Tied vs free of tie: what actually changes at the stocktake

The tie doesn't change how you count a keg. It changes what the count is worth. I've run a tied pub for years, and the stocktake in a tied house is doing a different job to the one it does in a free house: it sets your real margin, and it's your defence when the pubco's auditor visits. The Government confirmed this month that the tie is staying, so it's a job worth doing properly. Here's what actually changes on each side of the line.

September 2026: the tie stays, so plan around it

On 14 September 2026 the Government published its third statutory review of the Pubs Code, covering April 2022 to March 2025. The short version: the Code stays, and ministers want to strengthen it rather than scrap it. The proposals include revising the Market Rent Only gateways, looking at fairer lease terms and better beer pricing, and clearer PCA guidance. Amendments are expected to be consulted on with updates in 2027, and an independent review of the PCA itself is planned for early 2027.

The number that jumped out at me: fewer than 400 tenants applied to go free of tie through MRO in those three years. Tenants told the review it costs too much and takes too long. CAMRA called the outcome a cautious first step. So if you're tied today, the realistic assumption is that you're tied next year too, and the stocktake is how you make the tie survivable.

Change one: your cost prices, so your GP benchmark

Tied wholesale prices sit above the open market. That's the deal: you pay more per keg, and in exchange the rent is meant to be lower, under the Code's principle that a tied tenant should be no worse off than a free-of-tie one. Whether that principle holds at your pub is a rent conversation. What it does at the stocktake is simpler: it moves your GP.

Take the average £5.34 pint, which is £4.45 ex VAT. An 88-pint keg realistically sells 84 once you count the drip tray, the line cleans and the fobbing. Call the tied list price £160 and the open-market price for the same keg £120, purely to show the shape of the sum. At 84 pints your revenue is £373.80 ex VAT. Tied, that's a 57% GP. Free of tie, it's 68%. Same beer, same pour, same customers, eleven points apart before a drop has been spilled.

The practical point: never benchmark a tied pub against a free house's GP, and don't let anyone else do it to you either. When a brewery rep or an online calculator tells you draught lager "should" run at 70%, ask which cost price they're using. The GP benchmark guide has the ranges, and how to read your GP report covers why three calculators give three answers on the same pint.

Change two: someone else counts your cellar

Free-of-tie operators choose whether to have a stock audit. Tied tenants mostly don't: the pubco sends its own auditor, on their timetable, counting to their yield assumptions. I've written up what a pubco stock audit actually involves, and the blunt lesson from my own five audits is that the tenant who only sees stock numbers on audit day is negotiating blind.

Your own weekly count is the defence. If the auditor's figure lands £700 out and you have twelve of your own counts, a wastage log and delivery records that say otherwise, you have a conversation. If you have nothing, you have a chargeback. And most tied estates meter the beer lines these days: Vianet's dispense kit sits in around 11,000 sites, reconciling what flowed through the taps against what you bought. That system doesn't know about the cask you returned as ullage or the lines you cleaned on Tuesday unless your records do. Unlogged waste in a metered tied pub doesn't read as waste. It reads as a question about where the beer came from.

Change three: the annual price rise has legal edges

Every tied tenant knows the February letter. What fewer know is that the Pubs Code puts tripwires under it: if a tied price rise beats CPI plus 3 points on beer, plus 8 on other alcoholic drinks, or plus 20 on everything else, measured against the same four weeks a year earlier, it can trigger your right to an MRO offer, and the window to act is 21 days from the invoice. I've covered the mechanics in tied price rises: what you can actually do, and the fifteen-minute habit that catches rises early in tracking price rises on the delivery note. None of it works if you don't know your numbers per line, which is stocktake data, not till data.

Free of tie: cheaper beer, and nobody watching

Go free of tie, through MRO or by taking on a free house, and the cost side improves on day one. You shop around, you take the cash-and-carry deal on the guest line, your GP benchmarks shift up a band. What disappears is the scrutiny. No pubco auditor, no flow monitoring, no February letter with legal edges. Sounds like heaven, and then the first quiet leak opens up and nothing catches it, because the only person counting is you, and you stopped.

That's the honest symmetry. Tied, you count because someone else's count can cost you money. Free of tie, you count because nobody else ever will. The discipline is identical: a regular full count with real yields per container, and everything logged when it happens. The DIY stocktake guide covers the method, and it doesn't care who owns your lease.

Thinking about MRO? Count first

Fewer than 400 tenants in three years went through with MRO, against tie-release terms that the trade press has reported at around three times rent at the biggest pubco, plus your own legal costs. The review wants to make that route cheaper and simpler, but on a 2027 timeline. If you're weighing it up now, the first document you need isn't a solicitor's letter, it's a year of your own stock and margin numbers, because the whole MRO question is "would I be better off paying market rent and open prices", and that's arithmetic. Do it on your real volumes, not the pubco's forecast. The Stonegate investigation is partly about rent projections that didn't survive contact with reality.

The same count, different stakes

A stocktake in a free house tells you what you made. A stocktake in a tied house tells you what you made, what the auditor will find before they find it, and whether this year's price letter crossed a legal line. Weekly counts and real yields, with a written wastage log behind them. Tied or free, it's the same hour of work. Tied, it's also your evidence.