Restaurant Prime Cost Calculator

Prime cost is the sum of your two largest controllable costs: everything you spend on food and beverage (your cost of goods sold) plus everything you spend on labor. Expressed as a percentage of sales, it's the single most-watched number on a restaurant P&L — because almost every operational decision you make shows up here first.

Enter your food cost, your total labor cost, and your total sales for the same period. The calculator returns your prime cost in dollars and as a percentage, and breaks out the food and labor shares so you can see which half is doing the damage.

Why prime cost beats watching food cost alone

Food and labor trade off against each other. Scratch-cooking cuts your food cost but adds prep labor; switching to pre-portioned products does the reverse. Look at either number in isolation and you can "fix" one while quietly breaking the other. Prime cost closes that loophole — it's the honest scoreboard. Break each half down further with the food cost percentage and labor cost percentage calculators.

What's a good prime cost percentage?

Most full-service restaurants aim to keep prime cost in the 55–65% range, and many use 60% as the line in the sand. Quick-service and pizza can run lower; concepts with premium ingredients and heavy table service run higher. What matters is the trend: measure it weekly, not monthly, so a bad week is a conversation instead of a surprise at the end of the period.

Bringing prime cost down

On the food side: tighten portioning, cut waste and over-ordering, and re-cost your top sellers. On the labor side: schedule to your real demand curve and turn tables faster so each labor hour serves more guests. Once prime cost is under control, the money that survives shows up in your net profit margin.

Benchmark ranges are widely-cited US full-service norms — treat them as typical ranges, not guarantees.