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Staff, rotas and tips
Rota cost calculator: what this week's rota really costs with employer NI, pension and holiday pay
Enter hours, average rate and headcount to see the week's wage bill with employer NI at 15%, pension at 3% and holiday pay at 12.07%, and the cost per cover.
The rota app shows hours times rate. The bank account shows something a quarter larger, and since April 2025 the gap has been wider than most operators' rule of thumb. The calculator takes the week's hours, the average rate and the headcount and prints the number the bank will see, per hour and per cover.
Free tool
Rota cost calculator: this week's wages with employer NI, pension and holiday, per cover
Works in your browser. Nothing you type leaves this device unless you ask us to email you the result.
The four lines
Gross pay. Hours times the average rate. The National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for staff aged 21 and over from 1 April 2026, £10.85 for 18 to 20, and £8.00 for under 18s and apprentices. Enter the real average for your floor and kitchen; a team with several 18-to-20-year-olds averages lower, and a team with a head chef on £16 averages higher.
Employer National Insurance. 15% of each person's pay above the secondary threshold of £96 a week, since 6 April 2025, when the rate rose from 13.8% and the threshold fell from £175. At £12.71 an hour, NI now starts after the eighth hour of a person's week, so a team of part-timers on short shifts is no longer largely outside it. The Employment Allowance, £10,500 a year since the same date, takes the first £202 a week off the bill for most independent venues; the calculator applies it unless you say otherwise.
Pension. 3% of qualifying earnings, pay between £120 and £967 a week, for staff who earn at least £10,000 a year, both thresholds frozen for 2026/27. The calculator applies it on the average; if half the team are under the trigger, the real figure is lower.
Holiday pay. Staff on irregular hours accrue holiday at 12.07% of hours worked, and since the 2024 reforms it can be paid rolled-up on each payslip. Salaried staff accrue 5.6 weeks instead. Either way it is the same money; the calculator books it as the hours are worked, which is when it is earned.
What the all-in number is for
Three decisions. The first is price: the cost per cover, before food, is the floor under the menu, and a venue that has not recomputed it since April 2025 is pricing on an old number. The second is the rota itself: an extra body on a quiet Tuesday costs the all-in rate, not the gross, and the difference is usually the margin on that shift. The third is the budget conversation with the bank or the landlord, which goes better with the real figure than the rota app's.
The NI change in one venue
CGA's survey of 8,300 sites in January 2025 found 70% of operators planning to cut employment and 29% planning to cut trading hours in response to the April 2025 changes. The calculator does not say whether to cut; it says what each hour costs, so the cut, if there is one, lands on the shift that does not pay rather than on the one that does.
Tips are outside this
Tips and service charges passed to staff under the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 are not wages and are not in this calculation; through a properly run tronc they also avoid employer NI. Our guide on the tips law and tronc sets out what a venue must do with them.
Run it with the real split
Averages hide the mix. Run the calculator once with the whole team, then once for the kitchen and once for the floor at their own rates. The floor number per cover is the one to compare with the no-show cost, because the floor is what stood empty when the table did not arrive.
Figures are the GOV.UK rates on the date shown; they change every April.
Short answers from this page
What does a rota cost on top of the hourly rate?
About a quarter more. A 310-hour week for nine people at the £12.71 National Living Wage costs £3,940 gross and £4,906 once employer National Insurance, pension contributions and holiday accrual are added: 24% on top. At 900 covers a week that is £5.45 a cover before anyone has cooked anything.
Where this comes from: GOV.UK rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027 (employer NI 15% above £96 a week, Employment Allowance £10,500, NLW £12.71 from 1 April 2026); DWP written statement HCWS1206, 18 December 2025 (auto-enrolment trigger £10,000 and lower limit £6,240 frozen for 2026/27); all read 2026-10-01. Our test is in tests/covers/tools-check.txt.
AEO Lookup editorial team
We write practical guides for people who run small UK firms, and we check every fact against its source on the date shown. Read how we review, or tell us if something has changed.
