Most restaurants spend about 68¢ of every dollar on ingredients and payroll. Well-run places get it close to 60¢, and that gap is usually the whole profit.
Six views of the same month. Every one of them moves with the sliders above.
Profit Pour is a free restaurant profit margin calculator from Hospitality Uncut, a Virginia restaurant and hospitality consulting firm. It starts from a sample month built on National Restaurant Association medians, then lets you drag monthly sales, food and drink cost and payroll to see what a Virginia restaurant, bar, brewery or winery actually keeps, by the month and by the year.
A full-service restaurant typically keeps about 3 to 5 cents of every dollar in sales after food, payroll, rent and everything else. The National Restaurant Association's 2024 medians put food and drinks at about 32 cents per dollar, payroll at 36, rent and occupancy at 6 and other costs at 23, which leaves about 3 cents. Virginia's numbers track the national picture, with rent running higher in Northern Virginia and Richmond and lower in the Valley and Southwest.
Most full-service places land between 28 and 35 cents per dollar of sales for food and drinks, with bars lower and steakhouses higher. The number that matters more is food plus payroll together: typical is about 68 cents, and well-run places get close to 60. That gap of a few cents is usually the whole profit.
Payroll including taxes and benefits runs about 36 cents per dollar at a typical full-service restaurant. Counter service and taprooms often run lower, 25 to 30, because fewer people touch each sale. Every cent you take off payroll without hurting service drops straight to profit: at $185,000 a month in sales, one cent is $1,850 a month, or $22,200 a year.
Because costs scale with sales. Doubling revenue doubles food and payroll too, so the margin stays at a few cents per dollar unless the cost per dollar comes down. This calculator shows that: move the sales slider and profit grows, but move food or payroll one cent and the change is often bigger. Rent is the one cost that doesn't scale, which is why busy places in expensive Virginia locations can still do fine.
The sample month uses 2024 National Restaurant Association medians for full-service restaurants. They're illustrative, not a forecast for your place. If you want this built from your own POS and payroll data for a Virginia restaurant, brewery, winery or bar, Hospitality Uncut does that as part of its operations work.