Coffee shop business plan: free template with real numbers

At 8.10 on a weekday the queue is out of the door, and every minute someone gives up and walks on. A coffee shop lives or dies on its busiest hour.

A coffee shop business plan is a standard business plan built around four numbers: what each drink costs you to make, your average ticket, how many drinks the bar can make at peak, and how many customers a day you need to break even. In our worked example, a shop with $20,000 of fixed costs a month and a $7 average ticket needs about 141 customers a day; a UK café with £14,394 of fixed costs and a £5.40 ticket needs about 157. Borrow the typical SBA start-up loan and a US lender will want to see about 148. Last checked: 4 November 2026.

What goes in a coffee shop business plan?

The sections are the same as for any restaurant: executive summary, company description, market analysis, management, menu, marketing, funding request and financial projections. Our restaurant business plan guide covers each one, plus what US lenders check. For a coffee shop, the financial section carries more weight, because the margins per sale are small and the volume has to arrive in a few hours.

The demand is there. The National Coffee Association's 2026 National Coffee Data Trends specialty report, released in partnership with the Specialty Coffee Association on 27 July 2026, found that 47% of American adults had a specialty coffee in the past day, and that 36% of past-day specialty drinkers had one prepared away from home. In the UK, Allegra World Coffee Portal's Project Café UK 2026 (3 February 2026) valued the UK branded coffee shop market at £6.8bn across 12,313 outlets, 420 more than a year earlier.

None of that tells you how many people will walk through your door. Your market section has to: count footfall at your site at 7.30, 8.30 and 12.30 on two weekdays and a Saturday, and note which shops nearby have queues.

How much does a cup of coffee cost to make?

Work it out per drink, from your own supplier quotes. Here is a 12 oz latte, with the source for each line:

At a $5.50 price, that latte costs about 20% of the price to make. The BLS figures are supermarket retail prices, so treat them as a floor, not as what a specialty roaster charges. The arithmetic: 18 g is 0.0397 lb, and 9 fl oz is 0.0703 of a gallon.

Card fees come on top, per ticket. A common structure is a percentage plus a fixed fee: at 2.6% plus 10 cents, a $5.50 sale costs about 24 cents, or 4.4%. On a small ticket the fixed part hurts most, so check your processor's rate.

Prices are moving in your favour, slowly. The USDA's Food Price Outlook (23 October 2026) put food-away-from-home prices up 3.5% in the year to September 2026, while the BLS retail price of ground coffee rose 2.1%.

For UK owners: we found no free, official UK price series for café coffee or milk, so get quotes in pounds and redo the table. Remember UK prices include VAT. Hot drinks are standard-rated, so a £3.90 latte is £3.25 to you. Our café EPOS guide explains hot and cold takeaway VAT.

How many customers a day does a coffee shop need to break even?

The U.S. Small Business Administration's break-even formula is fixed costs divided by (price minus variable costs). For a coffee shop, the "price" is your average ticket and the answer is tickets a month.

Worked example. A shop open 7am to 3pm, every day. Every figure in the assumptions column is ours, for illustration; replace each one with your own. The UK column is a separate set of UK assumptions, not a currency conversion.

The staff line assumes two people on shift all day plus a third for a three-hour morning peak (19 hours a day). The UK rate is the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over from April 2026. It rises to £13.21 in April 2027, which adds about £319 a month to this shop's costs, or about 104 more tickets a month.

Three things the example shows:

• The ticket matters more than the cup. Drop the US ticket from $7.00 to $6.50 and contribution falls to $4.42, so break-even rises to 151 a day. A pastry with every third coffee does more than shaving a few cents off milk. If you plan a loyalty scheme to bring regulars back, our restaurant loyalty programme guide shows how to cost the rewards.
• Break-even is not a salary. At 141 tickets a day the owner earns nothing. To take $5,000 a month, the US shop needs ($20,000 + $5,000) / $4.76 = 5,252 tickets, or about 175 a day.
• Labour is the biggest line you control. Cutting the third person's peak shift saves money but slows the queue, which costs tickets. The next section shows how to check.

Can your bar keep up at peak?

Customers do not arrive evenly. Assume 40% of the day's tickets come between 7 and 9am. At break-even, that is 56 tickets in two hours, or 28 an hour. If the average ticket includes 1.3 drinks, the bar must make about 36 drinks an hour, one every 100 seconds, for two hours straight.

Time your own workflow before you sign a lease. Make 20 mixed drinks on the machine you plan to buy, with the staff you plan to have, and count. If the bar tops out below your peak need, you have three options: a second grinder or a bigger machine, a third person on the bar at peak, or a menu that is faster to make. Put the answer in your plan, because a lender or investor who has run a café will ask.

The same test applies to the till. If taking an order and a card payment takes 40 seconds, one till serves 90 people an hour at most. Order-ahead and contactless payment shorten the queue; our cloud-based POS guide covers what to ask about card readers and offline mode.

Will a lender back your coffee shop?

A US lender checks your break-even, then one more number: whether the shop's cash covers the loan payments with room to spare. Under the SBA's rulebook, SOP 50 10 8.1, a 7(a) Small loan ($350,000 or less) needs operating cash flow of at least 1.10 times the loan payments within a year of funding; a larger loan needs 1.15. Our restaurant business plan guide covers the other lender checks, including 10% equity.

What coffee start-ups borrow. Our analysis of the SBA's 7(a) loan data (as of 30 September 2026) found 148 loans approved in fiscal 2026 to independent start-ups in NAICS 722515, coffee shops and snack bars (a code that also covers juice, ice cream and doughnut shops). The median loan was $167,500, the middle half $84,250 to $399,500, at a median rate of 9.25% over 10 years. 86% had variable rates.

Put the median loan into the US example: $167,500 at 9.25% over 10 years is $2,145 a month, not the $1,200 assumed above. Fixed costs before the loan are $18,800, and each ticket contributes $4.76. That gives the daily numbers for the front page of your plan:

The decision rule: if your footfall counts do not support the owner line, or the bar cannot serve it at peak, change the plan before you sign the lease. Take a smaller loan, a cheaper site or a higher ticket. Lenders may also deduct the owner's living costs from cash flow, which raises their line.

How coffee start-up loans end. Of 611 SBA 7(a) loans to coffee and snack bar start-ups approved in fiscal 2010 to 2014, 14.7% were charged off, meaning the SBA wrote them off after default, against 2.5% for coffee and snack bars already trading for two years or more. The failed start-up loans were charged off a median 3.9 years after approval. Budget cash for the first three years, not just the first. The restaurant business plan guide compares these figures with full-service and limited-service restaurants.

How much does it cost to open a coffee shop?

There is no current survey of coffee shop startup costs; most figures online come from companies selling equipment or software. The closest neutral reference is the SBA median above: $167,500 borrowed by independent US coffee start-ups in fiscal 2026, plus at least 10% of the total project cost from the owner. Build your own total from quotes. The main lines:

• Lease deposit and rent before opening
• Fit-out: plumbing, electrics, counter, seating
• Espresso machine, grinders, water filtration, refrigeration, dishwasher
• Smallwares: cups, jugs, tampers, crockery
• Till, card reader, Wi-Fi
• Licences, permits, food hygiene registration (UK) or health permit (US)
• Opening stock of coffee, milk, food and packaging
• Pre-opening wages and training
• Working capital: at least the cash gap for the first three months, plus one month of fixed costs
• A contingency: the SBA suggests adding "a little extra, say 10%" for costs you cannot predict

Our guide to how much it costs to open a restaurant has a startup budget sheet you can copy and a working capital calculation that works the same way for a café.

Coffee shop business plan template

Copy this into a document. The square brackets are yours to fill.

COFFEE SHOP BUSINESS PLAN

1. SUMMARY
   Concept: [specialty espresso bar / café with food / drive-through]
   Site: [address, square feet or m2, seats]
   Opening hours: [ ] to [ ], [ ] days a week
   Total startup cost: [ ]  Own money: [ ]  Loan: [ ]
   Break-even: [ ] tickets a day  Lender's minimum: [ ]  Target: [ ]

2. MARKET
   Footfall counts: weekday 7.30 [ ], 8.30 [ ], 12.30 [ ]; Saturday [ ]
   Nearby coffee shops: name, price of a latte, queue at 8.30 (yes/no)
   Your reason to be chosen: [ ]

3. MENU AND COST PER ITEM
   Drink | price | coffee | milk | packaging | total cost | cost %
   Food  | price | cost | cost %
   Average ticket: [ ] (drinks per ticket [ ], food attach rate [ ]%)

4. CAPACITY
   Peak hours: [ ]  Share of daily tickets in peak: [ ]%
   Drinks per hour the bar can make (timed): [ ]
   Drinks per hour needed at target: [ ]

5. TEAM
   Owner role, baristas per shift, hours a week, wage rate

6. MARKETING
   Opening offer, loyalty, local offices, delivery or order-ahead

7. FINANCIALS
   Fixed costs a month: [ ]
   Contribution per ticket: [ ]
   Break-even tickets a day: fixed costs / contribution / trading days
   Loan: amount [ ], rate [ ]% fixed/variable, term [ ] years, payment [ ]
   Lender's minimum tickets a day: (fixed costs before loan
     + 1.10 x loan payment) / contribution / trading days
   12-month cash flow with a sales ramp
   Startup budget and sources of funds

For the cost per item, the food cost calculator and menu price calculator do the arithmetic. To see how cafés use TablePort day to day, see our cafés page.

Can TablePort handle this for you?

TablePort covers two lines in a coffee shop plan: the till and loyalty.

1. Till and card reader. POS Starter is $59 a month in the US (before sales tax) or £49 in the UK (plus VAT), and the card reader is a monthly rental at $12 or £9. Plans are month to month; cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid month, with no cancellation fee.
2. Loyalty at the till. Guests earn points automatically as they order and pay, with no punch card, and carry a branded Apple or Google Wallet pass. You set the earn rate and the reward steps.
3. Track the plan. The daily report shows each day's sales, so you can compare tickets with your break-even number.

The honest limit: TablePort cannot make your bar faster than your espresso machine. See Loyalty.