How many staff do I need for a restaurant?

"How many staff do I need?" is the question behind every rota, every new opening and every labour cost argument with the accountant. The honest answer is that there's no legal ratio and no magic number. There is a reliable way to work it out, though, and it starts with covers, not people.

A note before the numbers: every ratio on this page is a rule of thumb, the kind of starting point experienced GMs use and then adjust. None of it is law, and none of it is an industry statistic. Your service style, menu, layout and team will move the numbers, sometimes a lot.

The short method

1. Find your covers per hour at the peak of each service.
2. Decide how many tables one server can run in your style of service.
3. Add the support roles: host, bar, runner, pot wash.
4. Count your kitchen sections at the peak and put one competent person on each.
5. Add a duty manager for every session.
6. Check it against sales using sales per labour hour or labour cost percentage.
7. Adjust weekly using what actually happened.

Step 1: Get your covers by hour

Your till or booking system will tell you how many covers you did, and when. Pull the last four weeks for each service and look at:

• Peak covers per hour. A 60-cover restaurant might seat 45 covers between 7pm and 8pm on a Saturday and 12 on a Tuesday.
• Turns. One sitting or two? A 6pm and 8:30pm sitting is two peaks in the kitchen, not one.
• Average spend. A £25 head bistro and a £70 head tasting menu need very different staffing for the same covers.

Staff to the peak hour, then trim either side. A rota that's flat from 5pm to 11pm is either short at 7:30pm or wasting money at 5pm.

Step 2: Front of house rules of thumb

Servers

How many tables one server can look after depends on how much each table needs:

A good test: time how long tables wait to be greeted, to order and to get the bill at your peak. If any of those creeps past a few minutes, the sections are too big or the support isn't there.

Support roles

• Host or meeter-greeter: worth it once you're turning tables or have a queue at the door. Below that, the duty manager can do it.
• Bar: a service bar making drinks for the floor frees servers. A rough check: if servers are queuing at the bar for drinks at the peak, you need someone behind it.
• Food runners: let one server look after more tables, and get food out hot. Useful once the pass gets busy.
• Pot wash / KP: never optional. A kitchen with no clean plates stops.

Step 3: How big should the kitchen brigade be?

Forget the classic 20-person brigade de cuisine: most UK restaurants run with three to six people in the kitchen at the peak. Size it by sections, not covers alone.

List the sections that are busy at the peak. For a typical modern British restaurant:

• Grill / mains (proteins)
• Garnish / veg (sides, sauces)
• Larder / cold (starters, salads, cold desserts)
• Pastry / desserts (often covered by larder in smaller kitchens)
• Fryer (if chips and battered dishes are a big seller)
• Pass (head chef or sous calling and checking every plate)

Then match people to sections:

Two things push kitchen numbers up faster than covers: menu length (every extra dish adds mise en place and complexity) and everything ordered at once (a 30-person Christmas party on a set menu can need more hands than 60 à la carte covers spread over three hours). See our kitchen rota template for how to lay out kitchen shifts.

Step 4: Check it against your sales

Once you have a draft, check it pays for itself.

Sales per labour hour (SPLH): net sales divided by hours worked. If Saturday dinner takes £4,200 and your rota has 70 hours on it, that's £60 per labour hour. Track it by service for a month and you'll see which shifts are carrying too many people.

Labour cost percentage: total wage cost (including employer National Insurance, pension and holiday pay) divided by sales. Many restaurants set a weekly target and check each rota against it. Our labour cost percentage guide explains how to set one, and the labour cost calculator does the sums.

Remember the minimum wage floor when you cost hours: from April 2026 it's £12.71 an hour at 21 and over, £10.85 at 18 to 20, and £8.00 for under-18s and apprentices.

Worked example: a 60-cover bistro on a Saturday

A neighbourhood bistro, 15 tables, two sittings (6pm and 8:30pm), average spend £38 a head. Last four Saturdays: 105 covers on average, with 50 seated between 6pm and 7pm and 45 between 8:30pm and 9:30pm.

Front of house (17:00-23:30):

• 1 duty manager on the floor, also hosting
• 3 servers, five tables each
• 1 bartender on the service bar
• 1 runner from 18:30 to 22:00, covering both peaks

Kitchen (15:00-23:00):

• Head chef on pass
• Sous on grill / mains
• 1 chef de partie on garnish / veg
• 1 commis on larder and desserts
• 1 KP from 17:00 to close

That's 11 people and about 75 hours. At around £4,000 of sales (105 covers at £38), it's roughly £53 per labour hour. If the bistro's Saturday target is £55, the first places to look are the kitchen's 3pm start and the runner's hours, not a server at the peak.

Don't forget breaks, rest and holidays

Headcount isn't just the people on the floor at 8pm. Your numbers need to cover:

• Breaks. GOV.UK: adults working more than six hours get an uninterrupted 20-minute break; under-18s get 30 minutes if they work more than 4.5 hours. On a long Saturday, someone has to cover each section while a chef eats.
• Under-18s. Limited to 8 hours a day and 40 a week, so a 16-year-old KP can't do the double you'd give an adult.
• Holidays. Most staff are entitled to 5.6 weeks' paid holiday. Each person works roughly 46.4 weeks of the year, so to cover a role every week you need around 12% more hours in your team than your rota uses (52 ÷ 46.4 ≈ 1.12), before sickness and turnover.

That last point is why so many restaurants feel short-staffed in summer and at Christmas: the rota was built for a full team that's never actually all there.

Mistakes to avoid

1. Copying another restaurant's numbers. Their menu, layout and customers aren't yours.
2. Staffing to the average. The average Saturday doesn't exist. Staff to the peak and trim the shoulders.
3. Cutting the KP first. It looks cheap and slows everything down.
4. One manager for the whole day. Every session needs someone in charge.
5. Ignoring the data after week one. Review covers, SPLH and labour cost every week for the first couple of months.

Checklist

• Covers per hour pulled for each service, last four weeks
• Server sections set for your service style
• Host, bar, runner and KP decided for each peak
• Kitchen sections listed and staffed at the peak
• Duty manager on every session
• Breaks covered on long shifts
• Under-18s within 8 hours a day and 40 a week
• Rota costed: SPLH or labour cost % against target
• Team sized for holiday cover (about 12% extra hours)

Doing this in ShiftComplete

ShiftComplete helps you put these numbers into a real rota. Add events for the things that change your covers ("Saturday, 105 covers, two sittings", "Christmas party, +1 kitchen, +1 floor"), weight the people you want on, and it builds a draft rota from everyone's availability in seconds, fair across the team. Each person can have up to four time blocks a day, tagged by area (Floor, Bar, Kitchen, Pot wash), so you can see each section is covered at the peak.

Labour cost is shown while you build, so you'll see if Saturday is heading over target before you publish. Switch on clocking in and out and you can compare the hours actually worked against the rota, then download hours per person as a spreadsheet. A few weeks of that and your rules of thumb become your own numbers. It's £1.49 per staff member per month, free for 60 days, no card needed.