Free tools · labour
Labour is usually the second largest line in a hospitality P&L and the one most often measured wrong, because the gross pay on the rota is not what the hours actually cost. Put your week in below and the calculator adds employer's National Insurance, pension and holiday accrual, then shows the percentage and your sales per labour hour.
The calculator
Nothing is sent anywhere — the maths runs in your browser and we never see what you type. Every field starts at a deliberately ordinary default rather than a flattering one.
Before you quote the figure at anyone
01
Employer's NI only applies above a threshold, pension only to enrolled staff on qualifying earnings, and holiday accrual depends on your contracts. Twenty per cent is a reasonable planning figure for an hourly-paid hospitality team, not your actual rate. Ask payroll for the real one and type it in.
02
Two sites can run identical labour percentages and feel completely different on a Saturday night. The percentage tells you what you spent; it says nothing about whether the hours were in the right place, which is a question for your hourly sales pattern.
03
Advertising, agency fees, manager hours spent hiring and paid induction hours are all labour spend that never shows up in this percentage. On a site with high turnover that is a material amount of money — the staff turnover cost calculator estimates it.
Questions
Getting a number you don’t recognise from your own accounts is usually worth a conversation rather than another spreadsheet.
Divide your total labour cost for a period by net, ex-VAT sales for the same period and multiply by 100. Total labour cost means gross pay plus employer on-costs — National Insurance, pension contributions and accrued holiday pay — not just the figure on the rota.
Wet-led pubs commonly run in the mid-twenties, food-led restaurants in the low thirties, and hotels vary enormously by department. Those ranges are conventions, not targets. What matters is whether your labour percentage plus your cost of sales leaves enough to cover rent, rates, utilities and finance at the volume you actually trade.
Yes. Those are costs of employing the person and they are paid by the business, so leaving them out understates the real figure by roughly a fifth. A site budgeting 28% on gross pay alone is very likely running at 33% or more once on-costs are counted.
Sales per labour hour is net sales divided by hours worked, so it measures productivity in pounds rather than expressing labour as a share of sales. It is the more useful number when trading is volatile, because it does not flatter a quiet week simply because you cut hours as takings fell.
Most of the available saving is in scheduling and in retention rather than in headcount: rotas built to the hourly sales curve instead of to shift blocks, fewer people trapped doing tasks a trained team member could cover, and enough stability that you are not paying to recruit and train the same role three times a year.
WHY Hospitality