The £14 burger makes the pub about £1.80.

The £2.33 that was never the pub's money

Food and drink eaten on the premises is standard-rated, so the £14.00 on the menu is a gross figure. £14.00 ÷ 1.2 = £11.67, and the £2.33 difference is collected on HMRC's behalf. It passes through the till and straight back out.

That matters for more than the cash. Every percentage further down has to be measured against £11.67, not £14.00. Divide the £3.90 of ingredients by the menu price and you get 27.9%, which looks like a well-priced dish. Divide it by the money that actually belongs to the pub and you get 33.4% — a completely different conversation about whether the burger is working.

What £3.90 of ingredients actually buys

This is the line most people assume is the whole cost. It is a third of it. Broken down at the sort of prices a mid-sized UK pub pays:

• Patty, 170 g — chuck and brisket blend at £9.80 a kilo: £1.67
• Brioche bun — £0.42
• Cheese, two slices — £0.34
• Streaky bacon — £0.38
• Sauce, pickles, lettuce, tomato — £0.31
• Fries, 200 g — from a 2.5 kg bag at £4.20, so £1.68 a kilo: £0.34
• Slaw and garnish — £0.44

Total: £3.90. None of that includes the trim lost off the brisket, the buns that go stale on a quiet Monday, or the burger that goes back because it was ordered medium. Real ingredient cost sits above the recipe cost, always — which is why the stock take and the recipe sheet never quite agree.

£3.50 of labour is about thirteen minutes

Labour on a dish is not the chef's hourly rate multiplied by how long the burger is on the grill. It is the plate's share of everyone who was paid that day: the chef, the section that prepped the patties that morning, the kitchen porter, and the person who carried it out.

It is also not the rate you quote at interview. A full-timer on the National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour costs roughly £16.28 an hour actually worked once employer's National Insurance, pension and 5.6 weeks of statutory holiday are in — the full arithmetic is in the prime cost guide.

At £16.28, the £3.50 on this burger is about 12.9 minutes of one person's paid time, spread across four or five people's shifts. That is 30% of the ex-VAT price. It is the line that moves fastest when service is quiet, because the rota was set on Thursday and the weather changed on Saturday.

Food plus labour: the number that decides everything

Add the two lines you can actually control in a given week: £3.90 + £3.50 = £7.40. Against £11.67 of ex-VAT sales that is a prime cost of 63.4%.

Rent, energy and insurance do not care how busy you were. Food and labour do, and they are two-thirds of the plate. The American rule of thumb — keep prime cost under 60% — does not transfer to a UK pub, because it is quoted against sales that never had 20% VAT inside them and against a labour market with different statutory on-costs. Low-to-mid sixties is a realistic working number here.

What a pound on the menu is really worth

Put the burger up to £15.00 and the guest pays a pound more, but the business does not receive a pound. £15.00 ÷ 1.2 = £12.50 ex-VAT, so £0.83 of that pound lands and £0.17 goes to HMRC with the rest of the VAT.

Except £0.83 is not a small change. With the cost lines unchanged, what is left goes from £1.80 to £2.63 — a 46% increase in the money the pub keeps from every burger it sells. Nothing else on this page moves that much for that little.

It works the other way just as hard. A 10% rise in ingredient prices adds £0.39 to the plate and takes what is left from £1.80 down to £1.41 — a 22% fall in the pub's margin from a supplier increase that nobody in the dining room would ever notice. That asymmetry is the whole reason to recost when prices move rather than at the end of the year.

What the £1.80 is not

It is not profit in any sense the owner would recognise. It is 15.4% of the ex-VAT price, sitting there before the owner takes a wage, before corporation tax, before the fridge that needs replacing and before a single penny of what a bank would call a return.

At sixty burgers a week — a decent number for a pub with a busy weekend — that is about £108 a week from the best-selling dish on the menu. It is why margin in this trade is won on the lines you check every week, not on the price at the top of the page.

Run your own dish through the numbers rather than trusting a percentage someone quoted you. The free food cost calculator does one plate; the recipe tool handles a batch and its sub-recipes; and the menu-pricing guide covers turning the result into a price the menu can carry.