How to Create Your Restaurant’s Staffing Plan

Staffing in the restaurant industry is a complex equation that never seems to have a definite answer. Some shifts you’re overstaffed, others you’re understaffed. Sometimes you have a stacked roster of employees and other times it seems like there’s never enough people to fill your open positions.

Hiring has always been challenging, but now it’s even tougher with notorious labor shortages. All restaurants are feeling the effects, and thankfully there’s a simple equation to help you figure out exactly how many employees you need for your weekly operations.

With a little bit of math, you can calculate your restaurant’s exact staffing needs to help you better direct your hiring efforts.

If you’re not a fan of crunching numbers, then thankfully we live in a day and age where technology can make almost anything easier. For those interested, there’s hiring software available that can ease the process by automatically showing you insights into your scheduling trends.

Regardless, it’s always beneficial to know the manual way of doing things. Read on to learn how you can calculate your employment needs with a simple three-step calculation.

How Many Restaurant Employees Do I Need?: Our 3 Step Calculation

Using data for decision making is a smart business decision. So, the team at HigherMe took to the drawing board to create an equation that gave our clients the answers to their staffing needs.

With a simple three-step calculation, you can easily find how many employees you need for your business operations. This helps you ensure all the roles at your restaurant are properly filled, which will in-turn provide your customers with better service and a more quality experience.

This information proves itself invaluable, especially during a time with unprecedented labor shortages. Restaurants are having to meet demands with less, and this calculation definitively tells you if employment is worth an investment with scarce resources.

Step 1: List All Necessary Roles

The first step to finding out how many employees you need is to first outline all the necessary roles in your restaurant.

This means listing all positions including both front-and-back-of-house-staff, that are required for your restaurant to run smoothly.

This list might include:

Front-of-House: Restaurant manager, Server, Food runner, Busser, Bartender, Host

Back-of-House: Kitchen manager, Head chef, Sous chef, Line cook, Dishwasher

Step 2: Build a Sample Schedule

Building a sample schedule helps you see the staffing needs of your restaurant on paper. It may seem it a little daunting, but it can easily be done in a few simple steps:

A. Start with Opening Hours:

When building your sample schedule, it’s best to start with your opening hours and work your way to closing in shifts of 8, 10, or 12 hours. If you’re open later on the weekends, then you’ll need to add on extra shifts to accurately represent your restaurant’s schedule.

Next, calculate the total number of shifts required of your restaurant every week and group them by type, like day shifts, evening shifts, and weekend shifts.

B. Break up Shifts by Type:

Next, break up your shifts by type and calculate how many roles are required for each shift.

Start with the day shifts and work your way down the necessary role list you made in step one. Make sure to tally how many of each position you need for the shift to run smoothly. The number of staff required may fluctuate depending on if it’s a higher trafficked day.

To help you figure this out, you could consider the ratio of staff to customers. If you keep this ratio constant, you shouldn’t see any impact to the level of service and the dining experience during busier shifts.

C. Add up all the Shifts:

Once you have outlined how many positions are required for each shift for each day of the week, you can tally up your total shifts by position.
This will show you how many dishwasher shifts, for example, need to be filled each week for your restaurant’s weekly operations.

To move on to the next step, total all of your shifts by position. For example, here is a mock table:

Step 3: Compare Total Shifts with Your Roster

You now have the total amount of shifts required of your restaurant per week. Now, it’s time to cross-reference the list with the staff you have now.
For example, if your restaurant requires 30 server shifts per week and your servers average five shifts per week, then you need six servers for your restaurant to run smoothly. However, it would be wise to have seven servers on your roster to give you some slack in your scheduling and to accommodate any servers who would prefer four shifts rather than five.

Continue this same calculation for every necessary role on your list. From here, you can see how many shifts you’re short-staffed and where you need to focus your hiring efforts.

Conclusion

Hiring the right employees isn’t an easy task, especially in such a competitive and demanding industry. Restaurant managers have to work even more strategically to find and retain skilled employees to meet growing business demands.

Taking inventory of your staff and the required positions of your restaurant can help you gauge where you're short-staffed and where you should focus your hiring efforts. If you wish there was an easier way, then hiring software can help streamline your data and show automatic insights into your scheduling trends.

Whether you prefer calculating your staffing needs manually or using an automated software like HigherMe, we hope this guide has helped you create a staffing plan and narrow down what roles you need to hire for your restaurant’s overall success.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1 : How do I calculate how much staff I need for a restaurant?

To explain the calculation you can follow along the table on the side. Each column is identified with a letter from A to E.

First, decide how many employees for each role are required during a shift (Column A) and count the number of shifts you have per week (Column B). In a second step, calculate the total number of shifts by multiplying weekly shifts by employees needed per shift (Column C).

In a third step, estimate how many weekly shifts you expect employees to take on average. (Column D). Finally, divide the total shifts by the number of shifts per employee to know how many employees you need to hire to staff your restaurant.

Q2: How many employees does a restaurant need per shift?

It depends on the type of restaurant and how busy you get, but here are rough starting points most operators work from. Quick-service and fast food spots typically need somewhere between 5 and 15 people on the floor at any given time. Sit-down restaurants - casual dining, family style, anything with table service, usually need between 10 and 40, because you've got the full front-of-house crew on top of your kitchen team. Fine dining tends to run leaner in covers but heavier in staff per table because the level of service demands it.
The honest answer is that these numbers only get you in the ballpark. Your actual number depends on your floor plan, your average cover count, and whether your kitchen runs like a well-oiled machine or needs extra hands to keep up.

Q3: How do I figure out how many employees I need for each role?

Start with one shift and one role. Ask yourself: how many line cooks does it actually take to get through a Friday dinner rush without falling behind? Write that number down. Then count how many of those shifts happen in a typical week. Multiply them together and you've got your total weekly shift demand for that role.
From there, divide by how many shifts you realistically expect each employee to work per week. Most full-time restaurant employees work four or five shifts. Part-timers might do two or three. That division tells you the minimum number of people you need on the roster.
And here's the part most managers skip: add at least one or two people on top of that minimum. People call out. People request time off. People quit on a Thursday with no notice. If you're staffed exactly to the bone, one absence turns into a crisis.

Q4: What's a healthy labor cost percentage for a restaurant?

Most operators try to keep labor between 25% and 35% of revenue, though where you land in that range depends a lot on your concept. Counter service and fast food tend to run on the lower end - closer to 25 to 28% - because the service model is simpler. Full-service restaurants usually sit between 30 and 35%, sometimes higher if the concept is labor-intensive.
If you're consistently above 35%, it's worth looking at whether your scheduling matches your actual volume — not just your theoretical staffing plan. A lot of over-budget labor comes from overscheduling slow shifts, not from understaffing busy ones.

Q5: How many tables should one server handle?

In most casual dining environments, three to four tables per server is pretty standard. In fine dining, drop that to two or three, the expectation of attentiveness is different, and rushing through a table turns into a negative review fast.
The table count also changes depending on how well the rest of your team is set up. A server covering four tables is manageable when there's a busser clearing plates, a food runner dropping food, and a bar that keeps up with drink orders. Take away any one of those roles and suddenly four tables is too many.

Q6: How often should I revisit my staffing plan?

At minimum, quarterly. In practice, most experienced managers do a quick gut-check any time something shifts, a menu rollout, a change in hours, a surge in delivery orders, a wave of turnover. Your staffing plan isn't a document you file away, it's a working tool that should feel slightly out of date if you haven't touched it in a while.
The times it really matters: before summer, before the holiday season, and any time you're opening a new section of the restaurant or extending your hours.

Q7: What's the difference between a staffing plan and a schedule?

A staffing plan answers the question: "How many people do I need in each role for this restaurant to run properly?" It's a headcount blueprint - strategic, not week-specific.
A schedule answers: "Who is working Tuesday evening, and what time do they start?" It's the operational document you build every week.
Your schedule should always be built on top of your staffing plan. If it's not, if you're just moving names around based on who's available, you're scheduling by survival mode, not by design.

Q8: How do I keep up with staffing during high-turnover periods?

The restaurants that handle turnover best aren't the ones who react the fastest, they're the ones who never fully stop recruiting. Keeping an open job posting and a small pipeline of candidates, even when you're fully staffed, means you're never starting from zero when someone leaves.
A buffer of 15 to 20% above your minimum headcount for high-churn roles (servers, dishwashers, line cooks) is a practical target. It feels like overhiring until the week someone quits two days before a holiday weekend and you realize you have coverage.

Did we miss anything? If you’re ready to start hiring amazing employees, reach out to us at HigherMe! Email us at hello@higherme.com, or visit our Applicant Tracking System!