Free tool
Restaurant labor cost calculator
Labor as a share of sales, fully loaded — and the part of it nobody separates out: time on the phone.
A typical week
Time on the phone
Labor cost
40.5% of sales
$8,921 a week fully loaded ($7,560 in wages plus 18% payroll tax and benefits) — above the band most full-service operators aim for.
Of which, answering the phone
$9,940 / year
9.0 hours a week on 180 calls — 2.1% of your labor spend, and the only part of it you can remove without removing a person.
That is $191 a week of paid time spent on a task that does not touch a table.
The math, in the open: labor cost % = (hours × wage × (1 + burden)) ÷ sales. Phone cost = calls × average length, converted to hours, at the same loaded rate.
The 25–35% band is a common full-service rule of thumb, not a law: quick service typically runs lower and fine dining higher, and a single figure hides the split between kitchen and front of house. Not modelled: salaried management, overtime, tip credits, or the sales a missed call would have brought in — that last one is the other half of what the phone costs you. Nothing you type is stored.
The line that isn't a line
Phone time is labor, and it is the only kind you can remove without removing a person.
Every other hour in your labor percentage buys something visible — food run, tables turned, dishes cleared. Phone hours buy something too, but they are spread across people who were hired to do other things, so they never show up as a cost you could decide about. They just make everyone slightly slower during the rush.
That is why cutting labor usually means cutting a shift. The work is treated as fixed and the people as variable, when for this one task it is the other way round.
And the figure above is only half of it. The calls that go unanswered at seven on a Friday do not cost you wages — they cost you covers, and they never appear in any report because nothing was recorded. That side has its own calculator.
Questions
Labor cost
Full-service restaurants generally aim for 25–35% of sales, quick service tends to run lower at 20–30%, and fine dining often runs higher because service is the product. Treat it as a band rather than a target: the same 32% can be healthy in a busy dining room and alarming in a slow one, and a single figure hides the split between kitchen and front of house.
Give the hours back to the floor
The phone answers itself.
Reservations taken mid-rush, questions handled, and the floor plan run by the same system.