To price catering per head in the UK, add up your food cost per person, then multiply by 3 to 4 to cover overheads, labour, and profit. As a working rule, most caterers land between £15 and £75 per head depending on the event type, with food costs typically representing 25–35% of the price you charge. The trick is knowing your actual numbers rather than copying a competitor's menu price.
Here's exactly how to build that figure from the ground up.
Everything begins with what the food actually costs you. Not a guess — the real, ingredient-by-ingredient total.
Take every dish on your proposed menu and cost each ingredient based on what you pay your supplier, scaled to the portion size you'll serve. A chicken main might cost you £2.80 in raw ingredients. The accompanying sides, sauce, and garnish add another £1.90. A starter and dessert push your per-head food cost to, say, £9.50.
That £9.50 is your foundation. Get it wrong and every other calculation collapses.
A few things people forget to include:
Once you know your true food cost, you don't just add a markup — you work backwards from a target food cost percentage.
The catering industry standard in the UK is to keep food cost between 25% and 35% of the menu price. Lower percentages give you more margin but require efficient buying; higher percentages are common for premium ingredient-led menus.
The formula:
Menu price per head = Food cost per head ÷ Target food cost %
So if your food costs £9.50 per head and you want a 30% food cost:
£9.50 ÷ 0.30 = £31.67 per head (food element only)
That remaining 70% isn't all profit — it absorbs everything else.
Labour is the cost most new caterers underprice, and it's often the difference between a profitable job and a busy one that loses money.
Account for:
Calculate total staff hours, multiply by their hourly rate (remember to include employer National Insurance and pension contributions for employed staff), then divide across your guest count.
Example: a 100-guest event needs 60 total staff hours at an average loaded cost of £14/hour = £840, or £8.40 per head in labour.
Your business costs money to run even when you're not cooking. Spread these across your jobs:
Some of these are per-event (equipment hire, disposables), and some are general business overheads you recover as a percentage. A common approach is to add 10–15% of your subtotal to cover general overheads.
Profit is not what's left over by accident — it's a number you decide on. After food, labour, and overheads are covered, a healthy catering business targets a net profit of 10–20% on top.
If you skip this step, you've built a job that pays your costs and your wage but leaves nothing to reinvest, save for quiet months, or grow.
Let's price a three-course wedding for 100 guests:
| Cost element | Per head |
|---|---|
| Food cost | £9.50 |
| Labour | £8.40 |
| Equipment & disposables | £4.00 |
| Overhead recovery (12%) | £2.63 |
| Subtotal | £24.53 |
| Profit margin (15%) | £3.68 |
| Price per head | £28.21 |
You'd likely round this to £29–£30 per head, giving you a clean, defensible price.
Notice your food cost (£9.50) is exactly 33% of a £29 price — right in the healthy range.
These vary by region (London commands more) and quality tier, but as a benchmark:
Corporate and private events sit at the lower-to-mid end; weddings and premium events sit higher because of the service expectation and risk.
Copying competitors' prices. Their costs, suppliers, and overheads aren't yours. A headline price tells you nothing about their margin.
Forgetting minimum numbers. A 20-person event has the same setup and travel as a 60-person one. Set a minimum spend or a higher per-head rate for small bookings.
Ignoring scaling errors. A recipe that works for 8 doesn't simply multiply by 12. Yields, waste, and seasoning don't scale linearly, and getting the maths wrong silently eats your margin.
Not updating for ingredient inflation. A menu costed six months ago may now be losing you money. Re-cost regularly.
The pricing logic above is straightforward — but the accuracy depends entirely on knowing your real food cost per head, scaled correctly to your guest numbers, with up-to-date ingredient prices. That's where most caterers either guess or burn an evening with a spreadsheet.
PrepSheet turns any recipe into a costed, scalable prep sheet automatically — ingredient costs, yields, portion maths, and batch scaling done for you, so you can price every event with confidence instead of crossed fingers. If you'd like to stop guessing your margins, [join the PrepSheet waitlist](#) and be among the first to try it.