Restaurant Business Plan UK: Template, UK Figures and Worked Example

A restaurant business plan explains the concept, the market, the menu and pricing, how you will operate and staff the site, and above all the numbers: how many covers you will serve, at what spend, and what is left after food, wages, rent and tax. Lenders, landlords and investors mostly check the sales forecast and whether your costs are realistic for the UK in 2026. This guide gives you a copyable outline, the current UK rates to build into it, and a worked covers-times-spend example.

What lenders and landlords look for

A lender wants to know you can repay the loan. A landlord wants to know you can pay rent for the term of the lease. Both read the same things:

• A sales forecast built from capacity. Seats, turns and average spend, not a round number.
• Realistic costs. Food, labour, rent, rates and overheads that match what similar sites run at, with the sources shown.
• A break-even point. How many covers a week you need, and how far above that your forecast sits.
• Cash to survive the opening months. Working capital, not just fit-out money.
• Evidence you can run it. Your experience, your key hires and the legal steps already in hand (see how to open a restaurant in the UK).

Landlords may also ask for personal guarantees or a rent deposit, so say what you can offer.

A copyable business plan outline

Paste this into a document and replace each prompt with your own answers.

BUSINESS PLAN: [Restaurant name]

1. SUMMARY (ONE PAGE, WRITTEN LAST)
- The concept in two sentences
- The site, the opening date, the funding you need and what it pays for
- Year-one sales, profit and break-even covers per week

2. CONCEPT AND MENU
- Cuisine, service style (table service, counter, bar), opening hours
- Sample menu with price range and target gross profit per dish
- What makes it different from the five nearest competitors

3. MARKET AND LOCATION
- Who the guests are (local residents, office workers, tourists, groups)
- Footfall and parking, transport links, the competitors and their prices
- Why this unit and this rent

4. OPERATIONS
- Seats, floor layout, kitchen set-up, opening days and services
- Suppliers, stock control and waste approach
- Food safety, allergen and licensing plan (premises licence, DPS, registration)

5. PEOPLE
- Owners and their experience
- Staffing plan by role, hours, hourly rates, holiday and employer National Insurance
- Recruitment, training and rota approach

6. MARKETING
- Launch plan, booking channels, social, local partnerships
- Repeat-guest plan: email, loyalty, gift cards

7. SYSTEMS
- POS, booking, payments, stock, rota, accounting

8. FINANCIALS
- Start-up budget and funding sources
- Sales forecast (seats x turns x spend x trading days)
- Profit and loss for 12 months, cash flow by month for 12 months
- Break-even covers and a sensitivity table (sales down 10% and 15%)
- VAT, PAYE and business rates assumptions

9. RISKS AND MITIGATIONS
- Slow ramp-up, staff turnover, cost inflation, supplier failure, planning or licence delays

10. APPENDICES
- Lease heads of terms, quotes, CVs, menus, floor plan

The UK numbers to put in your plan

Use current official figures, and label the tax year. These are the main ones for 2026/27 in England:

Two quick illustrations. A team member working 30 hours a week at £12.71 earns £19,827.60 a year, so employer National Insurance is 15% of £14,827.60 (the amount above £5,000), or £2,224.14. A hospitality property with a £30,000 rateable value pays £11,460 a year in rates at 38.2p before any relief. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own business rates systems.

For cost benchmarks, treat published ranges as starting points, not promises. Lightspeed's UK guide puts food plus labour (prime cost) at 55 to 65% of turnover, with above 70% a warning sign, and Sage reports a UK average net margin of about 4.2%, with full-service restaurants at 3 to 5%. Both are publisher guides rather than audited industry data. Replace them with your own quotes and, once you trade, with your own actuals. Our restaurant profit margin guide and labour cost guide go deeper.

Forecast sales with covers x spend

The simplest defensible forecast works from capacity:

1. Covers per day = seats x turns per day. A turn is how many times a seat is used in a service period, so 1.5 turns means 60 covers from 40 seats.
2. Weekly covers = the sum across your trading days. Quiet weekdays and busy weekends should have different turns.
3. Net spend per head = average spend including VAT divided by 1.2 (at the 20% rate). Always forecast sales excluding VAT, because the VAT is not yours.
4. Weekly net sales = weekly covers x net spend per head.
5. Annual net sales = weekly net sales x trading weeks (50 is a sensible allowance for closures and holidays).

If you serve both food and drink, use one blended spend per head or forecast them separately, because their cost percentages differ.

Worked example: a 40-seat restaurant

These are illustrative assumptions, not benchmarks for your site. Open seven days, 40 seats:

Average spend is £38 per head including VAT, so net spend is £38 / 1.2 = £31.67. Weekly net sales are 456 x £31.67 = £14,440, and over 50 weeks that is £722,000 (22,800 covers). Weekly VAT collected is £2,888, which you hold for HMRC.

A simple profit and loss using illustrative cost assumptions:

That 3.4% sits inside the 3 to 5% range commonly quoted for full-service restaurants, which is a useful reality check: if your plan shows 15%, you have probably understated a cost or overstated sales. As a labour sanity check, £252,700 is about £5,054 a week, which buys roughly 337 paid hours at an all-in £15 an hour.

Stress-test the plan: break-even and sensitivity

Split costs into variable and fixed. Assume food cost (31%) plus 4% of sales for card fees and consumables are variable, so each £1 of sales contributes 65p. Fixed costs are then £404,700 (labour, rent, rates, utilities and the rest of overheads).

Break-even before depreciation and interest is £404,700 / 0.65 = £622,615 of sales. Once you cover the £40,000 of depreciation and interest too, break-even rises to £684,154, about 432 covers a week against a forecast of 456. That is a margin of safety of only around 5%, and it is exactly the kind of finding a lender wants you to have already seen. In practice, you would flex rota hours when covers fall short, but build the plan on the pessimistic case first.

Cash flow and VAT timing

Profit and cash are different. Plan the monthly cash flow, including:

• Ramp-up. New restaurants rarely hit forecast covers in month one. Model a slower first quarter.
• VAT. You collect 20% on sales but, because most food ingredients are zero-rated (alcohol and some drinks are not), you will reclaim far less VAT on purchases than you charge. Set the difference aside; do not treat it as cash in the bank.
• Wages and PAYE are paid monthly in arrears, and employer NIC is paid to HMRC with PAYE.
• Rent is often due quarterly in advance, and business rates are billed by your council in instalments.
• Supplier terms, which vary from payment on delivery to 30 days.

After opening: compare actuals to plan

Your plan is only useful if you keep checking it. Compare weekly covers, average spend, food cost and wage percentage against the forecast, and re-forecast monthly. TablePort's restaurant management platform gives you daily reports and analytics covering sales, orders and labour in one system, and our food cost calculator and menu price calculator help keep dishes on target.

This guide is general information, not financial, legal or tax advice; speak to an accountant before you submit a plan to a lender.