Stolen and broken glasses: what they really cost a pub, in pints, and the five-minute count that shows where they're going

A plain toughened nonic pint glass costs about £1.09 before VAT, a nucleated one £1.39, and a decent stemmed wine glass can be £6.83. Lose six pint glasses and two wine glasses a week, to the car park or the glasswasher, and that's £20.20 a week, £1,050 a year. At £2.45 profit on a pint of lager, you're pulling 429 pints a year just to replace glass. Nobody counts it, because glass isn't on the stock sheet. That's the problem.

Research for Simply Business in February 2026 put a national number on the theft side: an estimated 38.1 million pint glasses taken from UK pubs in a year, worth about £133 million. Spread that across the roughly 44,500 pubs in the UK and it's rough as anything, but it works out at around 850 glasses and £3,000 a pub. Your pub won't be average. The point is you can't tell whether you're above it or below it until you count.

What a glass actually costs you

These are list prices from one UK catering supplier, before VAT, checked today. You might pay less on a bigger order, and branded glassware from a brewery is a different story (more on that below), but it gives you a real starting point.

Glass prices and the pints of lager profit to replace one

Glass	Price each (ex VAT)	Pints of profit to replace (at £2.45)
Nonic pint, toughened, CE marked (24 pack £26.05)	£1.09	0.4
Nonic pint, nucleated head booster, UKCA (24 pack £33.30)	£1.39	0.6
Average glass used in the Simply Business estimate	£3.50	1.4
Stemmed 250ml wine glass (24 pack £164)	£6.83	2.8

The wine glass is the one that hurts. One stemmed glass knocked off a table costs nearly three pints of profit. If you serve wine in big stemmed glasses because it sells the 250ml, that's fair enough, but it belongs in your wine pricing sums.

The weekly sum

Here's the illustrative week from the top of the page, worked through. Put your own numbers in.

• 6 plain nonic pint glasses at £1.09 = £6.54
• 2 stemmed wine glasses at £6.83 = £13.66
• Total: £20.20 a week, £1,050 a year
• At £2.45 gross profit a pint, that's 8.2 pints a week, 429 pints a year, sold purely to buy glass

Double it for a busy town-centre pub with a beer garden and a big screen and you're past £2,000 a year without trying. That's more than a lot of pubs spend on their music licence.

Why it never shows up anywhere

Glass doesn't go through the till and it isn't stock for resale, so it isn't on your stocktake. It turns up as a line on a supplier invoice every few months, "glassware, £187", which goes in the accounts as a cost and nobody asks why. The pub across the road might be spending half that and you'd never know.

It also hides behind other problems. A pub that's short of pint glasses on a Saturday night starts serving in whatever's clean, the wrong glass for the measure, or plastic, and the head on the draught gets worse. If you've ever wondered why the draught wastage jumps on your busiest night, a glasswasher that can't keep up because you're thirty glasses down is part of it.

The five-minute glass count

This is the bit I'd actually do. On stocktake day, after the count, count the glasses. Not every glass in the building down to the last shot glass, just the ones that cost money.

1. Pick your four or five glass types. Pint nonics, half pints, branded pints, wine glasses, highballs. Whatever you buy most of.
2. Set a par for each. How many you need clean on a Saturday at 9pm without waiting on the washer. Same idea as par levels for stock.
3. Count them on stocktake day. Shelves, glasswasher, under the bar, the beer garden, the function room, the cellar boxes. Write the totals on the back of the count sheet.
4. Write every breakage on the wastage log. One line: date, glass type, how. Your wastage log is the right place, it already sits by the bar.
5. Next stocktake, do the sum. Last count plus glasses bought, minus this count, is what went. Take off the breakages you logged. What's left walked.

That last line is the useful one. It splits the loss in two, and the two halves have completely different fixes.

Breakage or theft? The glass type tells you

The pattern usually shows itself quickly. Plain nonics break. Branded glasses walk. The same Simply Business research found which brands people took by region, and it was the big names: Guinness, Heineken, Stella Artois and Carling all featured. Nobody's taking home a plain toughened tumbler as a souvenir.

So if your count shows plain glasses vanishing and nothing logged as broken, look at the washer, the stacking and the end of the night. If it's the branded pint glasses and the stemmed wine glasses, it's customers, and it's worst on the busiest nights, in the garden and when the football's on.

Cutting breakage

None of these cost anything except a bit of habit:

• Don't stack glasses inside each other. Nonics are made not to jam, but stacked wine glasses and tumblers crack each other.
• Let the washer finish. Pulling a rack out mid-cycle and filling a hot glass with cold lager is the classic way to get a glass that cracks a day later.
• Never scoop ice with a glass. Use the scoop. A chip in the ice bucket means emptying the whole bucket, which is its own waste.
• Racks, not hands, at the end of the night. Carrying eight pint glasses in two hands is how you lose three.
• Record it when it happens. Not to blame anybody. A broken glass is a broken glass. You just can't fix what you can't see.

Cutting theft without being miserable about it

Here's an idea I've not seen anyone else suggest. If people want your branded pint glass that badly, put it on the till. A "glass to take home" button at £5, a little card on the bar that says so, and the staff can say it with a smile when someone's clearly got one under their coat. You turn a loss into a sale, and nobody has to have an argument. Check first if it's brewery-supplied glassware, because some suppliers expect it back or limit how many you get.

Other things that work:

• Plastic outside on the big days. Match days and beer garden afternoons are when glass leaves the building, and some licences require polycarbonate outside anyway. I've covered the rest of the planning in match-day promotion.
• Collect regularly. Glass left on outside tables goes home in handbags. Glass on the bar doesn't.
• Keep the good glasses for the good drinks. If the stemmed glass only comes out for the large wine and the gin, you've cut how many are in circulation without anyone noticing.

Branded glasses aren't free

A lot of licensees assume brewery glassware is free and endless. It isn't. Some comes with the product, then you buy the rest, and when the branded pint glasses run out you're buying plain ones at your own cost anyway. Count branded and plain separately so you know which you're actually spending on.

And if you're replacing glasses you serve draught in, buy ones with the CE or UKCA mark. A lined or brim-measure pint glass is a legal measure, which I've covered in the drink measures law guide. A cheap unmarked glass from a supermarket isn't the bargain it looks.

Where it fits in your numbers

Glass spend is a cost, not a stock variance, so it doesn't touch your GP%. But it's the same habit. Count it, write it down, compare it with last time. If you're already doing a regular stocktake, the glass count adds five minutes. If the number's tiny, brilliant, stop worrying about it. If it's £40 a week, you've just found a pint and a half of profit a day.

Common questions

How much does a pint glass cost a pub?

A plain toughened nonic pint glass is about £1.09 each before VAT bought in a 24 pack, and a nucleated head-booster version about £1.39. Stemmed wine glasses can be several pounds each.

How many pint glasses are stolen from UK pubs?

Research by Censuswide for Simply Business in February 2026 estimated 38.1 million pint glasses taken from UK pubs in a year, worth about £133 million at £3.50 a glass.

Should glasses be counted in a pub stocktake?

They aren't stock for resale so they don't belong in the stock value, but counting them on stocktake day takes a few minutes and is the only way to see how many are being broken or taken.

How do I stop customers taking pint glasses?

Collect glasses regularly, use polycarbonate outside on busy days, keep stemmed glasses for the drinks that need them, and consider selling branded glasses from the till so a loss becomes a sale.

Do replacement pint glasses need to be stamped?

If you serve draught beer in them as the measure, lined and brim-measure glasses must carry the crown stamp, the CE mark or the UKCA mark.