What’s a good GP% for a UK pub in 2026?

Short answer, mate: on drinks you want to be north of 65%. On food you’re doing well at 60–68%. And if your overall blended GP is sitting anywhere near 50%, you’re not running a struggling pub — you’re running a fairly typical one, because the honest truth is nobody’s publishing fresh category numbers to tell you different, and the ones who claim to are usually just making it up.

I’ll get to why that gap in the data exists and what to do about it. But let’s start with what’s actually known.

What the last proper category survey said

The most recent named, dated, category-level GP survey I could find covering UK pubs is the UKHospitality/Christie & Co Benchmarking Report, published in 2022, covering the six months to 31 December 2021. It’s not this year’s data — nothing category-level is — but it’s real, it’s sourced, and it’s the freshest thing going. Here’s what it found, split by segment:

Wet (drinks) gross margin:

Food gross margin:

Interesting wrinkle that survey caught: for the first time in its history, food margins edged past wet margins overall — food GP crept up 3.1 percentage points while wet only moved 0.5. That’s a genuine shift worth knowing, even from three-year-old data, because it tells you the old “drinks pay the bills, food’s just a loss-leader that gets people through the door” assumption has been quietly going out of date.

The older benchmark — the BBPA Benchmarking Survey, reported by the Morning Advertiser on 14 November 2013, covering data to December 2012 — put wet-led community pubs at 49.1–49.6% GP, food-led venues at 55.6%, rural destination pubs at 56.3%, with food margins running 56.3–60.6% and drinks margins 49.3–53.8%. Worth keeping as long-run context — it shows margins have structurally improved since 2012 — but it’s thirteen years old and I wouldn’t hang your business plan on it.

One tied vs free-of-tie detail from the 2022 report worth flagging: tied leases showed a wet margin of 61.2% against 68.9% for commercial (free-of-tie) leases — a 7.7-point gap. If you’re tied, that’s not you doing something wrong. That’s structural.

What’s known right now, in cash terms

Category GP% might be stuck in 2021, but recent cost-pressure data is very current. Money.co.uk’s analysis of BBPA cost data, reported by CLH News on 19 March 2026, found the average pub now keeps roughly 6p gross profit per £1 spent at the bar before rent — down from 7p two years earlier — and after rent, only about 3p remains as actual profit for a typical wet-led venue. That’s not a GP% figure in the traditional sense, it’s a cash-margin-after-overheads figure, but it tells you where the squeeze is actually landing: not on the drinks GP% itself, which has held up reasonably, but on everything sitting below it — rent, energy, wages.

And the product mix behind the bar keeps shifting against you. CGA by NIQ data, reported in the Morning Advertiser on 23 July 2026, shows cask ale on-trade volumes down 7.1% year-on-year (1.28m hectolitres sold), with cask value falling from £982m to £974m to £947m over the last two years tracked. The same Morning Advertiser Beer Report 2026 (23 July 2026) put the average cask pint at £4.91. Cask’s shrinking, but it’s not disappearing — and it still carries a real margin story, which brings me to the bit that’s actually useful to you.

Why draught trails spirits, structurally

Here’s the bit nobody quite spells out. GP% isn’t a fixed property of “beer” versus “spirits” — it’s a function of how much waste, spoilage, and dispense loss sits between what you buy and what actually reaches a paying customer’s glass.

A bottle of spirits gets poured in 25ml or 35ml measures, doesn’t go off, doesn’t need a line clean, and loses almost nothing to waste beyond the odd over-pour. A keg of lager sits on a line that needs cleaning (that’s product down the drain), gets pulled through in pints that foam unevenly, goes flat if a barrel’s not turning fast enough, and — this is the one people forget — costs you duty and VAT on every drop whether it makes it into a glass or down a drain.

That’s why a 68%+ margin is realistic on wine and spirits, but 60–65% is a solid result on draught, not a warning sign. If you’re benchmarking your own beer GP against a wine bar’s overall number, you’re comparing two different structural realities, not two different levels of competence.

A worked example you can actually run

Say you’re a wet-led community local — the segment closest to what most licensees reading this run. Take last month’s till roll.

• Wet sales: £24,000
• Cost of wet sales (drink purchases, ex-VAT): £8,400
• Wet GP = (£24,000 − £8,400) / £24,000 = 65%

Against the 2021 benchmark, a Community Local averaging 65% wet GP is sitting exactly on the segment norm — not brilliant, not alarming. If yours comes out at 58%, don’t panic and don’t guess why — go line by line: has a supplier price gone up without you re-checking your sell price, is wastage from line cleaning higher than it should be, has portion control on spirits measures drifted. That’s a stocktake conversation, not a “the whole industry’s broken” conversation. If you want a sense of how much natural month-to-month wobble is normal before it’s actually a problem, that’s covered in acceptable stocktake variance for a UK pub — worth reading alongside this one.

One more thing that quietly wrecks GP% comparisons between pubs: whether you’re calculating cost of sales including or excluding VAT. Get that wrong and you can be “off” by several points without anything actually being wrong operationally. We’ve laid that out properly in ex-VAT vs inc-VAT stock value.

What’s known, and what’s a genuine industry gap

To be straight with you: there is currently no publicly available, category-level GP% survey for UK pubs newer than the 2022 UKHospitality/Christie & Co report (2021 data). Everyone publishing 2025/2026 hospitality data — RSM’s Coffer Peach tracker, Christie & Co’s own Business Outlook 2026, UKHospitality, the BII — is reporting revenue trends, footfall, EBITDA margins and cost pressures, not wet/food GP% by segment. That’s not me being lazy with the research; I went looking specifically for anything newer and it isn’t there. If you see a blog claiming “the average UK pub GP% in 2026 is X%” with no named report attached, they’ve made that number up, or they’re quoting the wrong metric (EBITDA margin, net profit margin) and calling it GP%.

What IS solidly known for 2026: cost pressure per pound sold (money.co.uk/BBPA, March 2026), category shifts in drink type and pricing (CGA by NIQ / Morning Advertiser, July 2026), and general industry profitability sentiment (roughly a third of pubs reporting they’re struggling to turn a profit at all, per BBPA/BII/UKH survey commentary reported by the trade press). What ISN’T known for 2026: a fresh wet/food GP% breakdown by pub type. Until someone runs that survey again, the 2021 figures are the best honest anchor you’ve got.

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