Cafes & coffee shops in United Kingdom

2026-09-06

The part of your card bill nobody can explain rose 25% in real terms, and the fix just slipped to 2029

If you take cards, a slice of every sale leaves the business before you ever see it, and it comes straight off gross profit rather than out of a budget you review once a year. The regulator has just finished nearly four years of investigating the fastest growing part of that slice, and the honest summary is this: nothing was capped, nothing on your statement changes, and the one piece that would let anyone check a card bill line by line was quietly pushed back to 2029 three weeks after it was announced. The money you can actually get back this month comes from a different set of rules that has been sitting there since 2023.

2026-08-31

The state is about to start auditing your holiday pay, and the meter started running in December

If you pay anyone casual or variable hours, there is a number that should be on their payslip every week, and from 2027 a government agency can come and check whether it was. Holiday pay itself is not changing. What changes is that it stops being something a worker has to sue you for and becomes something the state audits, with a proposed penalty of double whatever you owe. The record-keeping duty behind it quietly started on 6 April this year. Two pieces of good news: the penalty is avoidable in full if you find the problem before they do, and the amount they can reach back for is smaller today than it will ever be again.

2026-08-16

The kids' menu goes back to 20% VAT on 2 September. Set the price now

VAT on qualifying children's meals has been 5% since 25 June. On Wednesday 2 September it goes back to 20%, and that is £119.05 out of every £1,000 those meals take, straight off your margin, unless you move the price. Here is the exact number to move it by, the promotion that quietly cancelled the relief for a lot of cafes, and why these ten weeks are worth more to you as data than they ever were as cash.

2026-07-23

You now pay sick pay from the first day off. Here is what that does to a cafe.

Quick version, because you are on the floor: from 6 April 2026 you pay Statutory Sick Pay from the first day someone is off sick, not from day four, and you pay it to staff you never used to (your very part-time people). Nobody handed you extra revenue to cover it, so it comes straight out of margin. Here is the real cost on a normal cafe rota, one rule that makes it bite cafes harder than most, and the bit that quietly shows up when you sell.

2026-07-08

The April 2026 National Living Wage rise lands hardest on cafes, and quietly on what a cafe is worth

The National Living Wage went up again on 1 April 2026, to £12.71 an hour. In most trades that is a line in a payroll email. In a cafe, where a big share of your hours are paid at or near the legal minimum, it moves the number at the bottom of the page. Here is what the 4.1% rise actually does to your margin, and the quieter thing it does to what your cafe is worth.