Most restaurants are taught to manage labor by watching labor percentage. The problem? Labor percentage only tells you what labor cost, not what it produced.
That’s where Covers Per Labor Hour (CPLH) comes in.
CPLH answers a much more useful question: How many guests did we serve for every hour of labor we used? Instead of staring at costs after the fact, CPLH helps you see whether your staffing decisions are actually working.
We built a free CPLH tracker at Recipe Cost Calculator to make this dead simple. You enter:
- Total covers (or tickets)
- Front of house hours
- Back of house hours
That’s it.
You can log data day by day, see which days behave differently (Mondays vs Saturdays), and spot trends over time. The goal isn’t to chase some industry benchmark — it’s to beat your own number consistently.
Track it daily, look for patterns, and you’ll start seeing staffing problems (and opportunities) much earlier than labor % ever allows.
