About 3p in every pound. That's the 2026 figure for a wet-led UK pub from money.co.uk's modelling on British Beer and Pub Association cost data, down from 5p in 2025 and 7p in 2024. On a pub taking £5,000 a week over the bar, that's roughly £150 a week, or £7,800 a year, left after drink, wages, energy, rates and rent. Wetherspoon, the biggest operator in the country, made 2.6p in the pound before tax last year. If you've ever been told pubs are coining it at £5 a pint, this is the answer.
I get why customers think it. They see the price of a pint go up every year and assume it lands in the landlord's pocket. Very little of it does. Here's where it actually goes, what it looks like on an ordinary week, and the handful of costs that can wipe out the whole 3p on their own.
Where the pound goes
The modelling was published in March 2026 by money.co.uk's business current account team, using BBPA cost data. Per pound a customer spends in a wet-led pub:
| Where it goes | Out of every £1 |
|---|---|
| Drink and food from the wholesaler | 41p |
| Wages | 31p |
| Utilities | 4p |
| Business rates | 3p |
| Left before rent | 6p |
| Rent, typically about half of that | 3p |
| Left at the end | 3p |
The published version doesn't itemise everything, so the lines don't add up to a pound. VAT, repairs, insurance, card fees and the rest sit in the gap. Fair enough for a headline model. Just don't treat it as anybody's actual accounts.
One word in the original reporting trips people up. They call the 6p "gross profit". That isn't the GP% on your stock report. Your lager might run at 65% GP, which is the margin on the drink alone before you've paid a single member of staff. The 6p is what's left after wages, energy and rates as well. Both numbers are true, and mixing them up is how a licensee ends up thinking a 65% GP pub must be doing fine. I've laid the different GP numbers side by side in how to read your GP report.
What 3p looks like on a £5,000 week
Same percentages, applied to a local taking £5,000 a week over the bar. My arithmetic on their shares, nothing more:
| Line | Per week | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Takings | £5,000 | £260,000 |
| Drink and food | £2,050 | £106,600 |
| Wages | £1,550 | £80,600 |
| Utilities | £200 | £10,400 |
| Business rates | £150 | £7,800 |
| Left before rent | £300 | £15,600 |
| Rent | £150 | £7,800 |
| Left | £150 | £7,800 |
A quarter of a million through the till and under eight grand at the end of it. If you're a tenant running the place as a sole trader, that last line is usually where your own living comes from, because what you draw out isn't a wage in the accounts. The model doesn't say whether the licensee's own pay sits inside the 31% or not, so treat the £150 as a ceiling on what's left for you, not a floor.
The biggest operator does no better
You might think scale fixes this. Wetherspoon's results for the year to 26 July 2026 say otherwise. Revenue of £2,238m across 792 pubs, profit before tax of £58.6m, before one-off items. That's 2.6p in the pound, before corporation tax. Per pub it works out at roughly £2.8m of sales a year, about £54,000 a week, for around £74,000 of profit before tax.
Their own tax table is the bit worth reading twice. £891m in taxes of one kind or another, 39.8% of sales, about £1.13m a pub. Forty pence of every pound goes to the Treasury, the pub keeps under three. I went through those results in full in the Wetherspoon results guide, and the pint-level version of the same sum, £1.39 of tax in a £5.34 pint, is in the average pint price guide.
The costs that can eat the whole 3p
When your profit is £150 a week, small percentages stop being small. Against the £5,000 week:
| Cost | Per week | Share of the £150 |
|---|---|---|
| 1% of takings lost to stock you can't account for | £50 | A third |
| 2% of takings in drinks poured that never go through the till | £100 | Two thirds |
| Card fees at 1.69% if every sale is on card | £84.50 | More than half |
| February's duty rise (money.co.uk estimate) | £35 | Nearly a quarter |
| Sky Sports at the cheapest published pub bill, £754.38 a month | £174 | All of it, and then some |
Some of these are already inside the 3p model. Card fees and duty are costs every pub pays, so don't take them off twice. The point of the table is scale. The 2% line is Vianet's finding from 11,000 sites that about 2% of drinks poured never made it through the till. Old data, 2019/20, but nobody has published anything bigger since. If that's your pub, it's two thirds of your profit disappearing without anyone noticing.
The Sky line is why I keep saying a sports subscription has to bring in its own trade. At £174 a week it costs more than the whole profit on this model, so every match needs extra pints through the door just to stand still. The pints-per-week break-even is in the Sky Sports guide, and the per-pint cost of card fees is in the card machine fees guide.
Where the model is too neat
It's an average for a wet-led pub, built by a current account comparison site from trade body cost data. It isn't your accounts, and some pubs will be a long way either side of it.
A food-led pub has a different cost shape altogether. A free house pays no rent but usually has a mortgage instead. A managed pub pays no rent either, but the manager is on a salary and the profit belongs to the company. A tied tenant pays rent and higher wholesale prices together, which is why the tied price rise guide exists. And the business rates figure is moving: the 20% cut for pubs from April 2027 is in the business rates guide. At 3p in the pound, a rates line falling from 3p to about 2.4p is worth having.
So use it as a mirror, not a target. If your own accounts say you're keeping more than 3p, good. If they say less, the table above tells you where to look first.
The pennies you can actually move
You can't do much about duty or VAT. You can do something about the gap between what you bought and what you sold, and at 3p in the pound it's the biggest lever in the building. One point of stock loss is a third of the profit. Clawing it back doesn't need a price rise, which is just as well, because most of us are already near the ceiling on what the locals will pay.
That means a weekly count on the lines that matter and waste written down when it happens, instead of guessed at the end of the month. I've set out the order I'd do it in cutting GP losses in 30 days. If you'd rather see your own figure first, put your prices into the free GP calculator. StockTap does the weekly count part, by weight or tenths, and shows the variance product by product so you know which line to look at.
What I'd do this week
Get last year's accounts out and work out your own pence in the pound: net profit divided by takings. Then take 1% of a normal week's takings and hold it next to that profit figure. If the 1% is a third of what you keep, or more, stock control isn't admin. It's the job.
Common questions
How much profit does a UK pub make?
For a wet-led pub in 2026, about 3p in every pound spent, on money.co.uk's modelling of BBPA cost data. That's around £150 a week, or £7,800 a year, on a pub taking £5,000 a week.
How much profit does a pub make on a pint?
On the 3p model, roughly 16p on a £5.34 pint once drink, wages, energy, rates and rent are paid. The GP on the pint itself is much higher, often around 65%, but that's before any of those other costs.
How much does a pub make a week?
It depends on takings. On the 2026 model a pub keeps about 3% of what goes over the bar, so £5,000 a week in takings leaves roughly £150 after costs and rent. Wetherspoon averaged about £54,000 a week in sales per pub last year and kept 2.6p in the pound before tax.
Why are pub profits so low when pints cost so much?
Because most of the price goes elsewhere before the landlord sees it. VAT and duty alone take about £1.39 of a £5.34 pint, and wholesale, wages, energy, rates and rent take most of the rest.
What is a good net profit for a pub?
Anything above 3p in the pound is ahead of the 2026 average for a wet-led pub on current modelling. Compare your own net profit divided by takings with that figure, and look at stock loss first if you're below it.
Sources
- 3p profit per £1 in 2026, 5p in 2025, 7p in 2024; wholesale 41%, wages 31%, utilities 4%, business rates 3%; about 6p before rent, rent around 50% of that; duty rise adding about £35 a week; £5.17 lager pint used in their per-pint figure: money.co.uk analysis of BBPA cost data, reported by Caterer, Licensee and Hotelier News, 19 March 2026 and Business Matters, 24 March 2026.
- Revenue £2,238m, 792 pubs, profit before tax and separately disclosed items £58.6m, taxes of £891m equal to 39.8% of sales and about £1.13m per pub: J D Wetherspoon plc preliminary results for the 52 weeks to 26 July 2026.
- About 2% of drinks poured not going through the till, 11,000 sites: Vianet Insight Report 2019/20 (PDF, hosted by Cask Marque).
- £5.34 average pint and £1.39 of VAT and duty in it: Morning Advertiser pint price survey, May 2026, worked in the average pint price guide. Card fee of 1.69% from the card machine fees guide. Lowest published Sky pub bill of £754.38 a month from the Sky Sports guide. 20% rates cut from April 2027 from the business rates guide.
- Author's arithmetic: the £5,000-a-week table, the per-year figures, Wetherspoon per pub and pence in the pound, every share-of-profit figure, and the 16p per £5.34 pint.