The short answer: what a catering business pays
A UK catering business typically pays from around £75 a month as a sole trader up to £500 or £600 a month once it is VAT registered and running event staff through payroll. That range is wide for a reason. A wedding and event caterer taking booking deposits a year in advance has very different accounting from a school or contract caterer invoicing a client monthly, and both look nothing like a one-person canape business run from a home kitchen.
Three things move the number more than anything else: your turnover, whether you are registered for VAT, and how many people you employ. Turnover sets how much bookkeeping there is. VAT registration adds quarterly returns and a layer of rules that are genuinely awkward in catering. Payroll adds a monthly per-employee cost and the compliance around casual staff. Get all three and you are at the top of the range. Have none of them and you are at the bottom.
LOYALS monthly plans for hospitality and food businesses start from £150 a month, and a sole trader who only needs a year-end return and a bit of bookkeeping can come in lower. For the wider picture on the sector, our hospitality accountants page sets out how we work with restaurants, cafes, takeaways and caterers. You can also see our full price list for the current headline figures.
What is actually included in the fee
A catering accountant's fee covers your bookkeeping, your year-end accounts and tax return, and for a VAT-registered caterer the quarterly VAT returns and the payroll for your event staff on top. The more of those you need, the higher the monthly figure, and the honest answer to "why does it cost that" is almost always the VAT and the payroll rather than the accounts themselves.
On a typical monthly plan for a catering business, here is what sits inside the fee:
- Bookkeeping: recording sales, supplier invoices, food costs and card and cash takings, reconciled to the bank. Light bookkeeping starts from around £125 a month, a busier VAT-registered caterer from around £245.
- Year-end accounts and tax: the annual accounts and the self-assessment or corporation tax return. A sole trader caterer's self-assessment and accounts start from around £695 a year, a limited company's accounts and corporation tax from around £1,200 a year.
- VAT returns: the quarterly submission and the review that stops you over or under-charging. From around £195 per quarter, or bundled into a monthly plan.
- Payroll: running your kitchen and event staff through PAYE, from around £75 a month plus roughly £10 per employee per month.
Good firms bundle these into one fixed monthly figure so you are not hit with a surprise invoice after a busy summer. Our own approach is a single fixed fee agreed up front, with the detail in our bookkeeping service. The point of the bundle is simple: a caterer's income is lumpy, so the fee should not be.
Why VAT quietly decides your fee
VAT is the single biggest driver of a catering accountant's fee, because catering is always standard-rated at 20 percent and the £90,000 registration threshold catches most growing caterers fast. A few large weddings or a single corporate contract can tip your rolling 12-month turnover over the line before you have thought about it, and the threshold stays at £90,000 for 2026/27.
Here is the part that trips people up. Food sold as cold groceries is often zero-rated, so a caterer assumes their food is zero-rated too. It is not. The moment food is supplied in the course of catering, it becomes standard-rated, because catering involves a significant element of service. Third-party catering for weddings, parties and conferences, and delivery of hot ready-to-eat meals, are all caught. This is set out plainly in HMRC's VAT Notice 709/1 on catering and takeaway food. So once you register, effectively all of your catering income carries 20 percent VAT.
The second catering VAT trap is the tax point on deposits. When you take a booking deposit for an event months ahead, the VAT tax point is the earlier of the date you receive the money or the date you raise a VAT invoice. In plain terms, VAT is due on a wedding deposit taken in March for a September event in the March quarter, not in September. Caterers who account for the VAT on the event date instead of the deposit date end up filing wrong returns and, when HMRC checks, paying interest on top. You can read the official position on when and how VAT registration works on gov.uk.
There is a flat rate scheme option for catering set at 12.5 percent, which can simplify things for a smaller registered caterer, but it is not automatically cheaper and needs the numbers run properly first. This is exactly the sort of question worth a conversation rather than a guess, and it is a large part of what you are paying an accountant to get right.
What different catering businesses pay
A home-based sole trader caterer pays from about £75 a month, a VAT-registered event caterer from around £300 a month, and a contract caterer with employed staff from around £500 a month. The jump between each tier is not the accounts, it is the VAT and the payroll that come with growth.
The sole trader home caterer making canapes and small private events is the simplest case. Below the VAT threshold, one self-assessment return and light bookkeeping is often all you need, so you sit at the bottom of the range. Once your gross income passes £50,000 you also fall into Making Tax Digital for Income Tax from April 2026, which means quarterly digital updates rather than one annual return, and that nudges the fee up a little.
The VAT-registered event caterer running weddings and corporate functions is where most of our catering clients sit. Booking deposits, standard-rated supplies, seasonal peaks and a handful of part-time staff all add work, and the fee reflects that. Here is roughly how a monthly figure of around £410 for this kind of caterer is built up.
The contract caterer with employed staff, running a school kitchen, a workplace canteen or a rolling corporate contract, sits at the top of the range. Regular payroll, larger volumes, invoicing terms with clients, and often a limited company structure all add to the work, which is why from around £500 a month is realistic here.
The catering work a generalist misses
A generalist accountant tends to miss the catering-specific work that actually protects your margin: the VAT tax point on booking deposits, casual event-staff payroll and status, and the capital allowances on your vans and kitchen equipment. None of it is exotic, but all of it is easy to get wrong if catering is one account in a hundred rather than a specialism.
On staff, catering runs on casual and zero-hours labour, and that is where the risk sits. Waiting staff and kitchen porters brought in for a single event are usually employees for tax, not self-employed, even when they invoice you. Get that wrong and HMRC can reclassify them, leaving you with backdated PAYE and National Insurance. On the pay side, National Living Wage rises to £12.71 an hour from April 2026 and irregular-hours staff are entitled to rolled-up holiday pay at 12.07 percent, both of which a specialist builds into your costing rather than discovering after the event.
On equipment, a caterer buys vans, ovens, refrigeration, marquees and serving kit, and most of it qualifies for the Annual Investment Allowance, giving 100 percent tax relief in the year of purchase. A commercial van qualifies. A car does not. A generalist who lumps it all together as "equipment" can miss the relief or claim it in the wrong period.
Here is how the three common approaches actually compare for a catering business:
| What you need | DIY / software | Generic accountant | LOYALS specialist |
|---|---|---|---|
| Treats catering supplies as standard-rated correctly | ✗ You self-classify | ● Usually | ✓ Built into onboarding |
| Gets the VAT tax point right on booking deposits | ✗ | ● If asked | ✓ Checked every quarter |
| Runs casual and event-staff payroll and status | ✗ | ● | ✓ Status reviewed up front |
| Claims allowances on vans and kitchen equipment | ✗ | ● | ✓ Timed to your year end |
| Open Mon to Sat for last-minute event questions | ✗ | ✗ Mon to Fri 9 to 5 | ✓ 10am to 7pm Mon to Sat |
| Fixed monthly fee, no surprise invoices | ✓ | ● Hourly billing common | ✓ Fixed monthly |
This is why most caterers who register for VAT or take on staff move from a generic accountant to a hospitality specialist.
When an accountant pays for itself
An accountant pays for itself the moment it stops you overpaying VAT on a supply, mis-timing the tax point on a large wedding deposit, or getting an event-staff status decision wrong, any one of which can cost more in a single year than a year of fees. For a caterer, the maths is rarely close.
Take a single mis-handled area. A caterer wrongly treating a run of standard-rated supplies, or filing deposit VAT in the wrong quarter, can build up a four-figure underdeclaration over a year, and HMRC charges interest and potentially a penalty on top when it surfaces. Set that against a monthly fee of a few hundred pounds and the fee looks cheap. Add the time you get back, the hours not spent wrestling with a VAT return the night before the deadline during your busiest season, and the case is stronger still.
There is also the profit-visibility argument, which is less about tax and more about running the business. A caterer who can see profit per event, rather than one lump at the year end, quotes better, drops the loss-making jobs, and pushes the profitable ones. That is worth more over a year than the fee itself, and it is the part owners tell us they value most once they have it.