Every restaurant has a number, the sales it must hit just to keep the lights on, before a single dollar of profit. Most owners have never calculated it precisely, which is exactly why slow months turn into a scramble. This free break-even calculator shows you that number in plain terms: how much you need to sell each month, each day, and how many guests that actually means.
Enter your fixed costs, your variable cost percentages, and your average check, and you’ll see your monthly and daily break-even sales, the number of covers you need per day, and how much of every dollar is left over to cover those fixed costs. Add a profit goal and it’ll show you what it takes to clear it. It’s the clearest way to know whether your targets are realistic or where they need to be.
Unlock the monthly and daily sales — and guest count — you need to break even.
It’s the level of sales at which your total revenue exactly covers your total costs, you’re neither making nor losing money. Every dollar of sales below that point is a loss; every dollar above it contributes to profit. Knowing it tells you the minimum you need to survive and the threshold where you start to actually earn.
The formula is fixed costs divided by your contribution margin. Contribution margin is the share of each sales dollar left after variable costs (food, hourly labor, card fees). So if your variable costs eat 53 cents of every dollar, your contribution margin is 47%, and you divide your monthly fixed costs by 0.47 to get the sales you need to break even.
It’s what’s left of each sales dollar after variable costs, available to cover fixed costs and then profit. A higher contribution margin means each sale does more work, so you break even at lower volume. You raise it by lowering food cost, tightening variable labor, or increasing prices which is why those levers move your break-even point so much.
The calculator works that out for you: it takes your daily break-even sales and divides by your average check. So if you need $1,700 a day and your average check is $32, that’s about 54 guests a day. It turns an abstract dollar figure into something you can actually picture on the floor and staff against.
Three levers. Cut fixed costs (renegotiate rent, trim salaried overhead), improve contribution margin (lower food cost, control hourly labor, adjust pricing), or raise your average check (upselling, menu engineering). Even small shifts compound dropping food cost a few points or trimming a fixed expense can meaningfully reduce the sales you need every month.
Yes, it’s free. The figures you enter stay in your browser and aren’t stored. When you unlock your results, you’re sharing your contact details so we can send them over, your cost numbers themselves aren’t part of that.
