Restaurant staff rota template for UK teams (free, with labour cost)

A good restaurant rota matches paid hours to the covers you expect, keeps labour inside a target percentage of sales, and respects the Working Time Regulations. Below is a weekly rota template you can copy into Excel or Google Sheets, a method for building it from forecast covers, and the UK rules to check before you publish. Start from sales, not from who is available.

Weekly rota template (copy and paste)

Download the rota template as a CSV file. It opens in Excel or Google Sheets and works out wages and labour percentage for you.

Paste this table into a spreadsheet. Put shift times in the day columns, paid hours (after unpaid breaks) in the total column, and set the cost column to hours × rate × your on-cost multiplier (explained below).

Add three rows underneath the grid:

Use net sales (excluding VAT) and keep tips and service charge out of the labour figure, because they belong to staff and are not wages.

Build the rota from forecast covers

Work backwards from demand, in this order:

1. Forecast covers for each day and each shift. Start with last year's same week, then adjust for bookings already in and for events or weather. Bookings are the best early signal; walk-ins fill the rest.
2. Convert covers to sales. Multiply by your average net spend per cover (excluding VAT).
3. Set the labour budget. Take your target labour percentage of those sales. Lightspeed UK's guide describes labour as roughly a third of revenue as a general rule, and treats prime cost (food plus labour) of 55 to 65% as healthy, with 70% a warning sign. Use your own history as the real target, and our guide to labour cost percentage shows how.
4. Turn the budget into hours. Divide by your loaded hourly cost.
5. Assign hours by station and time band, so bodies sit where the covers are, not spread evenly across the shift.

Worked example: a Saturday

A restaurant forecasts 120 covers at £38 average net spend, and sets a 32% labour target. Average rate is £13.50.

The rota fills them by station:

75 hours at £17.40 is £1,305. A salaried manager's share of the day, say £120, brings the total to £1,425, or 31.3% of sales. That is under the 32% target, with £34 to spare. If the forecast drops to 100 covers (£3,800), the same rota would cost 37.5%, which is the signal to cut hours before the shift, not after.

The multiplier is a planning estimate. The holiday element is 12.07% (see below). Employer National Insurance is 15% above a £5,000 annual threshold in 2026/27, so part-timers cost a little less than the multiplier suggests. There is no employer NIC on earnings up to £50,270 for employees under 21. Employer pension contributions for auto-enrolled staff come on top.

UK working time rules to check before you publish

The Working Time Regulations set limits that a rota can break without anyone noticing:

Under-18s have tighter limits: no more than 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week (with no averaging), a 30-minute break if they work more than 4.5 hours, 12 hours of daily rest and 48 hours of weekly rest. Young workers also have restrictions on night work, so check Acas guidance before rostering anyone under 18 late.

The commonest breach is the "clopen": finishing at 1am and starting at 9am gives only 8 hours of rest, short of the 11 hours required. The fix is to swap one shift or to give compensatory rest, which is allowed for shift workers in some cases.

Holiday accrual and pay floors

Almost all workers get 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year, capped at 28 days for a 6-day week. Bank holidays can count towards it. For workers with irregular hours, and for part-year workers whose leave year began after 31 March 2024, leave builds up at 12.07% of the hours worked in each pay period, rounded to the nearest hour (half an hour or more rounds up).

An irregular-hours server who works 30 hours in a week accrues 3.6 hours of leave, which rounds up to 4. Track it from the first shift, because the rota is where the hours are recorded.

From April 2026 the National Minimum Wage rates are £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, £10.85 for 18 to 20, and £8.00 for under 18s and apprentices. Tips and service charges do not count towards them.

Common rota mistakes

• Building around availability, not demand. The grid looks full but the Tuesday lunch is overstaffed and Saturday dinner is short.
• Costing hours at the wage rate. Holiday pay and employer NIC add roughly 29% to the hourly cost in the example above.
• Not recording breaks. Mark each break as paid or unpaid on the rota, the same way every time, so hours worked and hours paid match.
• Ignoring changes after publication. Swaps and early finishes need to flow back into the actual hours, or labour % is wrong at week end.
• Publishing late. Give staff the rota well ahead. The Employment Rights Act 2025 is expected to introduce a right to reasonable notice of shifts and payment for short-notice cancellations, though the details are still being settled. The government's zero hours guidance already tells employers to give as much notice as possible, and our Employment Rights Act guide covers the timetable.

Doing it in software

A spreadsheet is enough for a small team. It stops working when you want clock-in data, swaps and live labour percentage against sales. TablePort Staff costs £49 a month per location ex VAT and covers rotas with shift templates, labour law compliance presets and overtime warnings, plus time tracking with clock-in and clock-out and wage forecasting. Hours worked also matter for tip allocation, which the tronc guide explains.

This guide is general information, not legal advice, so speak to a solicitor or Acas about your specific situation.