How Much Does Each Hour Your Restaurant Is Open Cost You?

You know roughly what you spend per month. Rent, suppliers, wages, electricity. Add it all up and you get a number. The problem is that number doesn't tell you much when you need to decide: is it worth opening on Sunday morning? Does the lunch service pay off when the restaurant is half empty? Does closing earlier on a slow day save real money, or is it irrelevant? Your restaurant's cost per hour answers these questions, and this article explains how to calculate it.

The problem with thinking about costs only by month

When you look at the total expenses for the month, the number can feel either under control or frightening, but it rarely tells you what to do next. "I spent €8,400 this month" doesn't help you figure out whether Monday's lunch service is worth it, whether the afternoon shift is profitable, or whether it makes sense to hire another person for the weekend.

Monthly cost is a report. Cost per hour open is a compass.

When you know that every hour your restaurant is open costs you €35, you can compare that against what you billed during that hour. If a two-hour lunch service brought in €55, you already know that service is running at a loss before you even count the ingredients. The decision to keep it, adjust the hours, or invest in promotion becomes based on a number, not a feeling.

What is the cost per hour open

Cost per hour open is your total daily costs divided by the hours the restaurant operates that day.

The calculation is straightforward. First, divide your total monthly costs by the number of days you work, and you get your daily cost. Then divide the daily cost by the opening hours, and you get the cost per hour.

For example: you have €6,000 in monthly costs and you open 25 days a month. Your daily cost is €240. If you open 8 hours a day, every hour open costs you €30. Any service where you don't bill at least €30 an hour is contributing to a negative result.

It's a simple number, but it completely changes the way you think about the business.

How to calculate your restaurant's cost per hour open

To arrive at this number, you need three pieces of data:

1. Your total monthly costs Include everything: staff wages and employer contributions, rent, accountant, insurance, energy, food and beverage suppliers, consumables, maintenance. Don't leave anything out, including what you pay in cash without an invoice.

2. The days you work per month It's not always 30. If you close on Mondays, that's 25 or 26 working days. If you have different hours in winter and summer, the number changes from period to period.

3. Opening hours per day If you open for lunch and dinner with a break in between, count the actual service hours, not the total time the door is open. The difference can be 2 to 3 hours and it affects the result.

With these three numbers, the calculation follows two steps:

1. Daily cost = monthly costs ÷ working days
2. Cost per hour = daily cost ÷ opening hours

Once you have this number, you can look at every service differently. A two-hour lunch service now has a minimum revenue threshold below which it's running at a loss.

Cost per labor hour: what your staff really costs you

There's a second number worth calculating alongside it: cost per labor hour.

This is different from the cost per hour open. While the first divides all your costs by the hours the restaurant operates, the second focuses only on staff costs and divides them by the total man-hours for the day, that is, by the number of hours all your employees work combined.

If you have 3 employees working 8 hours each, that's 24 man-hours a day. If your total staff cost, wages plus social security plus other contributions, is €4,200 a month and you work 25 days, your daily staff cost is €168. Divided by the 24 man-hours, every labor hour costs you €7.

This number helps you see whether your team size is calibrated per service. Too many hours on a slow shift, and staff cost eats into your margin before you even reach the kitchen.

How Tinz calculates this automatically

Getting to these numbers manually means organizing wages, contributions, fixed expenses, variable expenses for the month, and opening hours. In practice, it's the kind of calculation that always gets pushed to tomorrow.

The Analysis section in Tinz has a tab called Daily Cost that does this work for you. It uses the data you already have in the app: the wages and contributions set up in Settings → Staff, the recurring fixed expenses from Settings → Recurring expenses, the current month's invoices, and the opening hours set in Settings → Hours.

With that data, the tab shows the cost per hour open and the cost per labor hour, updated automatically. Every time you upload a new invoice or adjust a wage, the numbers reflect that change.

The result is what turns "how much did I spend this month" into the question that actually matters: "how much do I need to bill per hour to at least cover my costs?"

You can try Tinz free for 14 days, no credit card required, at https://app.mytinz.com/#/register?plan=pro.