How Much Does an Accountant Cost for a Pub in the UK?

The short answer: what a pub actually pays

Pricing for a pub accountant in 2025/26 falls into a fairly predictable band. A typical fixed monthly fee runs from £200 at the low end to £500 at the upper end, with most pubs landing somewhere in the middle once VAT, payroll and tips are accounted for. Over a year that is roughly £2,400 to £6,000.

Why the spread? A pub is not one type of business. A two-bar community local pouring mostly drink, run by an owner who does the cellar work themselves, is a far simpler set of books than a 60-cover gastropub with a kitchen brigade, a tronc scheme and three trading entities. The fee tracks that complexity, not the badge on the door.

It helps to think about pubs in three rough tiers, which is how most specialist firms, ours included, actually quote. A wet-led community pub run as a sole trader sits lowest. A food-led pub or gastropub trading as a limited company with VAT and payroll sits in the middle. A multi-site pub group with several sites or a tenancy across more than one company sits at the top. The chart below shows the typical monthly figure for each.

If you want the detail on how a hospitality specialist structures all of this, our bar and pub accountants page walks through what a pub engagement covers from the cellar up.

What drives the cost up or down

Two pubs with the same turnover can be quoted hundreds of pounds a month apart, and the reasons are nearly always the same handful of factors. Understanding them lets you push your own quote toward the lower end rather than the higher one.

Wet-led versus food-led. A drinks-only pub has simpler VAT and stock than a kitchen operation. Once you add food, you add a second cost-of-sales line, kitchen wastage, more suppliers, allergen and stock complexity, and usually more staff. Food-led pubs cost more to account for because there is simply more to reconcile each month.

VAT. Almost every pub is VAT registered, because turnover passes the £90,000 threshold on drink and food sales long before anything else. VAT on a pub is not trivial: the mix of standard-rated alcohol, food eaten in, cold takeaway and the occasional zero-rated item has to be split correctly on every return. Getting it wrong in either direction is expensive, which is why VAT work is a real chunk of the fee. You can read the rules straight from HMRC's guidance on when to register for VAT.

Payroll and staff numbers. A pub with fifteen part-time and casual staff, rotas that change weekly and starters and leavers most months is a meaningful payroll job. More people on the payroll means more processing, more pension auto-enrolment admin and more chance of a query, all of which the fee has to cover.

Tips and tronc. If your pub takes service charge or card tips, a properly run tronc scheme can take those payments out of National Insurance entirely. Setting one up and running it correctly is specialist work, but it usually saves far more than it costs. We cover the numbers in detail in our guide to how much a tronc scheme saves.

Gaming machines, accommodation and events. A fruit machine, letting rooms above the bar or a function room each add their own tax treatment. None is complicated on its own, but each one adds a line the accountant has to handle, and three or four together nudge the fee up.

How clean your records arrive. This is the single biggest lever you control. A pub that hands over a shoebox of receipts and a bank statement costs more to unpick than one running tidy bookkeeping with the till feeding the accounts. Good bookkeeping through the year keeps the year-end fee down.

What should be included in the fee

Before you compare two quotes on price alone, check they cover the same ground. A £180 quote that excludes VAT returns is not cheaper than a £300 quote that includes everything; it just hides the gap until the invoice arrives. A complete fixed monthly pub fee should normally include the following.

• Bookkeeping of sales, purchases and bank, ideally with the till or EPOS feeding the figures automatically.
• Quarterly VAT returns filed under Making Tax Digital, with the wet and food split handled correctly.
• Payroll for all staff, including starters, leavers, pensions auto-enrolment and any tronc payments.
• Annual accounts for the business, and for a limited company the statutory accounts filed at Companies House.
• The tax return, meaning the corporation tax return for a company or Self Assessment for a sole trader, plus the director's personal return where relevant.
• Year-round access to your accountant for the questions that come up between filings, not just at the year end.

The better quotes go a step further and give you monthly management figures: gross profit percentage, wage cost as a percentage of sales, and how the period compared to last year. For a pub, where a couple of points of margin is the difference between a good month and a loss, that visibility is worth as much as the compliance work.

Does it pay for itself? The maths

The fee is only half the question. The half that matters more is what a good accountant puts back in your pocket. For a typical food-led pub on roughly £325 a month, around £3,900 a year, the return usually comes from three places.

First, VAT handled properly. Pubs routinely lose input VAT they were entitled to reclaim, or over-declare on the wet and food split, and a specialist tightens both. Second, the tronc National Insurance saving on tips, which alone can match the whole fee for a pub with real table service. Third, ordinary tax planning: capital allowances on a kitchen refit or new cellar kit, the right structure, and timing. Stack those against the fee and the picture for a typical food-led pub looks like this.

None of those figures is exotic. They come up on nearly every pub we onboard, and the tronc saving in particular is the one a generalist accountant most often leaves on the table. Run the tronc numbers for your own site with our free tronc National Insurance saving calculator.

Sole trader, partnership or limited company: does it change the cost?

The trading structure changes both the fee and the tax, so it is worth understanding before you compare quotes. A sole trader pub files one Self Assessment return and is the cheapest to account for. A partnership adds a partnership return and a return for each partner. A limited company is the most involved, because it needs statutory accounts at Companies House, a corporation tax return, and a personal return for the director.

That extra company work is why a limited company pub typically pays £275 to £500 a month against £150 to £300 for a sole trader pub of similar size. The gap is real, but for a profitable pub the company structure usually earns it back, because a company gives you control over how much you draw and when, and lets profit sit in the business when you want it to.

One long-tail point publicans search a lot: is a limited company pub worth the extra accountancy cost? The honest answer is that below roughly £40,000 to £50,000 of profit it rarely is, and above it the structure usually pays for itself several times over. Equipment and refit spending never tips that decision on its own. If you are weighing it up, the same logic we set out for other trades in sole trader versus limited company at £50K applies to a pub too.

Whichever structure you run, the cost of getting VAT returns and Making Tax Digital right is roughly the same, because a pub is VAT registered regardless of how it is owned. Structure changes the accounts and the tax return, not the VAT workload.

When a cheap quote costs you more

Price matters, but the cheapest pub quote is frequently the most expensive once a year has passed. A few patterns come up again and again when a publican moves to us from a bargain provider.

The quote excluded VAT or payroll, so the real annual cost was double the headline. The accountant was a once-a-year generalist who never set up a tronc, so the pub paid National Insurance on tips it did not need to. Records were only touched at the year end, so the owner traded blind for twelve months and only found a problem when it was too late to fix cheaply. And nobody was reachable in the evening or at the weekend, which is exactly when a pub is open and a problem actually surfaces.

A fair fixed fee from a specialist who answers the phone on a Saturday is not an expense to minimise. It is the cheapest insurance a pub buys.

What this means for you: how to get an accurate quote

If you want a quote you can actually rely on rather than a headline that balloons later, give any accountant the same six things up front and the number that comes back will be solid.

1. Your annual turnover and a rough split between drink and food.
2. Your trading structure: sole trader, partnership or limited company, and how many companies are involved.
3. Staff numbers on the payroll, including casuals, and whether you take tips or service charge.
4. Whether you are VAT registered and on which scheme.
5. Any extras: gaming machines, letting rooms, a function room or events income.
6. How your records arrive: tidy bookkeeping software, a spreadsheet, or a shoebox.

Ask for the quote in writing, ask exactly what is in scope and what is billed separately, and ask whether VAT, payroll and the director's personal return are included or extra. A specialist should turn that around quickly. We issue every quote in writing within 24 hours, with no obligation to proceed.