Stock days: how many days of stock is your pub sitting on, and how much cash is that before Christmas?

Stock days is your closing stock at cost divided by what you use in an average day, also at cost. A wet-led pub carrying £5,300 of drink and using £2,400 a week is holding 15.5 days of stock. Draught should be the smallest number on your sheet, a few days to a week. Spirits and wine will be the biggest. Anything sitting at 60 days or more is cash you've parked on a shelf, and the run-up to Christmas is when most pubs park the most.

Search for it and you get American software blogs talking about "inventory turns". Useful, but not written for a British cellar on weekly drays. Here's the sum the way I'd do it on a pub stocktake, what the figures should roughly look like, and the pre-Christmas trap that shows up as a cash squeeze in January.

The sum

You need two numbers your stocktake already gives you.

• Closing stock at cost. The value of everything you counted, at what you paid, ex VAT if you're registered. My stock valuation guide explains why it's cost, not selling price.
• Cost of sales for the period. Opening stock plus purchases minus closing stock. That's what you actually used, at cost.

Then:

Stock days = closing stock at cost ÷ (cost of sales ÷ days in the period)

If your four-week stocktake shows £5,300 closing stock and £9,600 cost of sales, you used £2,400 a week, about £343 a day. £5,300 divided by £343 is 15.5 days. The same figure the other way up is stock turn: 52 weeks divided by 2.2 weeks of stock is about 23.5 turns a year.

Stocktakers do report this, by the way. InnStock, one of the independent firms whose prices I've written about, says its reports include "the number of days' stockholding on-site". If yours doesn't, you can work it out from the summary page in two minutes.

Do it by category, because the total hides everything

One figure for the whole bar is nearly useless. Fast draught drags the average down and hides a spirits shelf that hasn't moved since summer. Here's a worked example, my numbers, not a real pub:

Stock days by category for an example wet-led pub (my worked example)

Category	Stock at cost	Used per week at cost	Stock days
Draught keg and cask	£900	£1,200	5.2
Bottles and cans	£800	£350	16.0
Spirits	£1,900	£450	29.6
Wine	£1,100	£250	30.8
Soft drinks and mixers	£600	£150	28.0
Total	£5,300	£2,400	15.5

Look where the money is. Draught is the busiest category and holds the least cash. Spirits are a fifth of the usage and over a third of the stock. That's normal, because a back bar needs one of everything on display, but it's also where the slack lives. Getting spirits from 30 days down to 14 would free up about £1,000 in this example, without a single line going missing from the shelf.

What the numbers should roughly look like

There's no official UK benchmark that I can find. The most specific published figures are from Sculpture Hospitality, a bar inventory firm in North America. Their targets are roughly 2 to 3 turns a month for bottled and canned beer, which is 10 to 15 days on hand, and about one turn a month for spirits and wine, so around 30 days. They put draught at 1 to 2 turns a month, but that's an American bar with a few taps. In a British pub on weekly deliveries, where draught is the biggest seller, it should be a lot faster.

For cask, the clock decides it, not the cash. The Cask Marque cellar card says hold a minimum of three days' stock and empty a cask within three days of putting it on sale. I've covered the routine in cellar management basics.

Here's what I'd aim for, as a licensee's rule of thumb rather than anyone's standard:

Rough stock day targets for a UK pub on weekly deliveries (my rule of thumb)

Category	Aim for	Worry at
Draught keg	Under 7 days	Over 14
Cask	Set by the 3-day rule	Any cask on sale past 3 days
Bottles and cans	10 to 15 days	Over 30
Spirits and wine	Around 30 days	Over 60
Soft drinks and mixers	Under 14 days	Over 30

Why it matters more than people think

Stock you're holding isn't lost money, it's parked money. But parked money picks up bad habits. It goes out of date at the edges, and low and no alcohol beer is dated like a soft drink, which my best-before guide covers. It turns into dead stock nobody reorders because nobody remembers why it's there. The one people forget is that it makes every count take longer. A cellar with 30 lines too many is another twenty minutes on every stocktake, every month.

The pre-Christmas trap

This is the time of year the number jumps. Christmas 2026 has two long gaps in deliveries, with Christmas Day on a Friday, the Boxing Day bank holiday on Monday 28th and New Year's Day on a Friday, so everyone buys deep in mid-December. That's right for the fast lines. The trap is the rest.

The Christmas gin you took a deal on, the case of port, the extra cases of the bottled lager you only sell in the garden. Buy an extra £2,000 of spirits on top of a normal £450 a week and you've added 31 days to that category. If January is quieter than December, as it is for most locals, it takes even longer to sell through, and that £2,000 is sat on the shelf in the month the bills land.

What I'd do: set Christmas pars off last year's Christmas fortnight, not a feeling. My par levels guide has the method, and the Christmas stock guide has the delivery plan. Then run stock days on your first count in January. Anything over 60 days goes on a bin-end board before it goes out of date or goes to dust.

One idea worth trying

Add one column to your count sheet: stock days per line. Units on hand divided by units sold per day since the last count. It turns a list of numbers into a list of decisions. Anything under a few days on a fast line, check your par. Anything over 60, stop ordering until it's sold, or price it to go. It's one extra column whether you count on paper or in a spreadsheet, and you can add it to my free stocktake template in a minute.

My take

Stock days is the number that tells you how much of your money is sitting in the cellar instead of the bank. Keep draught low and nothing on the sheet over 60. Check it after the Christmas count and you'll find the cash before the January bills find you.

Common questions

How do you calculate stock days for a pub?

Divide your closing stock at cost by your average daily cost of sales. Cost of sales is opening stock plus purchases minus closing stock. £5,300 of stock against £2,400 a week used is 15.5 days.

How many days of stock should a pub hold?

There's no official UK benchmark. As a rule of thumb, draught keg under a week, cask set by the three-day rule, bottles and cans 10 to 15 days, spirits and wine around 30 days, and nothing over 60 days without a reason.

What is stock turnover in a pub?

How many times a year your stock sells through. It's 52 divided by your weeks of stock, so 2.2 weeks of stock is about 23.5 turns a year.

Why does holding too much stock matter?

It's cash on a shelf instead of in the bank. It can go past its best-before, turn into dead stock nobody reorders, and makes every stocktake take longer. Christmas overbuying is the usual cause.