Catering Quote Calculator

Adding a percentage to cost gives you a margin measured against cost, not against the final price. If you mark $1,000 of cost up by 35%, you get a $1,350 quote, but profit ($350) is only 25.9% of that $1,350 — not the 35% margin you intended. Dividing cost by (1 − 0.35) instead gives $1,538.46, where the $538.46 profit really is 35% of the quote. This is the standard way caterers and restaurants price to a target margin on revenue.

There's no single correct number — it depends on your market, competition, and how much labor-intensive service the event requires — but many catering operations target somewhere in the 25–40% range on the final price, factoring in that food cost alone often runs 25–35% of revenue. Complex plated events with heavy staffing typically need a higher margin than simple drop-off catering to stay profitable after labor.

Yes. More guests directly increases total food cost (food cost per person times guests), which raises total cost and therefore the quote price at any fixed target margin. Price per person can still move independently, though, since fixed costs like equipment rental get spread across more guests as the group grows.

Food cost per person changes the underlying cost base linearly, but the target margin changes the multiplier applied to the ENTIRE cost base, including labor and equipment rental. Near the high end of the margin range the 1/(1 − margin) multiplier grows quickly, so raising margin from 60% to 70% adds proportionally more to the quote than the same 10-point move at 20% to 30% would.

Breaking labor into staff count, hours each, and hourly rate lets you reuse the same rate card across events of different length and crew size without re-deriving a flat number every time, and it lets the calculator show labor cost as a percentage of the quote so you can compare staffing intensity across different events on an apples-to-apples basis.