How many staff should you roster on a Friday night? Covers per labour hour for Australian venues

A Friday night hour of casual Level 2 labour costs $36.80 under the Hospitality Award. The identical hour on Saturday costs $40.62. Work out how many of those hours your Friday actually needs and you've answered the staffing question properly, in dollars that are yours.

Every staffing calculator ranking for this is built somewhere else. The best of them prices revenue per labour hour in pounds, and the American ones hand you server-to-table ratios drawn up against a US wage floor. Neither survives contact with MA000009. Here's the Australian version, with a fully costed Friday for a 70-seat bistro at the end.

The short version. Labour hours you need = forecast covers divided by your target covers per labour hour. And your target covers per labour hour = blended hourly rate divided by (average spend per head x target labour %). For a Sydney bistro on 2026-27 award rates at $48 a head and a 30% labour target, that's about 2.6 covers per labour hour, or roughly 50 paid hours for a 130-cover Friday. General information only, not financial or legal advice.

Covers per labour hour, counted properly

One cover is one person served. Covers per labour hour is your total covers for a service divided by every paid hour that service consumed: floor, bar, host, kitchen, KP, the manager who was genuinely working the pass. Count front of house only and your number looks about twice as good as it is, which is the most common way a venue talks itself into under-rostering the kitchen.

It beats sales per labour hour for a rostering decision because it doesn't move every time you reprice the menu. Put a dollar on top of it and it gets sharper still: divide your blended hourly rate by your covers per labour hour and you get the award wage baked into every single cover you serve. That's the number that tells you whether Friday is worth opening for.

Friday is the cheapest peak in your week

Under MA000009, a casual is paid 125% of the ordinary hourly rate Monday to Friday, plus a flat $2.95 an hour for time worked between 7pm and midnight. Saturday is 150% with no evening loading on top, Sunday 175%, a public holiday 250%. So a Friday dinner hour sits on the weekday rate with a small flat top-up, while the same hour on Saturday carries a full weekend penalty.

That's roughly 10% more an hour on Saturday for identical work, and the gap widens with classification because the Friday loading is a flat dollar amount while the Saturday penalty is a percentage. It's why a ten-person peak that lands at 29% labour on a Friday can quietly finish Saturday at 33% on the same covers. How roster shape moves that number across a whole week is covered in what a healthy labour cost percentage actually looks like.

Friday is the only peak in your week that doesn't carry a weekend penalty. Same crew, same covers, and Saturday costs about 10% more an hour.

What covers per labour hour looks like by service style

There's no official benchmark for this, here or anywhere, because a 40-seat wine bar and a 200-seat pub bistro aren't the same business. What follows are working ranges for a whole venue on a Friday night, priced at the casual rates that took effect from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026. The 30% target in the last column is roughly the middle of the ATO's own labour-to-turnover band for restaurants turning over $500,000 to $2 million (23% to 32%), built from lodged tax returns.

Read that last column as a sanity check, not a target. If you're running a full-service restaurant at 1.8 covers per labour hour on a $52 average spend, the award wage alone is eating 41% of the bill, and no amount of tightening the roster fixes a menu priced for a different business. Fine dining is the honest exception: it runs a higher labour percentage on purpose, because the service is the product.

A costed Friday: 130 covers in a 70-seat Newtown bistro

Seventy seats, a 130-cover Friday, $48 average spend excluding GST, so $6,240 through the till. Ten casuals at peak: four on the floor, one on the bar, a host who also runs the pass, and four in the kitchen counting the KP. Six sit at Level 2, two at Level 3, two at Level 4, which blends to $27.73 an hour ordinary, so $34.66 casual before 7pm and $37.61 after.

Sixteen of those hours fall before 7pm at $34.66 and thirty-four after it at $37.61, so the night's wages come to $1,833.30. That's $14.10 of award wage sitting in every cover before you've bought a single ingredient, and 29.4% labour on $6,240. Add the 12% super guarantee and it's $2,053.30, or 32.9%.

Now put the identical roster on Saturday. Fifty hours at $41.60 is $2,079.90, up $246.60, and those same 130 covers now cost 33.3% in labour. To finish Saturday where Friday finished you need about 148 covers, not 130. If your Saturday isn't running 14% busier than your Friday, Friday is your better night and your roster probably doesn't reflect that.

Where the maths breaks

• The two-hour minimum. A casual must be engaged and paid for at least 2 consecutive hours every time you call them in (clause 11.3), so you can't roster one extra body for the 90-minute crush. Either find them two hours of work or absorb the peak.
• The unpaid meal break. More than 6 hours in a shift and the award requires an unpaid break of at least 30 minutes, taken after the first 2 hours and within the first 6 (clause 16.2). You save the wage, but you also lose a body off the floor mid-service, so choose when.
• Casual overtime is real. Past 12 hours in a day or 38 hours in a week (clause 11.2) a casual moves onto overtime: 150% for the first two hours Monday to Friday, then 200%, and 200% flat on weekends. Plugging a gap with someone already sitting on 36 hours is dearer than it looks.
• Flat rosters. Ten people from 5pm to 11pm is 60 hours and 2.2 covers per labour hour. The same ten rostered to the curve is 50 hours and 2.6. Nobody worked harder, you just stopped paying for the shoulders.
• The open and the close. In the table above, five of fifty paid hours produced zero covers. That's 10% of the wage bill, it's mostly unavoidable, and it's exactly why the peak has to carry it.

Run it for your venue this Friday

1. Pull last Friday's covers by the hour off your POS or booking system, four weeks of them if you can. You want the shape of the night, not just the total.
2. Set your target covers per labour hour: blended hourly rate divided by (average spend per head x your labour target). If you don't know your blended rate, take the classification each person is genuinely paid at from the MA000009 levels and average it across the team.
3. Divide forecast covers by that number to get your hours budget, then spread those hours along the curve instead of flat across the whole service.
4. Convert hours into bodies last, and check the two-hour minimum on every start. If a shift can't reach two hours, it isn't a shift. On Monday, compare what you actually paid against what you budgeted, and adjust the target rather than the story.

Where Shiftly fits

Two things wreck this maths in practice. The first is building a roster without seeing what each hour costs as you place it, which is why free roster templates get expensive. The second is the Friday someone drops at 4pm, when your choices narrow to running short through the peak or paying a premium to backfill.

Shiftly is free workforce management for Australian venues: rostering, plus award-aware timesheets that help you estimate what a shift should cost before you commit to it. It's a calculation tool, not payroll, and not legal advice. The part that matters at 4pm on a Friday is what sits behind it. Shiftly is the roster that fills itself, with an on-demand network of local hospitality workers built into the same roster you already run, so a hole gets offered to nearby staff who see the pay before they accept, instead of costing you the covers. Get started with Shiftly.

Frequently asked questions

How many staff do I need per shift in a restaurant?

Work backwards from covers, not from a borrowed ratio. Divide your forecast covers by your target covers per labour hour to get total paid hours, then spread those hours across the trading curve. A 70-seat bistro doing 130 covers on a Friday needs roughly 50 paid hours, which is about ten people at peak and three or four at the edges. A fine diner doing the same 130 covers needs closer to 110 hours, because the service is the product rather than the overhead.

What is a good covers per labour hour figure for an Australian venue?

There's no official benchmark, and any single number is a guess. As working whole-venue ranges: 5.0 to 7.0 for counter service, 2.4 to 3.0 for a pub bistro, 1.6 to 2.2 for a full-service restaurant, and 0.8 to 1.2 for fine dining. The better test is your own. Your blended hourly rate divided by your covers per labour hour gives the award wage in each cover, and that should land near 30% of your average spend per head, which is roughly the middle of the ATO's benchmark band for restaurants.

How many staff should a cafe roster on a Friday night?

Counter-service venues run far leaner than table service, usually 5 to 7 covers per labour hour, so a cafe doing 120 covers across a five-hour evening needs about 20 paid hours, or four people on at once. The constraint is the award floor rather than the ratio: at roughly $36.40 an hour blended for a casual Level 1 or 2 after 7pm, four people for five hours is $728 in wages, so the evening has to clear about $2,400 to hold 30% labour.

Does the Hospitality Award set a minimum shift length?

Yes. Under MA000009 a casual must be engaged and paid for at least 2 consecutive hours each time they're required to attend work (clause 11.3), and a casual can't be engaged for more than 12 hours a day or an average of 38 hours a week over a roster cycle of up to four weeks (clause 11.2). Part-time employees have their own guaranteed-hours rules. Check the current Fair Work Ombudsman pay guide for MA000009 before you build the roster, because these are minimums rather than the whole picture.