The national average doesn't matter. What matters is the gap between your best location and your worst — because that gap is recoverable.
Here are the typical labor cost percentages by restaurant segment:
These ranges are useful as guardrails, but they're not actionable. A 32% labor cost doesn't tell you whether it should be 30% or whether 32% is optimal for your concept and market.
Forget the national average. The only benchmark that matters is the gap between your best-performing location and your worst.
If your top location runs labor at 28% and your bottom location runs at 35% on similar revenue and format, that 7-point gap represents real, recoverable dollars. Not all of it — maybe 3-4 points are fixable. But at $40,000/week in revenue, 3 points is $1,200/week. Per location.
Multiply that across your underperforming locations and you're looking at the biggest single recovery opportunity in your P&L.
Operators assume the gap is wage rates or local labor supply. Sometimes it is. But more often, the gap comes from execution: how tightly each GM manages the schedule-to-actual variance, overtime exposure, and staffing-to-revenue alignment.
Location 3 cuts a server when covers drop below 50. Location 11 doesn't. Location 3 flags employees at 36 hours and adjusts. Location 11 doesn't see it until payroll. Those daily decisions — made or missed — create the gap.
The operators who close the gap between best and worst locations share one trait: they get dollar-level execution data to each GM every day. Not percentages. Not trends. Dollars.
Marty delivers that data every morning at 6 AM. Each GM sees their location's specific recovery opportunities — with the dollar amount, the root cause, and the action to take. The best locations stay sharp. The underperformers start catching up.
Free 48-hour analysis on 3-5 of your locations. Works with Toast, Square, Clover, Aloha, and every other major POS.
90-minute setup. No contract. No risk.
Marty integrates with Toast, Square, Clover, QuickBooks, R365, and Xero. Read-only connection. Average payback: 3.2 days.