What’s a good GP % for a pub in 2026?

Last updated: 26 June 2026

Most pub licensees obsess over a single GP percentage and miss the actual profit killer sitting in their cellar. You could be running a “healthy” 70% GP on paper while bleeding £3,000–£5,000 a year in unmeasured stock loss, and your EPOS will never tell you it’s happening. The difference between a good GP and a real GP—the one that actually hits your bank account—comes down to how carefully you measure what you’ve sold versus what you’ve poured. This article cuts through the industry noise and shows you exactly what matters.

What counts as a good GP percentage for pubs

A good wet sales GP sits between 68–72% for a wet-led pub, with 60–65% on food being the sector standard. These figures assume you’re running a reasonably tight operation with normal wastage and acceptable shrinkage baked in. If you’re significantly below these numbers—anything south of 65% on wet—you’ve either got a serious pricing problem, a cost control issue, or unmeasured stock loss that your weekly count should have caught.

The reason I say “wet” and “food” separately is because most pub bosses and pubco reps will lump them together and give you a blended number that hides problems. Food runs thinner (60–65% is realistic), but wet sales should be fatter (68–72%). If your blended number is 66%, you might be sat on 68% wet and 58% food, which is actually tight on the food side. Or you could be 70% wet and 50% food—which means your food operation is haemorrhaging cash and your wet margins are masking it. Always ask for the split. Never accept a headline figure.

The other thing nobody tells you: which product lines you’re selling matters far more than the headline number. A pub doing 30% of its sales on premium craft kegs and craft spirits will run a different GP to one shifting Guinness and own-label vodka. The cost of goods is built into your EPOS pricing, so if you’ve been told “you should hit 70% GP,” that’s based on your mix. Change your mix, and your GP moves. This is why comparing yourself to “the average pub” is mostly useless—the average pub isn’t your pub.

Why your headline GP number doesn’t tell the real story

Here’s what I learned the hard way: your EPOS is telling you what sold, not whether you made money on it. Your EPOS calculates GP based on what the till registered. If you’re pouring four pints from a cask but only charging for three, the EPOS doesn’t know. If someone’s free-pouring 35ml when the till is rung for 25ml, your EPOS calls it a sale at 25ml cost and the margin looks fine. You’re running a 70% GP figure on screen, but your actual margin on that measure is closer to 50% because the real cost was 35ml, not 25ml.

This is why the number that actually matters is wet GP by line, measured against what you physically poured or dispensed. A weekly count of every cask, keg, spirit bottle and till reconciliation on the same day is the only way to know if your headline GP is real or fiction. Most pubs that move from a messy spreadsheet to a disciplined count routine claw back 1–2 GP points within a couple of months. That’s not because they suddenly got better at pricing—it’s because they stopped losing money to measurement error and invisible over-pouring.

The pubco stocktaker who visits every quarter isn’t solving this problem. They’re a compliance checkpoint, not a profit tool. A quarterly stocktake catches big movements, but it misses the slow bleed that kills your year-end numbers. If you’re losing 0.3% every week through over-pouring, inconsistent measures, and forgotten wastage, a quarterly check won’t catch it because the loss is spread across three months of sales. By the time the stocktaker arrives, the evidence is already in your till. You need a weekly routine.

Where pub margins actually leak

I spent two years running stock on a tangle of spreadsheets and still losing track of partial kegs and spirit measures. I knew something was wrong because my GP was tracking a point or two below budget, but I couldn’t pinpoint where. The real leaks in pub margins come from three places, and they’re rarely what people assume.

Spirits: over-pouring and measurement drift

A free-poured 25ml is often 32–35ml, especially under a busy shift or when someone’s distracted. Electronic measures help, but only if they’re regularly calibrated and actually used. Most pubs I’ve worked in have electronic measures on some spirit lines and free-pour on others, which creates inconsistency. The worst part: over-pouring feels like generosity, so nobody flags it as a problem. But if you’re giving away 5ml per measure, and you’re pouring 200 spirits a week, you’re handing over roughly £200 a month in unmeasured cost. That’s 2–3 GP points right there.

The fix is simple but requires discipline: weigh every open spirit bottle twice a week against the weight you recorded when you opened it, then reconcile against till data the same day. If the bottle was 700ml when you opened it on Monday, and it’s 650ml on Friday, you’ve poured 50ml. Your till should show the equivalent in poured measures. If it shows less, you’ve either got measurement error or unknown waste. If it shows more, you’re pricing it wrong or recording it wrong. Either way, you see it immediately and can correct before next week.

Draught: cellar temperature, line cleaning and gas pressure

Bad cellar temperature (above 15°C) causes excess gas to come out of solution, which creates over-carbonation and foaming. You pour a pint, it foams over, you lose 10% of the pour as waste and have to remake it. That remake doesn’t register on the till as a loss—it registers as another sale. So your GP looks fine, but you’re pouring more beer than you’re selling. On a 300-pint-a-week cask, that’s roughly 30 pints wasted, or about £75 a week in unmeasured cost. Poor line cleaning leaves old beer in the lines, which means the first pint of a new cask pull is flat or tastes wrong and gets scrapped. Gas pressure too low means you’re pulling slow pints and wasting time; too high and you’re pouring loose, foamy beer and wasting product.

Dip every cask and partial keg at the same time each week (I use Friday morning), record the dip, and reconcile against till pints sold the same day. If your dip says you should have 250 pints remaining and you sold 40, the new keg opened this week should show 290 pints. If it shows 280, you’ve got 10 pints unaccounted for—either as waste, spoilage, or measuring error. Again, you catch it the same week, not three months later.

Stock ‘theft’ is usually measurement error and forgotten wastage

Most pub licensees assume stock loss is deliberate theft. It rarely is. The bigger culprit is forgotten wastage—a dropped bottle, a customer’s spilled pint that gets comped, a tap line that’s left open, a spirit that’s tasted too many times during a shift. These things happen constantly in a busy pub, but if they’re not recorded, they show up as stock loss. Add in measurement error (a scale that’s not calibrated, a till that doesn’t register a void correctly, a cask dip that’s 10 litres out), and you’ve got enough “loss” to account for most variance without a single pound being pocketed by staff.

This is why a proper weekly count matters: it teaches you where the real waste is. Once you start measuring, you see patterns. Maybe Tuesday nights are always 2–3 pints short because the new bartender is still learning. Maybe Saturdays are tight because it’s busy and voids aren’t being recorded. Maybe one spirit line is always down because someone’s consistently over-pouring. Once you see the pattern, you can fix it.

How to measure real stock loss

Real stock loss—the kind that matters—is measured by comparing what you physically have to what you sold, recorded on the same day. Here’s the formula: Opening Stock + Purchases − Closing Stock = Usage. If Usage is higher than EPOS Sales (adjusted for comps and voids), you’ve got loss. If it’s lower, you’ve either over-recorded your opening stock, under-recorded your purchase, or over-valued your closing stock.

The most effective way to catch real stock loss is to run a weekly partial count on the lines you’re most concerned about (usually spirits and kegs), reconcile against till data the same day, and hold a monthly full stock count. Most pubs can do a weekly spirits and draught count in 45 minutes if they’ve got a proper system. A monthly full count takes a morning, tops. The quarterly or six-monthly stocktake that most pubcos require can still happen, but it’s a compliance checkpoint, not your profit tool.

When I built a simple count routine around a dipstick and a set of scales at my own pub, the weekly variance went from guesswork to a number I could trust within a fortnight. Within two months, I’d identified where the real waste was happening and tightened controls. My variance dropped from 3% to under 1%, which clawed back nearly 2 GP points by the end of the year. That’s not magic—it’s measurement.

The weekly count that catches everything

A weekly count doesn’t need to be complicated. Here’s what I do:

• Every Friday morning (same time every week): Dip every cask and partial keg in the cellar. Record the dip and the date opened. Use a proper dipstick, not guesswork.
• Weigh every open spirit bottle. Record the weight and reconcile against the weight recorded when you opened it. Do this twice a week (Wednesday and Friday) to catch mid-week problems.
• Reconcile against till data the same day. Pull your till void and comp report. Match pints sold (net of voids) to cask usage. Match spirits poured to spirit bottles used. Do this on the day you count, not a week later.
• Record the numbers in one place. A spreadsheet is fine, but a proper count sheet or app is better because it forces consistency and stops you from forgetting things.
• Review the variance weekly. If you’re over or under 2%, investigate why. If it’s over 3%, you’ve got a problem that needs immediate attention.

A StockTap pub stock app removes the spreadsheet friction and forces you to reconcile till data on the same day. You can’t fudge the numbers or skip a week because the system won’t let you. But even a disciplined spreadsheet works if you stick to it.

The key is consistency, not perfection. A 1% variance week-on-week is normal and acceptable. What you’re watching for is when the variance trends up or when a specific line is consistently out. That’s when you dig deeper.

Moving from spreadsheets to a system that works

Most pubs I’ve worked with start with a spreadsheet because it’s free and feels simple. Then it becomes a mess. Someone forgets to update it, numbers get entered in the wrong column, a formula breaks and nobody notices, and before long you’re looking at data you don’t trust. The real cost of a spreadsheet isn’t the time you spend on it—it’s the confidence you lose in the numbers.

The jump from spreadsheet to a proper system doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. You need three things: a way to record physical stock (dips, weights, bottle counts), a way to pull till data (voids, comps, sales by category), and a way to reconcile them daily. That’s it. You don’t need a £300-a-month pub management platform if you only need stock tracking. You need something simple that forces you to measure the same thing every week and compare it to your till.

The objection I hear most often is “I don’t have time to stocktake every week.” Fair point—you’re busy. But a weekly 45-minute count beats a monthly 3-hour count or a quarterly 6-hour stocktake. It’s easier on your head, easier on your staff, and you catch problems before they compound. More importantly, once you’ve run a few weeks of proper counts, the process becomes automatic. Your brain learns where to look and what to expect. By week four, you’re moving faster because you know what you’re looking for.

The other objection is “my spreadsheet works fine.” Maybe it does. But I guarantee it’s slower and less reliable than a system built specifically for this job. SmartPubTools was built by a working pub landlord who got fed up with the same spreadsheet problems you’re probably facing now. If your spreadsheet is genuinely working, keep it. But most aren’t—they just feel familiar.

Once you’ve got a reliable weekly count, you can build real financial discipline on top of it. Your margin targets become realistic because they’re based on measured data, not guesswork. Your stock variance sits between 1–2%, which stops your GP surprises. And your year-end stocktake becomes a compliance checkpoint, not an audit of how much money you actually lost.