Catering Quote Calculator
Enter the real costs of the job — food, staffing, transport and hire — and get a quoted price that carries your target margin instead of hoping for one.
What a catering quote actually has to cover
Most catering quotes are built backwards. Someone asks for a price per head, the operator names a number that sounds competitive against the last enquiry, and the costing happens afterwards — if it happens at all. The job then either makes money by accident or loses it quietly, absorbed into a busy month where nobody separates the event from the restaurant.
A defensible quote works in the other direction. You cost the job in full, decide what share of the price you intend to keep, and let the arithmetic produce the number you send. That price may turn out to be uncompetitive, and that is useful information: it tells you to change the specification rather than to accept a job that cannot pay.
Those four lines are the whole of the job's direct cost. Everything else — your kitchen rent, insurance, the salaried chef, the office phone — is overhead that the margin has to cover. That is why margin here is not profit in your pocket. It is the contribution the job makes towards fixed costs first, and profit only after those are met.
Getting the per-head food cost right
Food cost per head is the input people get most wrong, almost always in the same direction. The usual error is to cost the menu from recipe cards written for plated restaurant service and forget that catering behaves differently: portions are served buffet-style or passed, guests take more when they serve themselves, and you cannot run out.
Build the number from a proper recipe costing for each dish on the menu, then add two adjustments. The first is yield loss, which is already in a good recipe cost but is frequently omitted in the rush of quoting. The second is the service buffer — the extra you produce so that the last table is served the same food as the first. On a canapé or buffet menu that buffer is commonly 10–15% of the base cost, and on a plated menu with a confirmed headcount it can be much lower.
For a 120-guest event at $18.50 per head, the food line is $2,220. That single figure is usually the largest cost on the job, and a $2 error per head moves it by $240 — more than most operators' entire transport budget for the event.
One discipline worth keeping: quote the food cost per head from the menu you have actually agreed, not from a generic package. Menus drift upwards during negotiation, and a quote priced against the original specification is a quote that loses money when the client adds a cheese course.
Costing the labour honestly
Labour is the line that turns profitable-looking catering jobs into losses, because the hours quoted are almost never the hours worked. The instinct is to count service hours — the four hours the team is on site with guests in the room. The actual bill covers prep in the days before, packing and loading, travel in both directions, setup, service, breakdown, the return journey, and unloading and cleaning back at base.
A four-hour event routinely consumes twelve to fourteen paid hours per person once all of that is counted. Quote the four and you have understated the labour line by roughly two-thirds.
The rate needs the same honesty. Use a loaded rate that includes payroll taxes, insurance, holiday accrual and any overtime or weekend premium, because catering happens disproportionately on evenings and weekends when premiums apply. A base wage of $22 can easily be $28 loaded, and using the base figure understates a 48-hour job by $288.
If you are unsure what your loaded rate really is, the same logic that drives your labour cost percentage in the restaurant applies here: total payroll cost divided by hours paid, not wages divided by hours worked.
The costs that never reach the quote
Transport and equipment are small individually and material collectively, and they share the property of being invisible until the job is over. Vehicle hire, fuel, tolls, parking at a city venue, a second van because the first was full, a courier run for the item that was forgotten — on a mid-sized event this comfortably reaches $200–300.
Equipment is the larger of the two on most jobs. Chafing dishes, gas canisters, linen, crockery, glassware, cutlery, serving platters, disposables and packaging are all either hired or consumed, and hire companies charge by the day rather than by the hour, so a Saturday event often carries a Friday-to-Monday hire period.
- Hire quoted for the full period, not the event duration. Weekend jobs frequently span three chargeable days.
- Breakage and loss on hired glassware and crockery, which is charged back after the event and never appears in the original quote.
- Venue-specific charges — loading dock fees, lift access, security passes, mandatory in-house staff at some sites.
- Ice, gas, cleaning materials and waste removal, all consumed on the day and all genuinely part of the job.
- The recce visit, if the venue is unfamiliar. It is paid time and vehicle cost spent on this job specifically.
None of these is large enough to argue about. Together they are routinely 8–12% of the direct cost of an event, which on a job priced at a 25% margin is close to half the margin.
Turning cost into price
Once the four cost lines are in place, the price follows from the margin you decide to hold. The important detail is that margin is taken as a share of the price, not added as a percentage of the cost — the same distinction that separates markup from margin when you set a menu price.
Take the worked example: $2,220 food, $1,344 labour (48 hours at $28), $220 transport and $340 equipment gives a direct cost of $4,124. At a 25% target margin the price is $4,124 ÷ 0.75 = $5,498.67, or $45.82 per head, and the job contributes $1,374.67 towards overhead and profit.
Had you added 25% to the cost instead, you would have quoted $5,155 and kept a margin of 20%, not 25%. On this one job the difference is $344 — roughly the entire equipment budget.
Choosing a margin you can defend
| Target margin | When it makes sense |
|---|---|
| 10–15% | Repeat corporate work, drop-off only, no service staff, predictable and low-risk. |
| 20–30% | The normal band for staffed events at a known venue with a confirmed headcount. |
| 30–40% | Weddings, unfamiliar venues, bespoke menus, tight timelines — anything where surprises are likely. |
| Below 10% | Only for strategic reasons you can name. One overrun turns this into a loss. |
Margin should scale with risk rather than with what you think the client will accept. A drop-off buffet at an office you have served ten times carries almost no execution risk; a marquee wedding at a site with no power and a single access road carries a great deal. Charging both at the same margin means the easy jobs subsidise the hard ones, and you will end up winning mostly hard ones.
The badge on this calculator reports food and labour as a share of the quoted price — the job's own prime cost, the same measure you would use on the restaurant through the prime cost calculator. Below about 55% the job has room to absorb an overrun. Above about 68% there is no slack at all, and any variation on the day comes straight out of the margin.
Finally, remember that a catering margin is not net profit. It is contribution towards the fixed costs you carry whether the event happens or not, which is why the break-even question matters as much for a catering arm as for the dining room. Understanding how much overhead each job needs to carry is what stops a full calendar of low-margin work from being mistaken for a good year.
Frequently asked questions
Should I quote per head or as a total?
Cost the job as a total and present it per head if the client expects that. Costing per head hides fixed job costs such as transport and equipment hire, which do not scale with guest numbers and therefore make small events look far more profitable than they are.
What food cost percentage should a catering job run at?
Typically 25–35% of the quoted price, higher than a restaurant because the labour and logistics attached to each dollar of catering revenue are heavier. Judge the job on food and labour combined rather than on food alone.
How many staff hours should I allow for an event?
Count every paid hour: prep, packing, travel both ways, setup, service, breakdown and cleaning at base. A four-hour event commonly runs to twelve or more paid hours per person, which is why service hours alone understate the labour badly.
Do I charge for the site visit and the tasting?
Both are real costs on that job. Large events usually justify charging for a tasting, often credited back against the final invoice if the booking confirms. If you absorb them, build them into the margin rather than pretending they are free.
How should I handle guest numbers that change?
Quote against a guaranteed minimum with a cut-off date, typically seven to ten days out, after which the client pays for the guaranteed number regardless. Your food ordering and staffing commitments are made at that point and cannot be reversed.
Should overhead be added to each job?
Not as a separate line. The margin is what covers overhead. Adding an overhead allocation and then a margin on top double-counts it, which is the most common reason quotes come out uncompetitive without anyone knowing why.
Is it worth taking a job at a very low margin to fill a quiet week?
Sometimes, provided the price still exceeds the direct cost so the job contributes something to fixed costs. The risk is precedent: a client quoted at 8% margin will expect 8% next time, and low-margin work leaves no room for the inevitable overrun.