E-BOOK
The Hospitality Owner’s UK Tax Handbook
Eight chapters on VAT at the counter, payroll on the rota, tips in the tronc and corporation tax at the year end, through one worked venue: The Lantern House, an 80-cover restaurant with six rooms whose numbers run through every free tool on this hub. Read the mechanism here, then check any figure on the calculators.
- Eight chapters, one restaurant with rooms, every figure checkable
- The rule the whole book runs on: menu prices include VAT, margins never do
- From the £16.36 loaded hour to the £22,485 tronc
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Who this e-book is for
Owners of restaurants, cafes, pubs and rooms who can run a service blindfolded but signed the tax setup someone else configured, and would like to know what it is actually doing.
You run the venue and the tax runs you
The book’s method is one venue followed honestly: £23,560 a week through the restaurant, £2,881 through the rooms, and a week that clears £2,407 after everything. Every chapter is a force that moves that number, VAT coding, the loaded rota, the tronc, the corporation tax taper, and every force has a free tool that measures it on your own figures.
Your till was set up by whoever installed it
Chapter two is the money chapter: eaten in is standard rated whatever it is, takeaway splits by hot and cold with the always-standard list on top, and hot is a five-limb legal test, not a thermometer. A £4.50 item mis-coded at 100 sales a week is £3,900 a year, in whichever direction the error runs, and most tills are quietly running one.
You suspect there is money on the table
There usually is, in four places the book prices: the tronc, £22,485 a year of National Insurance on the demo tips; the annual investment allowance, where December kit beats January kit by a year of relief; the £150 a head function exemption and £50 trivial benefits, small and reliably forgotten; and the marginal relief band, where many single-site venues sit and each extra pound of profit is taxed hardest.
FACTS
The floor is not the cost
From 1 April 2026 the wage floors are £12.71, £10.85 and £8.00 by age band, and the book loads them properly: holiday accrual at 12.07 per cent, employer National Insurance and the pension turn the £12.71 headline into a £16.36 hour, 29 per cent above what the rota was probably budgeted at. Keep the records six years, because hospitality is where the inspectors go first.
8 chapters
One worked venue throughout, every figure on the tools
£22,485
What a proper tronc keeps out of NI
FACTS
Quiet months pay busy months’ taxes
The VAT earned in the loud quarter falls due in the quiet weeks after it, and the rent quarter does not read the calendar either. The same venue that clears its weekly nut by £4,034 in the busiest week clears it by £509 in the quietest, with the low point of the demo quarter being week one itself, the rent landing on the year’s thinnest index. Chapter seven is the instrument for surviving that on purpose.