How Many Labor Hours Should You Schedule?

Jan 16

A Practical Answer for Restaurant Operators

It’s Sunday afternoon. You’re sitting down to write next week’s schedule.

You know your projected sales. You know who’s available. You have a labor target you’re supposed to hit.

But when it comes to the actual number—how many total labor hours should go on the schedule for Tuesday, for Friday, for the week—you’re guessing.

And you know you’re guessing. That’s why it feels so unsatisfying.

Why This Question Never Gets Answered Directly

Ask anyone in the restaurant industry how many labor hours you should schedule and you’ll get some version of “it depends.”

Depends on your concept. Depends on your sales. Depends on your service style. Depends on your menu.

All of that is true—and none of it helps when you’re trying to build an actual schedule.

The industry gives you targets to aim for (“keep labor under 30%”) and reports to review afterward (“you ran 31.2% last week”). What it doesn’t give you is the number you actually need before the week starts:

How many labor hours should go on the schedule?

That’s the gap operators live in every week.

Why Averages and Benchmarks Fail

You’ve heard the benchmarks.

“Full-service should be 30–35%.”
“Fast casual should be 25–28%.”

These numbers aren’t just unhelpful—they’re misleading.

They ignore how your restaurant actually operates.

A scratch kitchen needs more labor per dollar of sales than a heat-and-serve concept. A full-service restaurant with high-touch service has different staffing needs than a counter-service spot. A $50 average check creates a completely different labor dynamic than a $15 check.

When you chase a benchmark that wasn’t built for your operation, one of two things happens:

You’re always over and assume you’re doing something wrong
Or you hit the number and service quietly suffers

Neither outcome tells you whether the schedule itself was right.

The Difference Between Labor Percentage and Labor Hours

This is where most operators get stuck.

Labor percentage is a ratio.
It’s calculated after the fact: labor dollars divided by sales dollars.

Labor hours are a decision.
They’re what you actually put on the schedule. They determine how much cash leaves your account on payday.

You don’t schedule percentages. You schedule hours.

The percentage is the result. The hours are the input.

If you’re making decisions (hours) while staring at results (percentages), you’re working backward—building next week’s schedule based on last week’s outcome and hoping it works out again.

What you actually need is a way to go from projected sales → target hours, directly, before the week starts.

What Actually Determines Required Labor Hours

The number of hours your restaurant needs isn’t random. It’s driven by a few core factors.

Sales Volume

More sales generally require more labor, but not in a straight line. At low volume, you still need a minimum crew. At moderate volume, efficiency improves. At high volume, you hit capacity limits and need to add people again.

Operating Hours

A restaurant open 7am–10pm needs more total labor than one open 11am–9pm. But not all hours are equally productive. The lunch rush and the mid-afternoon lull shouldn’t be staffed the same way.

Service Model

Full service, counter service, fast casual, fine dining—each has a different relationship between sales and labor. These aren’t benchmarks; they’re structural realities of how work gets done.

Menu Complexity

Prep time, ticket times, number of components, and execution difficulty all affect how many labor hours it takes to produce a dollar of sales.

Together, these factors create a multiplier specific to your operation—a way to convert projected sales into required labor hours.

A Simple Way to Sanity-Check Your Hours

You can approximate this without any fancy tools.

Pull the last four weeks of data. For each day, note:

Actual sales
Total labor hours worked (not scheduled)

Calculate the ratio: hours ÷ sales.

You’ll get a number like 0.014 or 0.017. That’s roughly how many labor hours your restaurant has been using per dollar of sales.

Multiply that number by your projected sales for next week. That gives you a rough target for total hours.

This calculation gives you a starting range—not a decision you should trust without adjustment. It reflects how your restaurant has been staffed in the past, including whatever inefficiencies already exist.

It’s useful for orientation. It’s not something to blindly lock into the schedule.

Common Signs You’re 4–6 Hours Heavy

Most operators aren’t massively overstaffed. They’re slightly heavy—by a handful of hours spread across the week.

Here’s what that looks like:

Slow days look like medium days.
Monday does $2,800. Wednesday does $3,400. Both have 52 hours scheduled. That difference in sales with identical staffing means one of those days is wrong.
You’re cutting people almost every shift.
Cuts feel like good management. In reality, they’re evidence that the schedule was heavy to begin with.
Staff is underutilized during predictable lulls.
If Tuesday at 3pm always looks the same—standing around, finding things to clean—you have more bodies than work.
Prep never flexes.
If prep hours stay fixed while sales fluctuate, the schedule is operating on habit, not demand.
You can’t explain how you arrived at the hours.
Pick any day from last week. If the answer to “why 58 hours instead of 52?” is “that’s what we usually do,” you’re guessing.

The Point Most Operators Get Stuck

These signs tell you that something is off.

They still don’t tell you how many hours should actually be there.

That’s the missing piece.

I help operators calculate the right number of labor hours before next week’s schedule is written—not after the money’s already gone. A number derived from your data, calibrated to how your restaurant actually runs, so you know what “right” looks like before payroll hits.

If you’re tired of guessing and hoping it works out, that’s the problem I solve. Maybe your Hitting Your Labor Target but Still Broke? Here’s Why

Kwan Howard