Topic · 10 guides
Profit & loss
Prime cost, break-even, labor trade-offs, and reading a restaurant P&L line by line.
Guides in this topic
- Profit & loss
Restaurant employee turnover: what the BLS rate means for your budget
Understand the 2025 BLS turnover figures, calculate departures against your own headcount, and budget replacement hiring without mixing rates or costs.
· 5 min read - Profit & loss
Restaurant failure rates: what the BLS survival data actually shows
Read the BLS survival figures through March 2025, distinguish restaurant risk from sector data, and test the sales your own operating budget needs.
· 5 min read - Profit & loss
Restaurant Wages by Metro: Cooks, Dishwashers and Servers
Compare BLS hourly pay for restaurant cooks, dishwashers and servers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, then turn your own wage assumptions into a weekly budget.
· 5 min read - Profit & loss
New York Minimum Wage 2027 for Restaurants: The Freeze, Tipped Rates and the March Proposal
New York's minimum wage stays $17.00 downstate and $16.00 upstate on January 1, 2027. Tipped rates, tip-credit rules, overtime and what the proposed March increase would cost.
· 6 min read - Profit & loss
Restaurant Break-Even Analysis: Covers per Day, the Fixed Part of Labor and the Delivery Mix
Sort a month's costs into fixed and variable, find break-even sales and covers per day, and correct for what simple break-even math misses: the minimum crew, delivery commission and loan principal.
· 5 min read - Profit & loss
RevPASH: How to Calculate Revenue per Available Seat Hour, Hour by Hour
Calculate RevPASH correctly by the hour, split it into occupancy and spend, and see what Cornell's restaurant revenue research found about table mix, meal length and pricing by time.
· 6 min read - Profit & loss
Restaurant Labor Cost Percentage: What to Include and How to Calculate It
Calculate restaurant labor cost percentage with the right inclusions — payroll taxes, tips, service charges, benefits — using 2026 federal and New York figures and published benchmarks.
· 7 min read - Profit & loss
Prime Cost Explained
What prime cost includes, how to calculate it weekly, where the 65% rule of thumb comes from, and how to derive the ceiling your own P&L allows.
· 4 min read - Profit & loss
My Restaurant Isn't Making Money. Where Do I Look?
A structured walk down the restaurant P&L to find where the profit is going: profit versus cash, the line that is out of range, and each fix sized in monthly dollars before you pull it.
· 6 min read - Profit & loss
The Restaurant P&L, Line by Line (For Owner-Operators)
A restaurant profit and loss statement explained line by line: a worked month, what each line includes, the owner pay, interest and depreciation below it, and the national medians to read it against.
· 6 min read
Terms these guides define
- Labor cost percentage
- Total labour cost divided by sales — the other half of prime cost, and the half that's usually larger.
- Break-even point
- The sales volume at which total revenue exactly covers total cost — the number below which you are paying to open.
- Fixed vs. variable cost
- Fixed costs don't move with sales; variable costs do. Most restaurant labour is neither, and that's where planning goes wrong.
- RevPASH
- Revenue per available seat-hour — the metric that combines how full you are with how much each guest spends.
- Seat turnover
- How many times a seat is occupied by a new party during a service period.
- Prime cost
- Total cost of goods sold plus total labor cost — the two numbers that decide whether a restaurant survives.
- COGS (cost of goods sold)
- The cost of the food and beverage actually consumed in a period, computed from inventory rather than from purchases.
- Average check
- Total sales divided by covers — the single most leveraged number in a restaurant's revenue line.
- Covers
- The number of guests served in a period — the denominator behind average check, labour per cover and cost per cover.