Check your prime cost before rent takes the rest.
Prime cost — food plus labour — is the one number that decides whether a restaurant is structurally profitable. Under 60% of sales and you have room to breathe. Over 65% and no amount of marketing saves the month.
One month of sales and costs
Use a normal month. Labour includes both the hourly crew you schedule and the salaried payroll that does not flex with volume.
Use one month of sales, before tax and before third-party commission.
$19,200 of food cost this month
Quick service usually runs 28–33%; full service 30–35%.
Blended hourly wage across kitchen and front of house, including burden.
$24,941 of hourly labour per month
Total scheduled hours across all hourly staff in a normal week.
Managers, chefs and owner salary — the payroll that does not flex with volume.
60% is the classic target. Under 55% is excellent; over 65% leaves almost nothing for rent.
83.6%
Danger — there is almost nothing left to cover rent and overhead.
Food 32.0% · Labour 51.6%
$14,141 over your target
Prime cost = (food cost + total labour) ÷ sales
What is left for rent and profit
Prime cost
$50,141
83.6% of $60,000 in sales
Total labour
$30,941
51.6% of sales, including salaries
Left after prime cost
$9,859
Covers rent, utilities, marketing and profit
Sales needed to hit target
$83,568
Or cut $14,141 of cost
Your cost split vs. your target
Each bar is 100% of sales. The remaining slice is what is available for rent, overhead and profit.
Sales fix prime cost faster than cuts
Salaried payroll and much of your scheduled labour do not move with volume, so extra sales land almost entirely on the good side of the ledger. $83,568 in monthly sales would put you at 60% with no other changes.
Menu mix beats across-the-board price hikes
Shifting orders toward your high-margin items lowers food cost percentage without raising a single price. Test a price change with the price impact calculator before you commit.
More free tools
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What one customer is worth, and what you can spend to get one.
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The conversion rate your ads need to pay for themselves.
How much volume can you lose after raising prices and still break even?
How many new orders a promo needs to pay for itself.
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Where distance turns a delivery order into a loss.
Whether your rewards program earns back what it gives away.
Watch word-of-mouth spread through households — and where it stalls.
Work backwards from the profit you want to the orders and crew it needs.
Grow sales without growing labour
Online orders flow straight to the kitchen with no phone time and no order-taking labour. See how MenuLogic lifts sales on the same schedule.
Book a free demoThese numbers are estimates based on what you enter and what we see across independent restaurants. They are not a guarantee of performance.
