How Much Does It Cost to Open a Small Restaurant?

People often quote a kitchen quote as if it were the whole business. A usable estimate has three buckets: one-time setup (deposit, interiors, equipment, licences, branding), opening inventory, and working capital — usually two to four months of rent, salaries and other fixed costs.

If you skip working capital, you can open on time and still run out of cash in week six. That is not a POS problem. That is a planning problem.

• Monthly rent and security deposit (often several months of rent).
• Kitchen equipment and exhaust — driven by the menu, not by a catalogue.
• Interiors and furniture — easy to overspend relative to what guests will pay.
• Licences and compliance — required, location-specific, and not something a website should invent for you.
• First inventory and packaging.
• Hiring and a short training period before the first paying week.

Change every line for your quotes. A calculator is only useful if you overwrite the defaults.

Put conservative rent in first. Then add a contingency line for overruns — interiors and civil work almost always overrun. Then calculate break-even with those monthly fixed costs. If you need an optimistic number of covers every day to survive, the concept or the rent is wrong, not the spreadsheet.

These figures are estimates, not a bank’s view of your file and not a guarantee of profit.