Quick answer: UK hospitality vacancies have fallen to 69,000 (ONS, March 2026), but that is operators cutting back, not a shortage easing: UKHospitality counts 170,000 jobs lost in the thirteen months after the October 2024 Budget. Every hour you do staff now costs more. On the April 2026 wage floor of £12.71, once you add 12.07% holiday accrual, 15% employer National Insurance above a £5,000 threshold and a 3% pension, the statutory cost to employ is about £16.50 an hour before any margin. A fully loaded agency charge rate for the same base sits around £19 to £21 an hour. The published rates and rules are cited below; the per-hour build is labelled illustrative, not a quoted price.
Two numbers describe UK hospitality in 2026, and they point in opposite directions. Vacancies in accommodation and food service have fallen to 69,000, down from a 2022 peak above 177,000 (ONS, series JP9O, March 2026). Read on its own, that looks like the staffing crisis easing. It is not. UKHospitality counts 170,000 hospitality jobs lost in the thirteen months after the October 2024 Budget, and almost 89,000 of the 164,641 jobs shed across the entire UK economy in that period came from this one sector (UKHospitality, 2025). Vacancies are down because operators are cutting hours, closing on quiet days and running thinner rotas, not because the roles are being filled.
That gap, fewer adverts but fewer people working, is the whole story of the 2026 labour market. This guide sets out what the data actually shows, then does the one piece of arithmetic most rotas skip: what a worked hour costs once the April 2026 employer rules are loaded on. Where a figure is published, it is cited. Where it is built from components, the working is shown and the result is marked illustrative.
Falling vacancies are cost cutting, not recovery
The vacancy decline is real and it is steep. The ONS accommodation and food service series ran at an annual average of 162,000 in 2022, 126,000 in 2023 and 98,000 in 2024, then 79,000 across 2025, reaching 69,000 by March 2026 (ONS, series JP9O). On the surface, a market with fewer open roles is a market under less pressure.
The closures data says otherwise. CGA by NIQ counted 98,914 licensed sites at the end of December 2025 and 98,609 by the end of March 2026, a loss of 305 sites in the first quarter, or 3.4 net closures a day (CGA by NIQ, Hospitality Market Monitor, 2026). Roles disappear from the vacancy count not because someone took the job but because the kitchen behind it shut. When a site stays open, the response to a higher wage bill has been to drop a shift, shorten opening hours or leave a section short rather than hire at the new rate. Our hospitality staffing page works the gap that creates, where a venue still needs cover for the hours it does trade.
The turnover underneath the shortage
Hospitality has the highest staff turnover of any UK sector, and that has not changed with the wider cooling. The CIPD puts the sector’s attrition rate at 52% against a UK average of about 34%, with 40% of hospitality workers moving to another employer in the same sector inside a year and a further 12% leaving the industry altogether (CIPD analysis of the ONS Annual Population Survey). Churn at that level means an operator is not staffing a venue once, it is restaffing it every eighteen months whether trade grows or not.
There is some genuine improvement to report. Pineapple and Sona, analysing data from more than 35,000 hospitality employees, found annual turnover fell from 75% to 67% over the year to late 2025, with labour costs climbing to 35% of revenue (Pineapple/Sona Insights Report, September 2025). Lower churn, higher cost: the people who stay are being paid more to stay, which is rational but does nothing for the margin. Run a venue below its needed headcount and the remaining team absorbs the slack, which speeds up the next round of resignations. That loop is why understaffing rarely fixes itself.
What a worked hour actually costs in 2026
The headline wage is the smallest part of what an hour costs. From 1 April 2026 the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over is £12.71 an hour, up 4.1% (gov.uk, The National Minimum Wage in 2026). The 18 to 20 rate rose faster, by 8.5%, to £10.85, which matters because hospitality leans on younger staff for front-of-house and kitchen-porter roles. On top of the wage sit three statutory on-costs.
| Cost on a £12.71 hour (2026) | How it is worked out | Per hour |
|---|---|---|
| Base pay | April 2026 National Living Wage, age 21+ | £12.71 |
| Holiday pay | 12.07% accrual on hours worked | £1.53 |
| Employer National Insurance | 15% above the £5,000 yearly threshold | £1.91 |
| Workplace pension | 3% minimum on qualifying earnings | £0.38 |
| Illustrative cost to employ | Base plus statutory on-costs | ~£16.53 |
Two of those lines need a caveat. Employer National Insurance is charged at 15% only on earnings above a £5,000 yearly threshold, and the 3% pension applies to qualifying earnings above £6,240, so a full-time worker carries close to the full per-hour figure while a few-hours-a-week casual carries less (gov.uk, rates and thresholds 2026 to 2027). That is why the table is labelled illustrative rather than a quote. The point holds either way: the £12.71 advert is really about £16.50 once the law is applied, before hospitality recruitment costs, training or cover for the hours that worker is off. Our chef cost calculator runs the same build for a specific role and salary.
What pushed this from a rounding error to a board-level number was the employer National Insurance change. The rate moved to 15% and the threshold at which it starts dropped from £9,100 to £5,000, frozen there until 2031 (gov.uk). A low threshold pulls the part-time, flexible workforce that hospitality runs on fully into the charge, which is why UKHospitality argues the sector took a sharper hit from the Budget than its size alone would predict.
Agency cover versus a permanent hire
A common mistake is to compare a permanent worker’s base wage against an agency’s hourly invoice and conclude the agency is expensive. It is the wrong comparison, because the permanent wage is missing every line in the table above plus the cost of finding and keeping the person.
An agency charge rate bundles the worker’s pay, the 12.07% holiday accrual, the 15% employer National Insurance, the pension and a margin for doing the recruiting, payroll and compliance admin and carrying the no-show and replacement risk. Apply a margin in the mid-teens to low-twenties percent, the band typical UK temp staffing sits in, to the £16.53 statutory cost and the fully loaded charge for that base lands around £19 to £21 an hour, excluding VAT (illustrative build, not a quoted rate). The margin is the price of speed and of moving the risk off your books, not a surcharge on the same product. The published rate components behind chef cover specifically are set out in our 2026 UK chef hire rate benchmark, and the gap between a chef’s salary and a chef’s true cost is broken down in our chef salary 2026 guide.
The decision is about how predictable the hours are. For a role that runs 52 weeks a year and defines the kitchen, a Head Chef or a founding Sous Chef, a permanent hire is cheaper over the year and worth the fixed commitment. For short-notice sickness, a maternity gap, a three-month summer peak or a hard-to-fill skilled slot, the agency premium buys flexibility you cannot get from a contract that locks in salary, National Insurance and potential redundancy cost regardless of trade. Most operators need both, used deliberately rather than by default. When the gap is urgent, our hire staff page is the route in.
What leaving a shift unfilled really costs
The instinct under cost pressure is to run short and save the wage. It rarely saves money. There is no robust, published, UK-specific figure for the cost of one unfilled staff shift, so treat any single per-shift number you see with caution. What is published is the cost of the vacancy itself: the CIPD puts the average cost of filling a role at about £6,125, rising to roughly £19,000 for a manager (CIPD Resourcing and Talent Planning Report, 2022). Every time churn opens a role, that is the bill to close it again.
The per-shift damage is real even where it is not cleanly quantified. A missing Chef de Partie stretches ticket times, so tables sit longer and the door backs up. A missing server leaves tables un-cleared and covers turned away. The staff who are in get pushed into overtime at a premium, which feeds the burnout that drives the next resignation, and slow service shows up in the reviews that decide next month’s bookings. Separately, on the customer side, Zonal and CGA estimate diner no-shows cost the sector around £12.6 billion a year in lost sales, down from £17.59 billion as the no-show rate fell (Zonal/CGA, #ShowUpForHospitality). That is demand-side, not staffing, but it compounds the same problem: a venue already short on covers cannot afford to lose more to slow service. For the gaps you cannot plan around, our emergency chef cover and 2-hour response guarantee exist precisely to stop an unfilled shift becoming a lost service.
Plan peak cover before the peak
Hospitality demand still concentrates in two windows. The summer terrace and tourism peak runs roughly June to September, and the Christmas party season from late November is the sharpest concentrated spike of the year. Both hit the whole sector at once, so the temporary workforce gets committed weeks ahead and last-minute booking pays a premium for whoever is left. Brief agencies three to four months out for summer and from early autumn for Christmas, and you lock in the better staff at standard rates instead of paying the panic premium in week one.
The national peaks are not the only windows to plan. City calendars stack their own demand on top: hotel and restaurant chefs in Liverpool get committed around matchdays and a waterfront conference season that runs September to March, so the brief-early rule holds well outside summer there.
The squeeze is worst where the local labour pool is thinnest. A coastal or rural venue with an intense short season and almost no resident chefs has to bring people in, which is why parts of Scotland and the Highlands pay among the highest rates in the country at peak. Our Scotland chef agency page covers that market, and for planned cover across a season our relief chef service holds a known rate rather than a scramble.
Before you sign with an agency, check these
Using an agency moves the employment admin off your desk, but it does not move all the legal risk. The operator, as the hirer, keeps real exposure, so run these as a hard gate before signing terms.
Right to work is the big one. Civil penalties rose to up to £45,000 per illegal worker for a first breach and £60,000 for a repeat, from 13 February 2024 (Home Office). Get written confirmation of who in the contract carries the check and proof the agency runs it through the Home Office online service before anyone starts. Where the setting involves children or vulnerable people, contract catering in schools, care homes or hospitals, enhanced DBS checks are not optional, and you should verify the agency’s process rather than assume it, which is the standard our DBS-checked kitchen staff cover is built to. The Agency Workers Regulations 2010 give a temporary worker equal basic pay and conditions after 12 continuous weeks in the same role with the same hirer, so budget for that step-up rather than being surprised by it. And confirm the agency holds Employers’ Liability insurance, a legal minimum of £5 million (most carry £10 million), plus adequate public liability cover.
The operators who hold their margin through 2026 are the ones who stop treating labour as a fixed overhead and start pricing every hour at its real loaded cost, then decide hour by hour whether to own that hour on the payroll or buy it in. The wage floor, the National Insurance and the turnover are not going back down. The lever you still control is which hours you commit to permanently and which you keep flexible.
Frequently asked questions
How many hospitality vacancies are there in the UK right now?
About 69,000, as of March 2026, in the ONS accommodation and food service series (JP9O). That is down from an annual average of 79,000 across 2025 and a 2022 peak above 177,000. The fall reflects operators cutting back rather than roles being filled: UKHospitality counts 170,000 sector jobs lost since the October 2024 Budget.
Why are hospitality vacancies falling if there is still a shortage?
Because a vacancy disappears from the count either when it is filled or when the operator stops advertising it, and in 2026 it is mostly the latter. Faced with a higher wage bill, venues are dropping shifts, shortening hours and in some cases closing, with CGA by NIQ recording 3.4 net site closures a day in the first quarter of 2026. Fewer adverts, but also fewer people working.
How much does it cost to employ someone in hospitality in 2026?
More than the wage. On the April 2026 National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour, the statutory on-costs add roughly £3.80: about £1.53 for holiday accrual at 12.07%, £1.91 for employer National Insurance at 15% above the £5,000 threshold, and £0.38 for the 3% minimum pension. That takes the illustrative cost to employ to around £16.53 an hour before recruitment, training or cover, and the National Insurance and pension lines vary with hours worked.
Is agency cover more expensive than hiring directly?
Per hour, yes, because the charge rate bundles the same on-costs plus a margin. Over a full year on a predictable role, a permanent hire is usually cheaper. The agency model wins on short-notice cover, seasonal peaks, maternity gaps and hard-to-fill skilled roles, where the premium buys speed and transfers the no-show and replacement risk. The right answer is usually a mix, with baseline hours in-house and flexible hours bought in.
What does an unfilled shift actually cost?
There is no reliable published figure for one unfilled staff shift, so be wary of any single number. What is documented is the cost of the vacancy: the CIPD puts the average cost of filling a role at about £6,125. Per shift, the damage shows up as turned-away covers, overtime at a premium, management time spent chasing cover and the review-driven reputation hit from slow service.
What should I check before using a hospitality staffing agency?
Confirm who carries the right-to-work check and that it is done before deployment (penalties run to £45,000 and £60,000 per worker). Verify enhanced DBS checks for any school, care or hospital setting. Budget for Agency Workers Regulations parity after 12 weeks. And confirm the agency holds at least £5 million Employers’ Liability cover plus public liability.
When should I book agency cover for the summer and Christmas peaks?
Three to four months ahead for the summer peak, and from early autumn for Christmas. The whole sector competes for the same temporary workforce in those windows, so the best staff get committed early and last-minute booking pays a premium. Block-booking ahead locks in standard rates and reliable people.