I'm Andrew Pickersgill, Managing Director at eCatering. In thirty years of supplying UK kitchens I've been asked about the cost to open a restaurant UK-wide more times than I can count, and I've watched a lot of people get a number they liked rather than a number that was true.
So here's the honest version. Not a brochure figure. Most cost guides quote you an equipment total and stop there — and equipment, the part I know best, is only about half the story. Our guide to what commercial catering equipment you actually need covers that side venue by venue. This article is about everything wrapped around it.
The short answer
A small independent outside London, in a unit with some catering history: £80,000 to £150,000 all in. A mid-range 60 to 80 cover restaurant in a regional city, with a proper fit-out and a new kitchen: £150,000 to £350,000. A full-service restaurant in central London, or anything in a shell unit built from bare concrete: £350,000 to £750,000 — and flagship sites clear £1 million once prime rent, bespoke finishes and a large brigade are priced in.
That's a huge spread. What drives it?
- Whether the unit was already a restaurant. A former café with an existing extract route, grease trap and three-phase supply can save £40,000 to £80,000 against a bare retail shell. The single biggest variable in the whole exercise.
- Location. Central London restaurant rents run roughly £60 to £150 per square foot per year, and Soho or Mayfair sites push past £200. Manchester shell space starts nearer £21. Same restaurant, wildly different number.
- Covers and menu complexity. Every cover multiplies through furniture, crockery, refrigeration litres, dishwasher racks per hour and staff on rota — and a tight bistro menu costs a fraction of a multi-section kitchen with a pastry bench.
- How much you reuse. Second-hand stainless, an existing bar, a serviceable canopy. Where sensible operators claw back real money.
Now the lines themselves.
Premises: the number that sets everything else
Property is where most restaurant budgets are won or lost, and it happens before you've bought a single pan.
Leasehold premium. Take over an existing restaurant lease and the outgoing tenant will usually want a premium — a capital sum for the lease, the fit-out and the goodwill. On a modest regional site, £15,000 to £50,000. On a well-traded London site with a working kitchen, £75,000 to £250,000 is not unusual. Sometimes that's genuinely good value, because you're buying a fit-out that would cost more to build. Sometimes you're paying for somebody else's optimism.
Rent, deposit and rates. Budget rent as a percentage of forecast turnover, not in isolation: rent plus rates under 10 to 12% of net turnover is the traditional UK rule of thumb, and above 15% the business has to be extraordinary just to be ordinary. Deposits typically run three to six months' rent, though new businesses are routinely asked for twelve, a personal guarantee, or both. Business rates are payable whether you're trading or not, so check Small Business Rate Relief with the council before you sign.
Dilapidations. The quiet one. Your lease will almost certainly oblige you to return the unit to a specified condition at the end of the term, and on a restaurant with a full extract system that liability runs to tens of thousands. Get a schedule of condition drawn up at the start, with photographs. Cheapest insurance in the project. Budget £3,000 to £10,000 on top for solicitor, surveyor and lease negotiation.
Professional fees before you lay a tile
People underestimate this line badly, then wonder why the build overran.
- Architect or designer. UK architects typically charge 3% to 15% of construction cost. Basic planning drawings start around £1,200; a full set including building regulations drawings runs £5,000 and up. On a £300,000 build, all consultants to planning stage commonly total around £20,000.
- M&E consultant. Mechanical and electrical design — power loads, ventilation, drainage, gas. Not optional on a new kitchen, and not the same person as your architect. Expect £3,000 to £12,000. This is who tells you whether your cooking suite will actually work in that room.
- Planning permission. The standard application fee in England is £528, but the fee is the small part. Change of use, a new external flue or extended hours each add time and consultant cost. A flue that upsets the residential neighbour above can hold a project for months.
- Building control, licensing and registration. £1,000 to £3,000 for local authority or approved inspector; several hundred more for the premises licence and a personal licence holder. Food business registration is free, but must be done at least 28 days before you open.
Total professional and statutory fees on a typical independent restaurant: £10,000 to £35,000.
The fit-out and the 50/25/25 rule
Restaurant fit-out cost in the UK generally lands between £1,000 and £3,000 per square metre — casual dining from around £1,200, fine dining with bespoke joinery £2,500 and beyond, high-end London projects with heavy structural work £3,000 to £10,000. Sense-check it another way: a full commercial kitchen zone, including ventilation, refrigeration, drainage and power upgrades, costs roughly £190 to £250 per square foot.
But the framing I give every operator who calls us is simpler, and it's the one I'd tattoo on a napkin if I could.
The 50/25/25 rule. Of your total kitchen fit-out spend:
- 50% is equipment — ovens, fridges, fryers, dishwashers, prep tables. The things you can point at.
- 25% is installation and services — electrics, gas, plumbing, drainage, extraction, ducting, commissioning.
- 25% is fit-out — floors, walls, ceilings, hygienic cladding, front of house, EPOS, furniture.
Across the market, equipment consistently works out at 40% to 50% of total fit-out spend. Which gives you the sentence that saves people the most grief:
If someone quotes you £40,000 of equipment, you need to find roughly £80,000.
Total commercial kitchen setup typically lands £30,000 to £150,000, with the full observed range running from about £11,000 for a tiny reuse job to £400,000-plus for a large multi-section build. Per cover, £2,500 to £4,000 is a reasonable whole-project planning figure for a mid-range independent. Fine dining goes well past it.
Kitchen equipment costs by restaurant size
These are equipment-only bands, ex VAT. They exclude installation, ducting, services and fit-out — apply the 50/25/25 rule on top of every one of them.
- Entry — 40 to 60 covers, tight menu: £15,000 to £25,000. Upright fridge and freezer, undercounter refrigeration, convection oven, fryer, griddle, prep tables, sinks, undercounter dishwasher.
- Mid — 80 to 120 covers: £30,000 to £55,000. A proper cooking suite, combi or two convection ovens, prep counter refrigeration, pass-through warewashing, bar refrigeration and ice.
- Premium — fine dining or a multi-section brigade: £70,000 to £120,000-plus. Multiple combis, blast chilling, dedicated pastry and larder sections, redundancy built in because a brigade kitchen cannot stop.
Where the money actually goes in the entry and mid bands is less glamorous than people expect. Refrigeration and warewashing, not the range.
Some real numbers from our own shelves, all ex VAT. The Contender 400L Upright Freezer (FZU066) is £593.31, the 600L FZU067 £726.06. A Quattro 1500mm Twin Bowl Sink is £266.65, a Quattro 1200mm Extraction Hood with LED £349.16. Step up to serious warewashing and a Classeq D500DUO pass-through is £2,999.00, a Hobart Ecomax F504-20C £3,407.18 — and at 100 covers a night, that machine matters more than your oven does. Our commercial ovens, commercial fridges and dishwashers and glasswashers ranges cover the entry-to-mid spread.
If capital is tight, equipment bundles are the honest shortcut — The Starter Kitchen at £2,199.99 as listed, The Pizza Kitchen £1,599.99, The Asian Kitchen £899.99, The Butchery Bundle £699.99. Matched footprints, one delivery, one warranty conversation. For a line-by-line list of what a new site needs, work through our restaurant equipment checklist before you request a single quote.
Budget for a cleaning and hygiene programme from day one too, not month three. Detergents, sanitisers, dosing equipment, a written schedule and the records to prove it. Hygiene ratings are earned in week one.
Power and extraction: the two that blow budgets
This is the section I'd read twice.
A fully equipped commercial kitchen can need 50 to 100kW of total electrical capacity, and many high street units simply do not have it. A three-phase supply means a DNO connection at roughly £1,500 to £4,000 where the local network already has capacity, rising to £15,000 or more where excavation or reinforcement is needed. Lead times run from weeks to several months.
Read that again. Months. Not days.
Extraction is the other one. A bespoke canopy for a small-to-mid site runs £2,500 to £6,000; add ductwork, fan, filtration, make-up air and a route to atmosphere and full systems commonly land £4,000 to £10,000-plus, installation alone at £500 to £5,000. On gas you also need a BS 6173 interlock — gas will not flow unless extraction is proven running — and DW172-compliant ducting that your insurer and Environmental Health will both assess.
Which brings me to the decision that quietly governs all of it. Gas or induction. Your cooking suite choice dictates power supply and extraction spec for the next decade. Induction cuts extraction load and makes the kitchen a far better place to work, but pushes you hard towards three-phase. Gas is cheaper to run but triggers the interlock and heavier ducting.
Decide this before you sign the lease, not after. I've seen a Manchester operator sign a fifteen-year lease, buy a six-burner gas range, then discover the landlord wouldn't permit a flue on a listed frontage. That's not a delay. That's a different business.
The costs people forget
The line items that never make it onto the spreadsheet until the week they're due.
- EPOS. £1,500 to £6,000 for terminals, printers and a kitchen display, plus monthly software.
- Front of house furniture. £150 to £600 per cover. On 80 covers that's £12,000 to £48,000 — a real number hiding behind a small one.
- Crockery, glassware, cutlery and smallwares. £40 to £120 per cover for tableware (budget three covers' worth per seat, because breakage is not an if), plus £3,000 to £10,000 for pans, gastronorms, knives and boards.
- Uniforms, signage and insurance. £50 to £150 per head for workwear; £1,500 to £8,000 for external branding, which may itself need planning consent; £1,500 to £5,000 a year for public liability, employers' liability, contents and business interruption cover.
- Opening stock. Food, drink, chemicals and packaging to fill an empty building. £5,000 to £20,000, depending on your wine list.
- Pre-opening marketing and payroll. £6,000 to £18,000 across local digital, launch and print — plus four to eight weeks of chef and manager wages before a paying customer walks in.
Add it up honestly and this "forgotten" section frequently totals £30,000 to £80,000.
Working capital and the first six months
Here's the part that decides whether you're still open next year. What happens if the first three months are half what your forecast said?
Budget three to six months of full running costs as untouched working capital. Not a contingency you dip into during the build. A separate, ring-fenced reserve — commonly £40,000 to £120,000 on a mid-range independent, sitting there doing nothing except keeping you alive.
Staffing is the biggest slice, and it got heavier. The National Living Wage rose to £12.71 an hour from April 2026, with the 18 to 20 rate at £10.85. Employer National Insurance sits at 15% with the secondary threshold at £5,000 — a change that hit low-wage sectors like hospitality hardest, though the £10,500 Employment Allowance offsets some of it for smaller employers. Labour at 30% to 35% of turnover is a healthy restaurant. Past 40% and something structural is wrong.
Then the reality check. Accommodation and food services recorded a 12.9% business death rate in 2024 — the highest of any UK industry. Only 38.4% of businesses across all sectors survive five years, and hospitality sits below that. Through 2025, licensed premises closed at roughly eleven a week.
You'll see "60% of restaurants fail in year one" quoted everywhere. I don't use it, because I can't source it properly. What I can tell you from thirty years of watching sites open and close is that they rarely fail because the food was bad. They fail because they spent the working capital on the fit-out.
For contrast, our breakdown of pub opening costs shows a different shape of spend — lighter kitchen, heavier cellar and licensing.
How to fund it
Very few independents pay cash for everything, and they shouldn't.
- Buy outright when the asset has a long life and low obsolescence — stainless prep tables, sinks, shelving, basic refrigeration. This kit will outlast the lease.
- Finance or lease when you're protecting working capital, when the equipment has a clear upgrade cycle, or when a second site is planned. Cash for stock and staff is usually worth more than owning a fryer.
- Blend the two. Most operators should. Buy the long-life items; finance the high-value cooking and warewashing.
On our finance options: iwocaPay covers orders from £150 to £30,000, interest-free, via Pay Now or Pay Later across three equal monthly instalments, open to UK limited companies, LLPs and sole traders. Lease finance requires 18-plus months trading, homeowner status and good credit — new tenant businesses need a guarantor. PayPal Credit gives four months interest-free on orders over £99.
Speak to an accountant about the tax treatment. That's their job, not mine.
Seven ways new restaurateurs overspend
- Signing the lease before checking the incoming power supply. The most expensive twenty minutes you never spent.
- Budgeting equipment and calling it the kitchen budget. Fifty per cent. Every time. The canopy can genuinely cost more than the cooker.
- Overspending front of house and underspending on warewashing. Nobody has ever left a review about your dishwasher. They will leave one about a forty-minute wait caused by no clean plates.
- Sizing for average covers instead of peak. Average is a comfort number. Peak is the one that breaks you on a wet Saturday in December.
- Buying piecemeal from five suppliers. Five lead times, five deliveries, five warranty conversations, mismatched worktop heights — and an opening date set by the slowest of them.
- Treating contingency as optional. Ten to fifteen per cent of build cost, held back. Every restaurant project finds something behind a wall.
- Spending the working capital on the fit-out. The one that actually kills businesses. A beautiful room with no cash behind it is a beautiful room that closes in month seven.
When to bring in a Key Account Manager
There's a point where a spreadsheet stops helping and someone needs to look at the actual room.
The mistake isn't buying the wrong oven — it's buying any oven before anyone's looked at the room. We'd rather have twenty minutes on site in London or Manchester before you spend a penny than a phone call three weeks after the kit's landed and it won't fit through the door.
Our commercial team works with independents across London, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Bristol, and the pattern holds: sites that come in on budget are the ones where somebody specified the kitchen before the builder started, not during. Lease-negotiation stage is the moment to call. You'll find the team on our meet the team page, or browse professional restaurant equipment for front and back of house first.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to open a restaurant in the UK?
Most UK restaurants cost £80,000 to £350,000 to open. A small independent outside London in a former catering unit sits at the lower end; a mid-range 60 to 80 cover regional restaurant lands £150,000 to £350,000. Central London full-service commonly exceeds £500,000.
How much does a restaurant fit-out cost per cover?
Plan on £2,500 to £4,000 per cover for a complete mid-range independent fit-out, rising well beyond that for fine dining. Per square metre, UK restaurant fit-out cost runs £1,000 to £3,000, with casual dining from around £1,200 and bespoke fine dining at £2,500-plus.
How much does commercial kitchen equipment cost for a restaurant?
£15,000 to £25,000 for a 40 to 60 cover entry-level kitchen, £30,000 to £55,000 for 80 to 120 covers, £70,000 to £120,000-plus for fine dining or a multi-section brigade. All figures are equipment only, ex VAT, and exclude installation, services, ducting and fit-out.
How much working capital does a new restaurant need?
Three to six months of full running costs, ring-fenced and untouched — commonly £40,000 to £120,000 for a mid-range independent. That covers rent, wages, utilities and stock while trade builds. Restaurants that spend the reserve on the fit-out are the ones that close in year one.
What are the biggest hidden costs of opening a restaurant?
The three that catch everyone: power supply upgrades (£1,500 to £15,000 via the DNO, weeks to months of lead time), extraction and ducting (£4,000 to £10,000-plus for a full system), and dilapidations liability written into the lease. Pre-opening payroll and front of house furniture follow close behind.
Can I lease restaurant kitchen equipment?
Yes. iwocaPay covers orders from £150 to £30,000 interest-free across three equal monthly instalments. Lease finance requires 18-plus months trading, homeowner status and good credit, with a guarantor for new tenant businesses. PayPal Credit offers four months interest-free over £99.
Where to go next
The cost to open a restaurant UK-wide is never one number. It's a stack of them, and every one moves. If you're costing a site right now, work through these in order.
- Specify before you budget — our pillar guide to commercial catering equipment by venue type tells you what the room actually needs.
- Build the list — the opening a restaurant equipment checklist turns that into line items you can quote against.
- Price the kit — browse everything for a restaurant kitchen, or start from a bundle and bolt on.
- Sort the funding — check finance and lease options before you commit capital you'll need in month four.
Get the room surveyed. Get the power checked. Then buy the oven.
— Andrew
Equipment pricing: all equipment prices quoted are ex VAT and correct as of 9 August 2026. Bundle prices are as listed on site. Prices, specifications and availability are subject to change — check the product page for current pricing.
Property and professional cost ranges: figures for premiums, rent, fit-out, professional fees, extraction, power connections and working capital are indicative UK market ranges gathered from published industry sources. Costs vary significantly by location, unit condition, specification and contractor. Always obtain site-specific quotations.
Business advice: this article is general information, not financial, legal, tax or regulatory advice. Employment, licensing, planning, food safety and taxation requirements change and vary by circumstance. Speak to a qualified accountant, solicitor or your local authority before making commitments.
