Wetherspoon results, 2 October 2026: 40p of every £1 taken went in tax

Wetherspoon published its full-year results this morning. Sales up 5.2%, profit down 28%, and one table in there matters more to the rest of us than all the rest of it: taxes of £891 million, which is 39.8% of everything the company took, £1.13 million per pub.

The headline numbers first, for the 52 weeks to 26 July 2026. Revenue £2,238m, up 5.2%. Like-for-like sales up 4.2%. Profit before tax £58.6m, down 28.0% on last year. Operating margin 5.37%, down from 6.88%. The estate ended the year at 792 managed pubs, 8 opened and 15 gone.

So the biggest pub operator in the country grew sales by over a hundred million pounds and made less money. Costs rose 5.3%: wage increases alone added £46m over the year, repairs £31m, business rates £9m.

The tax table

Wetherspoon breaks its tax bill out every year, and it is the most useful page in the whole document for an independent licensee, because it is audited scale for the sums we all do on the back of a delivery note.

Taxes paid and collected by J D Wetherspoon, FY2026, from this morning's results.

Tax	FY2026
VAT	£432.3m
Alcohol duty	£179.6m
PAYE and national insurance	£174.1m
Business rates	£42.6m
Other taxes	£62.4m
Total	£891.0m, 39.8% of net sales

That is £1.13m of tax per pub. Tim Martin's line in the statement: pubs and restaurants "pay around 40% of their receipts as taxes of one sort or another". On VAT he is blunter still: supermarkets pay "virtually no VAT in respect of food sales, whereas pubs pay 20%", which is how they can subsidise the price of the lager in their aisles.

Checking it against the pint

I have done this sum from the other end, from one glass instead of 792 pubs. On the £5.34 average pint, 89p is VAT and just under 50p is duty. That's £1.39, 26% of the glass, before a penny of payroll tax or rates lands. Wetherspoon's 39.8% is the all-in figure once PAYE, NI and rates go on top, across food as well as drink. Two completely different routes, same picture. My envelope arithmetic and their audited accounts agree with each other, which is worth something next time someone tells you the tax moan is exaggerated.

The wage line is worth a second look too. £46m of wage increases across 792 pubs is about £58,000 per pub in one year, £1,100 a week, my arithmetic not theirs. Their pubs are far bigger than mine, so don't map the number onto yours directly. But that is the same April wage rise that landed on every one of us, measured at scale.

What 5.37% means behind an ordinary bar

An operating margin of 5.37% is 5.4p kept from every £1 taken, before interest and tax. Take the interest off and it's 2.6p in the pound left, before corporation tax. This is the company with the best buying terms in the trade, and famously low prices built on volumes none of us can copy. If that machine keeps 5p in the pound, the honest conclusion is not that Spoons is in trouble. It's that the margin for everyone operating without their buying power is thinner than most business plans admit, and the supermarket VAT gap Martin keeps banging on about is carrying more of the explanation than most customers realise.

Don't copy their response either. Spoons prices only work at Spoons volumes. For the rest of us the controllable number in this whole story is not the tax line, which arrives whatever we do, it's the GP% we actually achieve against the one we price for.

26 days to the Budget

These results land 26 days before the Budget on 28 October. The trade's asks are on the table already, duty and business rates chief among them. What results like this do is put audited numbers behind the asks. If you write to your MP before the Budget, "the biggest operator in the country paid 39.8% of its sales in tax and cleared 2.6p in the pound before corporation tax" is a better opening line than anything I could invent.

Common questions

Does the 40% tax figure apply to my pub?

Not directly, your mix will differ. Wetherspoon is food-heavy and every pub's split of VAT, duty, payroll and rates is its own. The useful check is the one you can do tonight: on a £5.34 pint, VAT and duty alone are £1.39 before you touch payroll or rates, so 40% all-in for a whole pub is not a strange number, it's roughly where the arithmetic goes.

Why did profit fall 28% when sales rose 5.2%?

Costs rose faster than sales: 5.3% overall, with £46m of wage increases, £31m more on repairs and £9m more rates. Margin is a gap between two moving lines, and the cost line moved quicker. The same squeeze is in every pub's numbers this year, theirs is just published.

What should I actually do with this?

Know your own version of their tax table. Work out what VAT, duty, payroll taxes and rates take from your till in a normal week, the per-pint guides above will get you most of the way. It changes how you price, and it makes you far harder to fob off in any rent or Budget conversation.