. Where nothing citable exists we say so instead of inventing a number.

Casual dining came out at about 66% across the surveyed P&Ls.

Source: UKHospitality / Christie & Co Benchmarking Report 2022 (2021 P&L data)

Blended wet GP across all drink. Per-category splits for draught, wine and spirits are widely quoted but we found no citable public source for them, so we do not publish them.

Whole survey 28.3%, casual dining 30.9%. The underlying data is 2021, when furlough suppressed labour cost and trading was interrupted, so treat it as a direction rather than a target.

The survey average was 10.0%, with segment averages between 7.6% and 12.2%. Above 15% was described as on the verge of unsustainable.

The published spread: food-led pubs about 1%, casual dining 9.3%, nightclubs 10.5% after rent. The underlying data is 2021, when furlough suppressed labour cost and trading was interrupted, so treat it as a direction rather than a target.

WRAP estimates 18% of food bought by UK hospitality is wasted. WRAP flags this as modelled from 2021 prices rather than directly measured, so treat 18% as a ceiling worth beating, not a target.

Source: WRAP, Food Waste in UK Hospitality and Food Service, July 2025

Standard published in-person rates for UK-issued cards. Non-UK cards and card-not-present transactions cost more; a negotiated interchange-plus deal can cost considerably less.

Source: Square, SumUp and Zettle published UK in-person card rates, 2026

Deliveroo's audited take rate as a share of gross transaction value. It is the only delivery figure we could source to a primary document — the Just Eat and Uber Eats rates quoted around the trade press have no published rate card behind them, so we do not present them as benchmarks.

Source: Deliveroo plc interim results, H1 2024 and H1 2025 (take rate of GTV)

• UKHospitality / Christie & Co Benchmarking Report 2022 (2021 P&L data) — Food and drink gross profit, labour as a share of sales, rent as a share of turnover and net margin. Built from operator profit and loss accounts.
• BBPA Guide to Costs, June 2024 — Pub food gross profit and wet-led versus food-led pub labour percentages.
• WRAP, Food Waste in UK Hospitality and Food Service, July 2025 — Food waste as a share of food purchased by UK hospitality.
• Square, SumUp and Zettle published UK in-person card rates, 2026 — Published in-person card processing rates for UK cards.
• Deliveroo plc interim results, H1 2024 and H1 2025 (take rate of GTV) — Delivery platform take rate as a share of gross transaction value.
• HMRC / GOV.UK, VAT rates and temporary reduced rate guidance, 2026 — The VAT rate applying to hospitality, and the status of the temporary reduced rates.
• GOV.UK, Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027, and The Pensions Regulator auto-enrolment earnings thresholds — Employer NI at 15% above a £417 monthly secondary threshold, and the 3% employer auto-enrolment minimum on qualifying earnings of £520 to £4,189 a month. Used by the staff cost builder.
• GOV.UK, National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates from 1 April 2026 — The statutory hourly floors from 1 April 2026 — £12.71 for 21 and over, £10.85 for 18 to 20, and £8.00 for 16 to 17 and for apprentices — which the staff builder checks every role against.
• HM Treasury, Budget 2025 Retail, Hospitality and Leisure factsheet; GOV.UK small business rate relief; Welsh Government non-domestic rates 2026-27 — The business rates multipliers and reliefs behind the "estimate it for me" button. From April 2026 the temporary 40% RHL relief is replaced by permanently lower RHL multipliers rather than extended.
• CIBSE TM46:2008 energy benchmarks; DESNZ Quarterly Energy Prices, March 2026 — The kWh per square metre per year and the pence per kWh behind the utilities estimate.
• Uber Eats and Just Eat published UK merchant commission rates, 2026 — The delivery commission estimate. Deliveroo publishes no rate card, so we do not quote one.
• Lumina Intelligence, UK Restaurant Consumer Trends 2026 — Average restaurant spend per visit, used only to estimate a starting spend per cover for restaurants. No settled public figure exists for the other venue types.

Take the whole thing away as a PDF

A branded multi-page report with your figures, the break-even chart, the full cost breakdown, the sensitivity table, all three scenarios and the benchmark comparison. The kind of thing a bank or a landlord actually reads.

The calculator itself is free with no signup. Only the PDF asks for an email.

Break-Even for Hospitality, Explained

The formulas, a worked example, and the mistakes that make the answer wrong.

How break-even works in a venue

Every cost in a venue is one of two things. A fixed cost is paid whether you serve nobody or a full house: rent, business rates, insurance, salaries, the accountant, the music licence. A variable cost only happens because someone bought something: the food and drink they consumed, the card fee on the payment, the platform's cut if it came through an app, the packaging it went out in. Break-even is simply the volume at which the money left over from the variable costs finally covers all of the fixed ones.

The money left over is called contribution, and it is the number that matters most in hospitality. If a cover spends £30 net and costs you £9 in food, drink and fees, that cover has contributed £21 towards the rent. Divide the rent — and everything else fixed — by that £21 and you have your break-even in covers.

A worked example, start to finish

A 60-cover neighbourhood restaurant, open six days a week, lunch and dinner — twelve services a week. Average spend is £26 on food and £11 on drink, both inc VAT.

• Strip the VAT. £37 inc VAT ÷ 1.20 = £30.83 net a cover, of which £21.67 is food and £9.17 is drink.
• Work out the goods cost. Food GP 66% means food costs 34% of its net price; drink GP 70% means drink costs 30%. Weighted by the actual split that is about 32.8% of net sales, and a 3% waste allowance takes it to 33.8%.
• Add the other variable costs. A 1.75% card fee on 88% of sales, grossed back up for VAT, is 1.85%. Packaging is 0.5%. Delivery at 27% commission on 8% of sales, grossed up, is 2.59%. Total variable cost is about 38.7%.
• That leaves a 61.3% contribution margin — about £18.90 of every cover goes towards the fixed costs.
• Add the rest of the fixed costs. Rent £3,200, rates £764, utilities £1,400, insurance £250, loans £450, software £180, marketing £300, licences £60, maintenance £250, accountancy £200, other £150.
• Divide. Fixed costs divided by £18.90 of contribution gives the covers a month needed, and dividing that by 52 services gives the covers a service. Hit "Reset to example venue" at the top of this page to see every one of those numbers calculated live, role by role.

The lesson in that example is the staff line. In most UK venues labour is bigger than rent by a wide margin, which is why "cut the rent" is rarely the answer and "get the rota right" almost always is. It is also why the on-costs matter: an operator who budgets on gross wages alone is roughly a fifth light on the single largest number in their business.

Break-even is not cash break-even

This calculator answers the profit question: at what volume do sales cover costs? That is not the same as the cash question, and venues fail on the cash question. Cash break-even is usually a higher number, because the money leaving your account is not the same as the cost in your accounts.

• The capital part of loan and finance repayments — only the interest is a cost, but the whole payment leaves the bank.
• Your own drawings or dividends, if you are not on the payroll.
• VAT and PAYE when they fall due — a quarter's VAT can be a five-figure hit in a single week.
• Stock build: money spent on inventory you have not sold yet.
• Corporation tax on last year's profit.
• Depreciation and amortisation — a real cost, but no cash moves.
• Anything accrued and not yet paid.
• Supplier credit, which delays the cash without changing the cost.

A useful habit: work out your profit break-even here, then add your monthly loan capital, drawings and an average month's VAT and PAYE to the fixed cost box and run it again. The second number is the one that tells you whether you can pay everybody at the end of the month.

Seven ways a break-even comes out wrong

The VAT you take was never yours. Working on gross prices overstates income by a sixth at 20% and is far and away the most common error.

A rota written last Thursday does not shrink because tonight is quiet. Unless you genuinely send people home, it is a fixed cost.

Employer NI, pension and holiday accrual add roughly a fifth to an hourly rate. A £12.71 hour is closer to £16.80 in reality.

Theoretical GP ignores waste, over-portioning, staff food and comps. Your actual GP is what your stocktake says, not what your recipe card says.

Drink usually carries a better margin than food. A venue that shifts from wet to dry trade at the same total spend quietly loses contribution.

Platform commission is charged on the gross order value, VAT included, so a headline 27% is nearer 32% measured against your net sales.

A seasonal venue that breaks even on the annual average still loses money for four months of it. Run January and August separately.

What is break-even for a restaurant or pub?

Break-even is the point where your sales exactly cover all of your costs, so you make neither a profit nor a loss. In hospitality it is usually expressed as covers: the number of customers you have to serve in a day, or in a service, before the venue starts earning rather than just paying its bills. Everything above that line is profit; everything below it comes out of your own pocket.

How do you calculate the break-even point in hospitality?