The short answer: what a gastropub actually pays for an accountant
A UK gastropub usually pays from £250 to £600 a month for a full accounting service in 2026/27, with a small two or three site group nearer £1,200 a month, plus year-end accounts and a Corporation Tax return from £1,200 a year. That is the honest range, and where you land inside it comes down to turnover, VAT, staff numbers and tips.
Why the spread? A gastropub is not a pub and it is not a restaurant. It runs a proper kitchen alongside a bar, which means it carries the drink side of a pub and the food side of a restaurant at the same time. That combination is exactly what pushes the accounting work, and the fee, above a drinks-only local.
Most gastropubs trade as VAT-registered limited companies with a payroll spanning chefs, kitchen porters, bar staff and front of house. Get a quote from a general high-street firm and it often looks cheap on day one, then creeps up when they realise the VAT is mixed-rate and the tips need a tronc. A specialist prices that reality in from the start. If you want the wider picture of what a food-led pub needs, our bar and pub accountants page sets out the full service, and this guide focuses on the number.
What a gastropub accountant fee covers each month
A monthly gastropub fee covers your bookkeeping, VAT returns, payroll, management figures and year-end accounts, all filed on time. It is a bundle, not a single job, and the size of each part is what sets the price.
Here is what usually sits inside a gastropub package, with the LOYALS building-block fees behind each part:
- Bookkeeping from £125 a month. A gastropub generates a lot of transactions: daily takings split by till, supplier invoices for food and drink, delivery-app payouts and card settlements. This is where the mixed VAT gets coded correctly, or does not.
- VAT returns from £195 a quarter. Quarterly, under Making Tax Digital, with food and drink split across the right rates.
- Payroll from £95 a month plus a small amount per employee. Kitchen and front-of-house staff, real-time information filing, and National Living Wage checks at £12.71 an hour from 6 April 2026.
- Management figures so you can see food gross profit, wet gross profit and labour as a percentage of sales, rather than waiting a year to find out.
- Year-end accounts and the Corporation Tax return from £1,200 a year for a single-site limited company.
Bundle those into one monthly plan and a single-site gastropub lands somewhere between £250 and £600, depending on how busy the kitchen is and how many staff are on the payroll. A plan starts from £150 a month for a smaller, quieter venue and rises with volume.
The fee by stage: from a new single site to a small group
The fee rises with turnover, staff numbers and sites: from about £250 a month for a new single site, £400 for an established one, £600 for a busy food-led venue, and £1,200 for a two or three site group. The chart below shows the ladder.
A brand new or smaller single site, still finding its feet with a modest kitchen and a handful of staff, sits at the bottom of the range. An established gastropub that is comfortably VAT registered, running a full kitchen and front-of-house rota, sits in the middle. A busy food-led venue with high covers, a large team and tight stock control sits higher again, because the bookkeeping and payroll volume is simply greater.
Once you add a second or third site, the work changes shape. You are now consolidating figures across companies, watching the associated-companies rule that can drag your Corporation Tax into the 25 percent bracket sooner, and running a central payroll. That is why a small group starts nearer £1,200 a month rather than a simple multiple of one site.
What moves a gastropub's fee up or down
Five things move the fee: your turnover against the £90,000 VAT threshold, your mix of food and drink VAT, your payroll size, whether you run a tips and tronc scheme, and how many sites you have. The heat map below shows how each one bites across three common gastropub profiles.
Read across the rows and the pattern is clear. A small wet-led site is barely more complex than an ordinary pub, so most drivers stay green. Add a proper kitchen and the VAT and tips turn red at once. Add a second site and everything turns red, because you are now running a group.
The useful takeaway is that the two things which most reliably push a gastropub above a plain pub fee are the mixed VAT and the tips. Those are also the two a wet-led generalist is most likely to underprice, then charge you extra for later.
Mixed food and drink VAT: the biggest reason a generalist underquotes
A gastropub charges 20 percent VAT on all alcohol and on all eat-in and hot food, but some cold takeaway food can be zero-rated, so the till has to be split by rate every single quarter. This is the detail that quietly separates a gastropub from a wet-led pub, and it is the most common thing a generalist misses.
Break it down. Every pint, every glass of wine and every spirit is standard-rated at 20 percent, exactly as in any pub. The moment food enters, it gets more involved. Anything eaten in, sitting at your tables and served by your staff, is catering and therefore standard-rated at 20 percent whether it is hot or cold. Hot takeaway food is standard-rated too. Only genuinely cold takeaway food that does not fall into an excepted category, such as a sandwich collected to go, can be zero-rated. The official position is set out in HMRC's VAT Notice 709/1 on catering and takeaway food.
Here is where it costs money. If your bookkeeper treats the whole till as one blended rate, you either overpay VAT on the zero-rated slice or, far more dangerously, underpay on the standard-rated slice and build a liability that surfaces on an HMRC enquiry. We see gastropubs lose the equivalent of a few percent of turnover this way before anyone notices. Getting the till coding right, quarter after quarter, is real work, and it is why a food-led venue costs more to keep on the books than a drinks-only one. Our VAT returns and Making Tax Digital service handles exactly this split.
One more point on the threshold. VAT registration is compulsory once your taxable turnover crosses £90,000 in any rolling 12 months for 2026/27, and almost every gastropub is comfortably over it. So the question is rarely whether you register, but whether the returns you file each quarter actually reflect the right rates.
Tips, service charge and the tronc: the payroll a wet-led accountant misses
Since 1 October 2024 you must pass on 100 percent of tips to staff, and running them through an independent tronc can keep them free of National Insurance, which a wet-led pub accountant rarely bothers to set up. For a food-led gastropub with a busy service, that is not a rounding error, it is real take-home pay for your team and a real saving for you.
The law changed with the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023. It requires you to allocate all qualifying tips, gratuities and service charges to workers fairly, and to pay them out no later than the end of the month after they are received. You can read the plain-English version on the government's tips at work guidance.
The tax angle is the tronc. A tronc is a pooled tips fund run by a troncmaster who, and this is the crucial part, decides the allocation independently of the employer. When the employer does not control who gets what, the tips paid out through the tronc fall outside National Insurance, saving both the employee's and the employer's contributions on that money. With employer National Insurance at 15 percent in 2026/27, that matters. Set the tronc up wrong, with the owner still deciding the split, and HMRC treats the tips as normal pay and the saving vanishes. To see the numbers on your own service, use our tronc NIC saving calculator.
This is also a payroll-volume question, which feeds straight back into the fee. A gastropub kitchen and floor might run twenty or thirty staff across full-time, part-time and casual shifts, all needing real-time information filing, National Living Wage checks at £12.71 an hour from April 2026, and pension auto-enrolment. That payroll is a bigger job than a two-person wet-led bar, and the fee reflects it.
Is a gastropub specialist worth it, and when it pays for itself
A specialist is worth it once your food and drink VAT, payroll and tips are complex enough that a generalist's mistakes cost more than the fee, which for most gastropubs is immediately. The moment you have a kitchen, mixed-rate VAT and a tips scheme, the margin for error is wide and the cost of getting it wrong is real.
The table below shows how the three common routes actually compare for a gastropub. A cheap generalist quote can look attractive until you see what it quietly leaves on your plate.
Here is how the three common approaches actually compare for running a gastropub's books:
| What a gastropub needs | DIY / software | Generic accountant | LOYALS specialist |
|---|---|---|---|
| Splits the till by food and drink VAT rate | ✗ You self-code | ● If asked | ✓ Built into bookkeeping |
| Sets up a compliant independent tronc | ✗ | ● Rarely | ✓ Set up and reviewed |
| Runs kitchen and FOH payroll with NLW checks | ✗ | ● | ✓ Full payroll |
| Tracks food gross profit and stock | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ Monthly figures |
| Open Mon to Sat for urgent trading 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 gastropub owners who run a real kitchen move from a general firm to a hospitality specialist.
Put a number on it. If a blended VAT rate is quietly costing you two percent of a £600,000 turnover, that is £12,000 a year at risk. Set against a fee difference of a few hundred pounds a month, the specialist pays for itself many times over, before you even count the tronc saving or the time you get back. For a plainer comparison across pub types, our guide on how much an accountant costs for a pub sets the baseline a gastropub builds on.
What this means for you: what to do before you choose an accountant
If you are pricing up an accountant for your gastropub, a few checks will tell you quickly whether a quote is realistic or too good to be true.
- Ask how they will handle mixed VAT. A good answer talks about splitting the till by rate each quarter. A vague answer is a warning sign.
- Ask whether they set up troncs. If tips are a meaningful part of your service and they have never run a tronc, they will miss the National Insurance saving.
- Count your payroll honestly. Kitchen, floor, casuals and any live-in staff all count. Payroll volume is a real part of the fee, so an accurate headcount gets you an accurate quote.
- Confirm the fee is fixed and monthly. Hourly billing on a business with this many transactions is how small quotes become large invoices.
- Check the year-end is included. Make sure the accounts and Corporation Tax return, from £1,200 a year, are in the monthly plan and not a surprise on top.
- Ask when they are open. Hospitality questions do not keep office hours. Weekend and evening support is worth having when a supplier or a VAT deadline lands on a Saturday.
None of this is complicated. It is about matching the accountant to the operation. A gastropub is a hospitality business with a bar attached, not a pub with a menu, and the fee should reflect the real work that keeps it compliant and profitable.