How many employees does a restaurant need per shift?

Written by Roster Flow. Published 25 June 2026.

Too few people on a Saturday and food waits at the pass, tables wait for their bills and your best staff go home worn out. Too many on a Tuesday and the wage bill eats the takings. The right number sits between the two, and it is different for every restaurant, every service and every half hour. This post sets out a way to find it from your own figures, with a worked Saturday dinner. The rest of the week’s roster is covered in the restaurant rostering guide.

Why there is no standard number

You will find figures quoted for tables per server or covers per cook. Treat any number you did not measure yourself with caution, because the work behind each guest varies a great deal between venues.

• Service style. Plates carried to the table, courses paced by a server and wine poured at the table take far more floor time than ordering at the counter.
• Menu. A short menu with the prep done ahead lets one cook send out more plates than a long menu cooked to order.
• Layout. A long walk from the pass to the far tables, or a bar at the other end of the room, adds time to every trip.
• Experience. A team that has worked together for a year gets through more than one with two new starters.

That is why the method below starts with your bookings and your past services, and finishes with you checking the result against what actually happened.

Step 1: Forecast guests by the half hour

The number that decides staffing is not how many guests you expect over the night, but how many are seated at the same time. Work it out in three parts.

1. Take the bookings for each half hour, and add the walk ins that service usually gets at that time, from your booking system or point of sale.
2. Work out how long a typical table stays, from past bookings or the time bills are paid. If tables stay 90 minutes, a guest who arrives at 6:30 is still seated at 7:00 and at 7:30.
3. For each half hour, add the guests arriving in it to the guests still seated from earlier arrivals.

With a 90 minute stay, the guests seated in any half hour are the arrivals in that half hour plus the arrivals in the two before it. The worked example below does this for a whole Saturday night.

Step 2: Decide how many guests each role can look after

Next, decide what one person in each role can handle in your venue at a steady pace, not a heroic one. Look back at services that went well and services that fell behind, and note how many guests were seated and who was on. Write the figures down and change them as you learn.

Round every figure up to whole people. If one server looks after 20 seated guests and 45 are seated, that is 3 servers, not 2.25.

Step 3: Add the roles that do not depend on trade

Some positions are needed from the moment the doors open until they close, however few guests come in. Together they are the minimum crew for a service:

• Someone in charge of the service, with the keys and the authority to make decisions
• Enough cooks to cook every dish on the menu, even if only one table orders it
• Someone who can serve at the bar, if it is open
• Someone to open and someone to close, so nobody sets up or locks up alone

The minimum crew sets the floor under every half hour. The figures from Step 2 only add people above it.

Step 4: Turn half hours into shifts

You now have the number of people each role needs in each half hour. The last step is to cover those numbers with shifts people can actually work, and three things push the answer above the bare numbers.

• Minimum shift lengths. A person needed for one hour at the peak cannot be rostered for one hour. Awards set a minimum, as the table below shows.
• Setting up and packing down. Each person needs time to set up before they are needed and to finish their station afterwards.
• Breaks. Under the Restaurant Industry Award 2020, a shift of 5 hours or more comes with an unpaid meal break of at least 30 minutes, taken after the first hour of work and within the first 6 hours (clause 16.2). Somebody has to cover it, so plan breaks before the doors open or after the peak.

Confirm which award applies to you with the Fair Work Ombudsman’s Find my award tool, and see minimum engagement in the glossary for what the term means. The staff coverage calculator sets the people you need in each half hour against the shifts you have drawn up, so any gap or surplus stands out.

A worked example: Saturday dinner for an 80 seat restaurant

A restaurant seats 80. On Saturday it opens for dinner at 5:30 pm, seats its last table at 9:00 and closes at 10:30. From past Saturdays, the owner knows a table stays about 90 minutes, one server comfortably looks after 20 seated guests, and one cook keeps up with 30, with at least 2 cooks while orders are coming in. A supervisor runs the floor all night and looks after the last tables once only one server is needed. The figures are this owner’s, not a standard.

The 130 guests never fill the room: the most seated at once is 70, from 7:00 to 8:00. The owner then draws up shifts to cover the table, adding a head chef for prep, a kitchen hand and a bartender, and rostering meal breaks for every shift of 5 hours or more.

That is 42.5 paid hours for 130 guests: 19.5 in the kitchen (7.5, 5.5, 2 and 4.5) and 23 on the floor (5.5, 4.5, 3.5, 2.5, 2 and 5). Every half hour has at least the servers and cooks the first table asks for, and the supervisor covers the bar during the bartender’s break.

Two shifts run longer than the bare numbers, and both show minimum engagement at work. The fourth server is needed only from 7:00 to 8:00, but a casual must be engaged and paid for at least 2 hours under clause 11.3, so the shift runs to 9:00 and there are 4 servers where 3 would do from 8:00. The third cook is also needed only from 7:00 to 8:00, so their 2 hours start at 6:30 to set up before the rush, and their last half hour lets the second cook take a meal break at 8:00 without the kitchen dropping below 2.

If the owner kept these shifts every Saturday whatever the bookings, a 90 guest Saturday would carry the same wage bill as this one. Rebuilding the first table from each week’s bookings is what keeps the roster tied to the trade.

Quiet shifts: roster the minimum crew

On a quiet afternoon or a Tuesday lunch, the same method gives a different answer: the figures from Step 2 ask for fewer people than the minimum crew, so the minimum crew is the roster. That makes it the number most worth questioning. For each quiet service, ask:

• Could one person cover two roles, such as the supervisor serving tables or a cook who also washes up, if they are competent to do it?
• Could the kitchen run a shorter menu, so fewer cooks can cover it?
• Does the service earn its wage cost at all, or would opening later or closing between lunch and dinner cost less?

Covering two roles can change what a person is paid when one of them is a higher classification. Rostering kitchen and front of house employees explains the award rules for moving people between the kitchen and the floor.

Check the number against the wage cost

Once the shifts are drawn up, cost them. The roster cost calculator costs the week by person and by day from your hours and rates, and the labour cost percentage calculator shows wages as a share of the sales you expect. Saturday, Sunday and public holiday hours are paid at higher rates under the Restaurant Industry Award (clause 24.2), so the same shifts cost more on a weekend than on a weekday. The current rates are on the Restaurant Industry Award pay rates page.

If the share is higher than the business can carry, go back through the steps rather than cutting a name at random. Check whether your figures per role are cautious, whether shifts could start later or finish earlier, and whether a minimum engagement is stretching a shift beyond what the trade needs, as with the fourth server above.

Review last week before building next week

A forecast is a guess until the service has happened. After each week, compare the hours rostered with the hours worked for each service, and note who was sent home early, who was asked to stay and who was called in. A service that always runs over is short of people, and one where people are always sent home early has too many. The roster vs actual hours tool puts rostered and worked hours side by side for each person.

Roster Flow handles the week around the roster: availability and leave from staff phones, the roster published to everybody at once, clock ins that become timesheets, and approved hours sent to Xero, MYOB or a CSV file. See how it works for restaurants.

A quick checklist

• Guests are forecast by the half hour from bookings and walk ins, not for the night as a whole
• The figures for guests per server and per cook are your own, written down and reviewed
• The minimum crew is on for every hour the doors are open
• Every figure is rounded up to whole people
• Shifts meet the award’s minimum engagement and include time to set up
• Meal breaks are rostered for shifts of 5 hours or more, before the doors open or after the peak
• The week is costed, with weekend hours shown separately, before it is published
• Rostered and worked hours are compared once the week is over

Sources

• Fair Work Commission: Restaurant Industry Award 2020 [MA000119]
• Fair Work Commission: Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020 [MA000009]
• Fair Work Commission: Fast Food Industry Award 2020 [MA000003]
• Fair Work Ombudsman: find my award

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