Sales Per Labour Hour (SPLH) tells you how much revenue your venue takes for every hour your team works. To calculate it, divide your net sales by the total labour hours worked in the same period. It’s the simplest way to see whether your rota is working as hard as your team.
SPLH is a productivity measure: net sales divided by labour hours. If your pub takes £6,000 on a Friday and your team works 150 hours that day, your SPLH is £40. Unlike labour cost percentage, it isn’t affected by pay rates, so it shows how well hours match demand.
Operators use SPLH to answer practical questions: are we putting people on at the right times, are quiet periods carrying too many hours, and is one site more productive than another? Tracked over time, it shows whether changes to the rota are actually paying off.
To calculate SPLH, add up your net sales (excluding VAT) for a period, add up every hour worked by your team in that same period, and divide sales by hours. Use the same period for both figures, whether that’s a shift, a day or a week.
SPLH = net sales ÷ total labour hours worked
Worked example: one day
| Figure | |
|---|---|
| Net sales (excluding VAT) | £6,000 |
| Hours worked by all staff, including managers | 150 |
| SPLH | £6,000 ÷ 150 = £40 |
Include every hour worked, including salaried managers and kitchen staff. Leaving them out flatters the number and hides some of the most common sources of wasted labour.
A daily SPLH can look healthy while individual hours tell a different story. Breaking it down by hour shows exactly where the rota is out of step with trade, which is where the savings are. It also shows which busy hours are short of staff, so you can protect service at the peaks.
| Hour | Net sales | Staff on | SPLH |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3pm–4pm | £150 | 6 | £25 |
| 7pm–8pm | £900 | 12 | £75 |
The daily average hides both problems: the afternoon is carrying more people than trade needs, while the evening peak may be stretched thin. Moving one or two people from the quiet hour to the busy one can lift sales and service at the same time.
There’s no single good SPLH, because it depends on your prices, venue type and service style. A wet-led local and a premium restaurant will never look alike. The most useful benchmarks are your own trend over time and the comparison between similar sites in your estate.
A practical way to set a target is to work backwards from your budget: divide your forecast sales for a period by the labour hours you can afford. That gives you a target SPLH for each day or hour, and a clear signal when the rota drifts.
As a rough UK guide, £35–£55 is typical, above £55 is strong, and below £30 needs urgent attention. Across 128 sites in S4labour’s Operational Excellence programme, SPLH rose by an average of £5.21, from £41.17 to £46.38.
Labour cost percentage measures what you spend on labour as a share of sales. SPLH measures how productive each hour is. Use both: labour percentage shows whether you’re profitable, while SPLH shows whether the hours themselves are in the right place.
| SPLH | Labour cost % | |
|---|---|---|
| Formula | Net sales ÷ labour hours | Labour cost ÷ net sales × 100 |
| What it shows | Productivity of each hour worked | Labour spend as a share of revenue |
| Affected by pay rises? | No | Yes |
| Best for | Building and fixing rotas | Budgets and profit tracking |
Because SPLH ignores pay rates, it stays comparable when wages rise, which makes it the better measure for judging the rota itself.
The fastest way to improve SPLH is to match staffing to demand hour by hour, rather than building rotas from habit. Look at when you trade, move hours from quiet periods into busy ones, and check that every role on shift is earning its place.
The aim isn’t to cut hours across the board. It’s to put the right people in the right place at the right time, so guests get great service and every hour pays its way.
Most SPLH errors come from inconsistent inputs. Use net sales excluding VAT, include every hour worked (salaried managers too), and compare like with like. Otherwise the number moves for reasons that have nothing to do with your rota, and comparisons between weeks or sites stop meaning anything.
SPLH stands for Sales Per Labour Hour. It’s the revenue a venue takes for every hour its team works, calculated by dividing net sales by total labour hours.
Use net sales, excluding VAT. It reflects the revenue you actually keep, and it keeps your figures consistent from week to week and site to site.
Yes. Include every hour worked, including salaried managers. Leaving them out makes SPLH look better than it is and hides labour that isn’t adding value.
Review it weekly at site level, and look at it by hour when building rotas. Hourly SPLH is where most savings are found.
Not always. If SPLH rises because you’re understaffed at peak times, service and sales can suffer. Aim for a healthy SPLH with consistent service, not the highest possible number.
Calculating SPLH by hand is a great start, but it’s hard to keep up across every shift and site. S4labour shows labour against sales hour by hour, so you can spot wasted hours and fix them before they hit profit. Find out more about labour optimisation, or book a demo to see it with your own data.