What Is Good GP for a UK Pub in 2026

Last updated: 10 April 2026

Most UK pub owners have no idea what their gross profit actually is—and that’s costing them thousands every year. You pour drinks, count tills, and hope the numbers work out. But without tracking GP properly, you’re flying blind. I’ve seen pubs with identical footfall and revenue where one owner makes £40,000 profit and another makes £15,000. The difference? One knew their GP cold. The other didn’t.

In this article, I’m going to show you exactly what good GP looks like for a UK pub in 2026, why it matters more than net profit, and how to identify the hidden cost leaks that are dragging yours down.

What Is Gross Profit and Why It Matters

Gross profit is the revenue you take minus the cost of the goods you sold. That’s it. If you take £5,000 behind the bar and your cost of those drinks is £1,500, your gross profit is £3,500. Your GP percentage is 70%. That’s the one number that tells you whether your pub’s actual business model works.

Most pub owners confuse gross profit with net profit and make catastrophic decisions because of it. Net profit is what’s left after you’ve paid rent, rates, wages, utilities, insurance, and everything else. Gross profit is purely about the core business—can you sell drinks for more than they cost you?

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Why does this matter? Because net profit lies. I’ve seen pubs with £20,000 net profit that are actually in deep trouble. Why? Their GP was 55%. They were making £3 on every £5 of sales. One bad month of footfall, one rent increase, or one rates review and the whole thing collapses. Meanwhile, a pub with 70% GP can absorb cost shocks and still turn a profit.

Your GP tells you three critical things:

• Is your pricing right? If your GP is below 60%, you’re underpriced relative to your cost base.
• Is your cost control working? If it’s dropping month-on-month, you have a stock, waste, or shrinkage problem.
• Can your pub survive stress? Below 65% GP means one bad quarter could put you in the red.

At The Teal Farm, I was tracking net profit religiously. Looked great on paper. But when I started actually measuring GP by drink category, I discovered I was losing money on spirits and making it back on beer. The moment I saw that split, I could price correctly and moved GP from 64% to 71% in six weeks without raising a single price on best sellers. Just smarter pricing on the items where I had room.

Good GP Benchmarks for UK Pubs in 2026

The answer to “what is good GP” depends on your pub type, location, and customer base. But there are clear benchmarks.

Tier-1 Benchmark: The Industry Standard

65-75% is the healthy range for most UK pubs, with 70% as the realistic target for 2026. Any pub below 65% is operating with dangerously low margins. Any pub consistently above 75% is either massively over-pricing (and losing volume) or has genuinely exceptional cost control.

These figures come from pub accounting data across hundreds of venues. But—and this is critical—most pubs aren’t hitting 70%. Most are sitting between 60-65%, which means they have structural cost problems they haven’t identified.

By Pub Type

Your specific benchmark depends on what you’re serving:

• Community locals (beer-heavy, food minimal): 68-72% GP. Lower cost base, higher margins on volume.
• Food-focused pubs: 62-68% GP. Food brings volume but lower margin. Offset by higher per-head spend.
• Premium/gastropubs: 72-78% GP. Higher pricing power, but food cost is significant. Requires tight kitchen control.
• Wet-led city-centre bars: 75-82% GP. High volume, premium pricing, minimal food cost.
• Tied pubs (Pubco estates): 58-65% GP. Forced supplier, higher cost base, less pricing flexibility.

If you run a tied pub on a managed pubco agreement, your benchmarks are naturally lower because you have less control over supplier costs. But that doesn’t mean you should accept poor GP tracking. In fact, managing tied pub finances tightly is how you find the 2-3% improvement that turns a break-even pub into a profitable one.

The 2026 Reality Check

Energy costs, wage inflation, and business rates increases in 2026 mean more pubs are operating with thinner operating margins overall. This makes GP tracking more important, not less. Your gross profit is now your safety net. If you’re at 60% GP and energy costs jump 15%, you might drop into negative net profit. If you’re at 70% GP, you can absorb it.

How to Track and Measure Your GP Properly

Knowing what good GP looks like is useless if you’re not measuring it. Most UK pub owners track GP in one of three ways, all of which are wrong:

• Not at all. They assume if the till looks healthy, GP must be fine. It’s not.
• Monthly spreadsheet. They add up sales, guess at COGS, and call it done. The guessing part is where thousands disappear.
• POS system reports. They pull the standard GP report from their EPOS, which doesn’t account for waste, over-pouring, or shrinkage.

None of these catch the real problem: the gap between what you should have and what you actually have.

Real GP tracking works like this:

Step 1: Count Your Opening Stock (Physical, Not System)

Your EPOS tells you what you sold. But if you opened with incorrect stock figures, every GP calculation downstream is wrong. Go and actually count the bottles and kegs behind your bar and in your cellar. This is non-negotiable.

Step 2: Record Every Purchase

Every crate, every bottle, every keg that comes in goes on a purchase log. This is your opening stock plus purchases equals closing stock plus what you sold. Most pubs miss 20-30% of their purchases because suppliers send items without matching invoices, or invoices arrive weeks later. Set up a simple delivery log—one sheet, three columns: date, supplier, cost. Takes 30 seconds per delivery.

Step 3: Count Your Closing Stock (Physical)

Same as opening. Physical count, not system count. Every month. Most pubs do this once a year and are shocked to find £1,500-£3,000 in unaccounted-for stock.

Step 4: Calculate COGS and GP

COGS = Opening Stock + Purchases – Closing Stock. GP = (Revenue – COGS) / Revenue × 100.

If your physical closing stock doesn’t match your system, that gap is waste, spillage, over-pouring, or theft. You now know your real number.

Step 5: Track By Category

This is where the real value lies. Don’t just track total GP. Break it down: Cask ales, keg beers, spirits, wine, soft drinks, food. Each has a different margin profile. Most pubs don’t do this and miss that, for example, their cask ales are at 65% GP but their spirits are at 55% because they’re over-pouring or under-pricing.

Manual tracking of this is a nightmare. Most pub owners end up spending 15-20 hours a month on stock reconciliation and still don’t get accurate numbers. That’s why Pub Command Centre includes integrated stock and cost tracking—you log purchases once, counts are recorded, and your GP by category updates automatically. No formulas, no spreadsheet maintenance.

When I switched from spreadsheet tracking to real system-based tracking at The Teal Farm, I found £850/month in unaccounted-for costs within the first week. Most pub owners do. That’s not an outlier. That’s the norm.

Five Ways to Improve Your GP Without Raising Prices

Once you know your GP, the next question is: how do you move it from 62% to 70%? Most pub owners assume the only lever is raising prices. That’s wrong. Here are the five real levers:

1. Fix Your Over-Pouring

If you pour 50ml spirits and call it a 50ml shot, but your actual pour is 55ml (because your pourers are loose or your staff free-pour), that’s 10% margin loss on every spirit sold. Across 200 spirits per week, that’s £80-100 in lost GP weekly. A proper optic (measured pour) fixes this instantly. Cost: £15. ROI: immediate.

2. Identify Your Loss Leaders

Most pubs have 5-10 products they sell at a loss or paper-thin margins just because “they’re expected” or “the previous owner priced them.” Once you have category GP data, you see this. A £5 bottle of wine might be 35% GP because you bought it at cost. Replace it with a different £5 wine at 60% GP and you add £30-50/month with zero volume loss.

3. Control Waste and Shrinkage

Spillage, broken bottles, stock that expires, kegs that go flat—most pubs lose 3-5% of their stock value here. The gap between your closing physical count and your system count is this number. Once you know it, you can track it weekly and set targets. “We lost £150 in shrinkage this week—where did it go?” is a question that changes behavior. At The Teal Farm, making shrinkage visible reduced it from 4.2% to 1.8% in eight weeks, just through awareness.

4. Negotiate Your Supplier Costs

Most pubs never challenge their supplier costs. They take the first quote and assume it’s fixed. It’s not. Call three competitors’ suppliers, get their rates, and tell your current supplier. A 3-5% reduction in your COGS (which is very achievable if you’re not locked into a pubco tie) moves your GP up by 2 full percentage points. On £40,000 annual turnover of spirits, that’s £800.

5. Implement Dynamic Pricing by Category

This doesn’t mean raising all prices. It means pricing each category to its market rate. Your cask ales might be priced too high (losing volume). Your craft beers might be priced too low (leaving money on the table). Your wine by the glass might be 40% GP when the market supports 55%. Once you see the GP by category, you can price each optimally. No customer sees a “price rise”—they see you’ve introduced new options at different price points.

Common GP Mistakes UK Pub Owners Make

In 15 years of pub management and talking to hundreds of other owners, I see these patterns repeat:

Mistake 1: Confusing Revenue Growth With Profit Growth

You increase sales by 15% and assume profit increased 15%. It doesn’t. If your GP is 65% and you’ve added cost (extra staff wages, longer hours, rent increase), your absolute profit might have grown 5%. Worse, if you’ve actually taken on volume at lower margins (cheap promotions, happy hour), you’ve added work and reduced profit. Track GP religiously alongside revenue.

Mistake 2: Not Separating Food and Drink GP

If you run food, your overall pub GP will be lower (because food margins are genuinely thinner) than if you run wet-led. But most owners lump them together and assume something’s wrong. Break them apart. Your drink GP is probably closer to 70%. Your food GP is probably 55-60%. That’s normal. The problem is when you don’t know the split and can’t see if one is dragging down the other.

Mistake 3: Trusting EPOS Reports Without Physical Verification

Your EPOS tells you what you sold and what your system thinks you should have. It does not tell you what you actually have. The gap is where your real costs hide. A pub using proper cash flow forecasting will do physical counts. Pubs that rely purely on system data are always 3-8% out.

Mistake 4: Setting Prices Based on Gut Feel

You know what you think a pint should cost in your area. You’re usually wrong. Price based on GP targets and market positioning. If your target is 70% GP and a pint costs you £1.05, it needs to sell for at least £3.50. If you’re selling it for £3.20, you’re accepting 65% GP. That might be market-forced, but at least you know it’s deliberate, not accidental.

Mistake 5: Not Reviewing GP Monthly

Annual profit accounts are too late. You need to know your GP monthly, ideally weekly. Because once you see it trending down, you can act. Down from 70% to 68% in a month? Something changed. Over-pouring? Supplier cost increase? Theft? Waste spike? You need to find it that month, not discover it in March when you do your tax returns.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final Verdict

Good GP for a UK pub in 2026 is 70%. That’s your target. Below 65% and you’re operating with dangerously thin margins. Above 75% consistently and you’re either pricing inefficiently or have genuinely exceptional cost control.

But knowing the benchmark is useless without measuring yours accurately. And most UK pub owners aren’t. They’re relying on EPOS reports, spreadsheet estimates, and annual accounts. By then, six months of lost margin has already gone unnoticed.

The pubs that win are the ones doing monthly physical stock counts, tracking GP by category, and adjusting pricing and costs in real-time. They’re not spending extra time on this—they’ve just automated the tracking so the data is there when they need it, not something they have to build from scratch.

Start with one action: count your actual closing stock this month and compare it to your system figure. That gap is your reality check. Then decide if you’re going to keep tracking the guessed numbers, or measure properly.

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