Sales per labour hour (SPLH): formula, rota maths and UK benchmarks

Sales per labour hour (SPLH) is your net sales divided by the hours your team worked in the same period. It tells you how much money each hour of staff time brought in. If you took £18,000 last week and the team worked 420 hours, your SPLH was £42.86.

You'll find it one of the most useful numbers when you build a rota, because it's measured in hours, and hours are what you schedule. This page covers the formula, what counts as a sale and what counts as an hour in the UK, a worked week split by session, how to turn a target into rota hours, how SPLH connects to labour cost percentage, covers per labour hour, and what the published benchmarks are worth.

Sales per labour hour at a glance

• SPLH = net sales ÷ labour hours worked, for the same period.
• Use sales without VAT, service charge, tips and discounts.
• Use the hours on your clock-in system, minus unpaid breaks.
• Work it out by session as well as by week. A good week can hide a bad Monday lunch.
• Rota hours = forecast net sales ÷ target SPLH. Then check the result against the minimum crew you need to run safely.
• Labour cost % = average hourly labour cost ÷ SPLH × 100. So you can work out the SPLH you need from your pay rates.
• We found no official UK SPLH benchmark. The ranges online come from software companies and consultants, so treat them as opinion.

The formula

Formula: SPLH = net sales ÷ labour hours worked.

Both numbers must cover the same period. That can be one shift, one day, one week or one month. The Mindpera KPI library defines it as "net sales excluding VAT divided by the total staff hours actually worked", and that's the version this page uses.

It's measured in pounds per hour. A higher number means each hour of staff time brought in more money. It doesn't tell you whether that money was profitable, whether guests were happy or whether the team was stretched too thin. You need the other restaurant KPIs for that.

Take a coffee shop, and take VAT out first. Three staff work a four-hour morning shift and take £1,500 at the till, all standard-rated. Net sales are £1,500 ÷ 1.2 = £1,250. Labour hours are 3 × 4 = 12. SPLH is £1,250 ÷ 12 = £104.17.

In the afternoon the same three people take £750, which is £625 net. SPLH is £625 ÷ 12 = £52.08. The team and the hours are the same, and the output per hour has halved. SPLH is built to show that pattern.

What counts as a sale

Use net sales. In the UK that means taking three things out of your till total.

Take VAT out

Under HMRC VAT Notice 709/1, food and drink eaten on your premises is standard-rated, and so is hot takeaway food. At the 20% standard rate, net sales are standard-rated takings ÷ 1.2. Cold takeaway food is often zero-rated, so if you sell it, add those takings separately rather than dividing them by 1.2. The current rates are on GOV.UK's VAT rates page.

This matters most when you compare yourself with someone else's figure. A US SPLH figure has sales tax outside the price. A UK figure on gross takings has 20% VAT inside it, so it looks 20% better than the same business measured on net sales.

Take service charge and tips out

Service charge isn't your sales. VAT Notice 709/1 says "if you make a service charge, it's standard-rated", but since 1 October 2024 the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 has required employers in England, Wales and Scotland to pass tips and service charges to workers. The statutory code of practice tells employers to "Pass on all tips and service charges to workers without deductions". If you count it as sales, a 12.5% service charge inflates your SPLH by 12.5% on every table that pays it, and the money isn't yours.

Take discounts and comps out

Use the price the guest paid. If your till reports sales before discounts, a busy voucher week will look more productive than it was.

Delivery and takeaway

Delivery app orders bring in sales without front-of-house hours, so they lift SPLH. That's fine as long as you know it's happening. If delivery is a big share of your sales, work out SPLH with and without it, and look at delivery margin on its own, because the app's commission comes out after SPLH has counted the sale.

What counts as a labour hour

Decide this once, write it down, and don't let anyone change it in month three without telling you. Two sites with the same trade can report very different SPLH just by counting hours differently.

• Use clocked hours from your time and attendance system. Mindpera's advice is to "Take hours from time and attendance, not the planned rota, including overtime and excluding leave and sickness."
• Take unpaid breaks out. Adult workers have the right to a 20-minute rest break if they work more than six hours a day, according to GOV.UK's rest breaks guide. Under regulation 12(4) of the Working Time Regulations 1998, a young worker who works more than four and a half hours is entitled to at least 30 minutes. If those breaks are unpaid, nobody is working, so they aren't labour hours.
• Include salaried managers' hours if they work shifts. Leaving them out makes a site run by a working manager look better than one with an extra supervisor on the rota. If you can't track salaried hours, use their contracted hours and say so.
• Include agency and casual staff. Their hours produce the sales just like anyone else's.
• Include kitchen porters, cleaners and prep hours in the total, and split the figure by team if you want to see where hours go.
• Leave holiday and sickness out of hours worked. They belong in labour cost, because you pay for them, but nobody was producing sales.

Splitting by team helps. Front of house SPLH and kitchen SPLH answer different questions. Front of house hours can be added or cut as bookings change. Kitchen hours include prep that happens before service, so they don't fall as quickly when a session is quiet. The kitchen team, front of house team and bar team pages cover how those teams are usually organised.

A worked week, split by session

This worked example uses made-up numbers for a 60-cover restaurant open six days for lunch and dinner and Sunday all day. It's a separate example from the £24,000, 520-hour week on the restaurant KPIs page, so the two sets of figures won't match.

The weekly figure of £42.86 looks reasonable. The split shows where the hours are going. Weekday lunches and Sunday bring in under £31 for each hour worked, while weekend dinners bring in more than £53.

Sunday and weekday lunch are where to look first, before you touch the busy sessions. Questions worth asking:

• Is the crew bigger than the trade needs, or is it the minimum you can open with safely?
• Do people start too early for a lunch that doesn't fill until 12:30?
• Is prep for the evening being done on lunch hours? If so, those hours belong to dinner.
• Would a shorter Sunday, or a different menu, bring more covers per hour worked?

Your end of shift report is a good place to capture covers and hours by session, so you're not rebuilding them from the till and the rota at the end of the week.

Turning a target into rota hours

The formula works backwards too.

Formula: rota hours = forecast net sales ÷ target SPLH.

Say next week you forecast £18,000 of net sales and want an SPLH of £45. That's £18,000 ÷ £45 = 400 hours, which is 20 fewer than last week.

Now apply it session by session, using each session's own forecast. For Sunday, £1,600 ÷ £45 = 35.6 hours. But if your safe minimum for Sunday is two chefs, a kitchen porter and three front of house staff for seven hours each, that's 42 hours. You can't go below it, so Sunday stays at 42 hours and the shortfall has to come from somewhere else or you accept a lower target that day.

That's the most important limit on SPLH targets. Every site has a minimum crew: enough people to cook, serve, wash up and handle an emergency, and to give everyone their breaks. Work out your minimum for each session first, then use SPLH to decide the hours above that floor.

A few other limits apply to the rota itself:

• Daily rest: regulation 10 gives adult workers 11 consecutive hours' rest in each 24-hour period, and young workers 12. A close followed by an open breaks that.
• Weekly rest: the same guide gives workers "an uninterrupted 24 hours without any work each week" or 48 hours each fortnight.
• Weekly hours: regulation 4 of the Working Time Regulations limits average working time to 48 hours a week, unless the worker has opted out in writing.

A forecast is only as good as your sales history. Record sales and covers by session every day, and your forecast for a wet Tuesday in March will be based on real wet Tuesdays.

How SPLH connects to labour cost percentage

Labour cost percentage and SPLH are the same information seen from two sides.

Formula: labour cost % = average labour cost per hour worked ÷ SPLH × 100.

That follows because labour cost is cost per hour × hours, and net sales are SPLH × hours. The hours cancel out. Turned around:

Formula: SPLH you need = average labour cost per hour worked ÷ target labour cost %.

So once you know what an hour of labour costs you in full, you can work out the SPLH that hits your labour target.

What an hour of labour costs

An hour of labour costs more than the hourly rate. This worked example is for one employee aged 21 or over on the National Living Wage, working 30 hours a week. The rates are from GOV.UK and apply from April 2026; the method is ours, and it simplifies a few things.

That's £484.07 ÷ 30 hours = £16.14 for every hour worked, against a pay rate of £12.71.

The holiday line works the same way as GOV.UK's 12.07% figure for irregular-hours workers: 5.6 weeks of leave ÷ 46.4 working weeks is 12.07%. For people on regular hours the leave is taken rather than accrued, but the cost per worked hour comes out the same.

The simplifications: the example ignores the Employment Allowance, assumes the pension scheme uses qualifying earnings, ignores overtime and assumes the worker takes all their holiday. Your payroll will give you the real figure. Use the full cost per worked hour, blended across everyone on your rota, including managers.

From cost per hour to SPLH

At £16.14 an hour:

• A 30% labour target needs an SPLH of £16.14 ÷ 0.30 = £53.80.
• The worked week above, at £42.86, gives labour cost of £16.14 ÷ £42.86 × 100 = 37.7%.

That's why a site paying mostly entry-level rates can still have a high labour percentage. The sales per hour drive it more than the pay rate does. The restaurant prime cost page shows how labour and food cost add up, and the restaurant KPIs page shows where labour cost % sits in a weekly review.

For a UK reference point, the UKHospitality and Christie & Co Benchmarking Report 2022 found payroll costs fell "1.2ppts to 28.3%" of turnover, and says that was partly because operators used the furlough scheme. So 28.3% is a figure from an unusual period, measured on payroll rather than your full labour cost, and it's an average across the businesses that answered. At £16.14 an hour, 28.3% would need an SPLH of about £57.

Covers per labour hour

Covers per labour hour (CPLH) swaps sales for covers.

Formula: CPLH = covers served ÷ labour hours worked.

In the worked week, 1,200 covers over 420 hours is 2.86 covers per labour hour. It's a steadier measure than SPLH, because it doesn't move when prices or the drinks mix change. A price rise lifts SPLH without anyone working faster, but CPLH stays where it was.

Use them together:

• SPLH up, CPLH flat: you're taking more per guest. Check spend per head.
• CPLH up, SPLH flat: the team is serving more people, but each one is spending less.
• Both down: more hours for the same trade. Look at the rota first.

There's a related measure for seats rather than staff. RevPASH, revenue per available seat-hour, was set out by Sheryl Kimes in a 2004 Cornell Center for Hospitality Research report. It measures how hard your seats work, where SPLH measures how hard your hours work.

UK benchmarks and where online targets come from

We found no official UK benchmark for sales per labour hour. The figures below are what we found, and where each comes from.

Official statistics

The Office for National Statistics publishes output per hour for accommodation and food services as an index, with 2023 = 100. It was 97.9 in 2024 and 93.8 in 2025, and 97.0 in the first quarter of 2026 (release dated 18 August 2026). That's output (gross value added), not sales, and it includes hotels, so it can't be turned into a pounds-per-hour target. It does show that across the sector, output per hour worked fell between 2023 and 2025.

Accountants' index

Moore Kingston Smith added Revenue per Labour Hour to its monthly Hospitality Sector Index in September 2026. The data comes from WMT Troncmaster Services, which it says manages tronc for "circa 400 hospitality businesses". It reports changes, not levels. For fine dining in August 2026 it says "Revenue increased by 10.25% compared with August 2025 whilst labour hours declined by 3.42%, resulting in a 14.16% improvement in Revenue per Labour Hour". Useful as a direction of travel, but it gives you nothing to compare your own figure against.

Software companies and consultants (opinion)

• S4labour's Labour Efficiency Playbook gives a "UK benchmark: £35–£55 typical | Above £55 is strong | Below £30 needs urgent attention". It doesn't say where the range comes from. The same document reports its own client programme across 118 sites, where average SPLH went from £41.17 to £46.38. That's real data, but it's one software company's customers.
• WorkSchedule.uk says "Small independents typically run £30–£45 SPLH; strong food-led operators £50–£70; QSR chains £70+", with no source given.
• Ops Hospitality says "There is no universal good sales per labour hour because every restaurant model is different", and recommends building your own baseline by session.

US and Australian figures

US figures are in dollars and exclude sales tax, and US pay rules are different, so they don't transfer. One US article, Restaurant Bottom Line, gives two different full-service ranges on the same page: "120 to 180" dollars in its summary and "$35 to $50" further down. That's a good reason to check where any range comes from before you set a target from it.

Skai Solutions, an Australian firm, shows a better method. It takes an official labour cost ratio and the award pay rate, and works out the SPLH needed, calling it "our arithmetic on published figures rather than a published benchmark". That's the same calculation as the "What an hour really costs" section above, with UK rates swapped in.

What to use instead

Set your target from your own numbers. You know your blended cost per hour and the labour percentage your budget can carry; a published range doesn't. Then compare each session with the same session in previous weeks. So Monday lunch goes against earlier Monday lunches.

How to improve sales per labour hour

There are two ways to move the number: more sales in the same hours, or the same sales in fewer hours. Cutting hours shows up in next week's figures. Selling more takes training and menu changes, so it's slower to show.

Fit the hours to the trade

• Stagger start times so people arrive as the room fills.
• Move prep to the quietest part of the day, and record it against the session it's for. Written SOPs make prep quicker for whoever picks it up.
• Use your session split to find the weakest hours, then change one thing at a time and watch the next four weeks.
• Use a short pre-shift huddle to agree sections and breaks, so you're not carrying an extra person "just in case".
• Hand over cleanly between shifts with a shift handover, so the late team doesn't start by redoing the early team's checks.

Sell more in the same hours

• Train the team on the menu. Staff who know the dishes can suggest a starter or a side without a script. The restaurant training and kitchen training pages cover how to set this up, and a training sign-off record shows who has done it.
• Look at the menu itself. A dish that takes a long time to cook and sells cheaply drags SPLH down in the kitchen. Menu engineering helps you find those dishes.
• Turn tables at the right pace. If guests wait for the bill, that seat isn't earning and the server is standing still.

Keep people longer

Every new starter needs training hours before they're fully productive, and those hours count in SPLH. Lower labour turnover means fewer of them. The onboarding page covers getting new starters up to speed, and staff flight risk covers spotting people who are about to leave.

Common mistakes

Using gross takings overstates SPLH. With 20% VAT and a 12.5% service charge on every bill, gross takings make SPLH look 35% higher than it is (1.2 × 1.125 = 1.35).

Using rota hours instead of clocked hours misses the people who stayed late or started early. The rota shows what you planned, and the clock shows what you paid for.

Leaving managers out flatters the site. If the general manager works the floor, their hours produced sales.

Looking only at the week can hide two sessions that lose money every week.

Cutting below the safe minimum is the riskiest. Running one chef and no kitchen porter to hit an SPLH target puts food safety, the team and the guests at risk.

Comparing with US figures mixes different currency, taxes and pay rules.

Changing the definition breaks the trend. If agency hours go in one month and not the next, the trend means nothing.

Your weekly SPLH worksheet

Copy this into a spreadsheet. Fill in the inputs each week; the outputs are formulas.

Inputs

Outputs

Add a column for last week and the same week last year next to each output. A change in SPLH means more when you can see whether sales or hours moved.

How often to check it

• Daily: hours and sales by session, from the end of shift report.
• Weekly: SPLH by session and team, cost per hour and labour %, and the rota for next week.
• Monthly: the trend, your target, and the minimum crew for each session. Bring it to the manager meeting. Our restaurant management tips cover the other weekly checks.

Frequently asked questions

How do you calculate sales per labour hour?

Divide net sales by the hours your team worked in the same period. For example, £18,000 of net sales over 420 hours worked is £42.86 per labour hour.

Should sales per labour hour include VAT?

No. Take VAT, service charge and tips out first. In the UK, VAT is inside the menu price, so gross takings would make your SPLH look 20% higher than it is.

What is a good sales per labour hour in the UK?

We found no official UK benchmark. Software companies quote ranges such as £35 to £55, but without saying where they come from. Work out the SPLH you need from your own cost per hour and labour target: at £16.14 an hour and a 30% target, that's £53.80.

Do you include managers' hours?

Yes, if they work shifts. Use their clocked or contracted hours, and keep the same rule every week.

What's the difference between SPLH and covers per labour hour?

SPLH measures sales per hour worked, so it rises when prices or spend per head rise. Covers per labour hour measures guests served per hour worked, so it only rises when the team serves more people in the same time.