Blogs · July 2026

What a part-time person really costs in 2026

The real cost of an hour of cover, and how to handle the hours you have already lost.

The short answer: a part-time person costs about £15.80 for every hour of cover in 2026, not the £12.71 you are thinking of. One person on 20 hours a week costs £14,660.51 a year once employer National Insurance and pension go on top, and because 5.6 weeks of that year is paid holiday you get 928 hours of actual cover, not 1,040. That works out about 24% above the headline rate. The wage, National Insurance, pension and holiday rates below are the published 2026/27 rates from GOV.UK. The £14,660.51, the 928 hours and the £15.80 are our own arithmetic using those published rates, and we show the working so you can check it or change it to match your own rota.

What does an hour of cover actually cost in 2026?

Let us do the arithmetic properly. One person, 20 hours a week, at the National Living Wage. The working, our maths using GOV.UK rates, 2026:

So a person you think of as "twelve seventy-one an hour" costs you a shade under £14,700 a year for 20 hours a week.

Now the part almost everyone misses. Almost every worker is legally entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year. (GOV.UK) That is not a criticism of the entitlement, it is the law and it is a fair one. It just means the maths is not what it looks like.

You are paying for 52 weeks. You are getting 46.4 weeks of someone actually being there.

• 46.4 weeks × 20 hours = 928 hours of cover a year.
• Not the 1,040 hours you might have written down.

So the real number, in three steps:

Step 1 is the law. Step 2 is arithmetic you can check line by line. Step 3 is the number that should be in your head when you plan a rota, and it is about 24% above the rate you were thinking of.

Three honest caveats, because this number can be misused:

1. This is the floor, not the ceiling. It does not include recruitment, onboarding, training, uniform, payroll admin, or the time you personally spend managing someone. Those are real and they are yours to add.
2. It assumes no one is off sick and nobody leaves. Both of those cost more.
3. It assumes the National Living Wage. If you pay above it, which plenty of good venues do, scale it up. The 24% uplift roughly holds.

Work it out for your own rota: take your hourly rate, multiply by the hours a week, multiply by 52. Add 15% of everything above £5,000. Add 3% of everything above £6,240. Then divide the total by (your weekly hours × 46.4). That is your true cost of an hour of cover.

That is the giveaway. Use it whatever you decide next.

Why did the maths change this year?

Two things happened at once, and read together they explain the position most operators are in.

The cost of an hour went up in April.

• The National Living Wage for people aged 21 and over rose to £12.71 an hour from April 2026. (GOV.UK, 2026)
• Employer National Insurance is 15%, and it now starts at £5,000 a year of an employee's pay, which is £96 a week. (GOV.UK, 2026/27 rates)
• The minimum an employer puts into a workplace pension is 3% of qualifying earnings, which is the slice of pay between £6,240 and £50,270. (GOV.UK)

The hours came off the rota.

• April's cost increases will force two-thirds of hospitality businesses to cut more jobs. (UKHospitality quarterly members' survey, Q1 2026)
• 69% of businesses are operating at or below 85% of the capacity they actually need. (UKHospitality members' survey)

That second figure is the one worth sitting with. It does not say businesses are worried about losing capacity. It says the capacity is already gone. Most venues are already running with less than they need, and have been for a while.

So when we talk about "the hours you have already lost", that is not a sales line. That is 69% of the sector, in their own trade body's survey.

Foreword from the founders

Hey guys. Quick note on why we wrote this one.

Hospitality is rightly pushing hard for a VAT cut right now, and there is a fair case for it. But that is not a number you can change this quarter. So this report is about the numbers you can.

Here is what we kept running into. We would ask an operator what a part-time person costs them, and almost everyone says the hourly rate. Twelve seventy-one. And that is genuinely not the number, it is not even close. Once the National Insurance and the pension go on top, and then you notice you are paying for fifty-two weeks but only getting forty-six and a bit of actual cover, the hour costs a lot more than the hour.

Nothing here is hidden, by the way. It is all sat on GOV.UK. It is just that nobody running a kitchen at eight on a Saturday has a spare afternoon to add it up.

So we added it up. That is most of what this is: the arithmetic, laid out, working shown, so you can take it and use it whether or not you ever talk to us. That is fine with us. If all it does is help you price your next rota properly, it did its job.

The second half is the part we know best. Which of those hours actually need a person, and which are just the phone ringing while someone is carrying three plates. Our view, plainly, is that most venues do not need more people to answer a phone. They need the people they have free to do the thing people are actually good at.

We are also straight about where an agent is the wrong answer. There is a section on that too.

Chanel, and the team at Sorino

Which of your uncovered hours actually need a person?

Here is where we will be opinionated, and also honest about the limits. Not all uncovered hours are the same. Some genuinely need a human being and no software is going to change that.

Hours that need a person. Always.

• Carrying plates, pulling pints, turning rooms, cooking. Obviously.
• The guest in front of you who is upset. That is a person's job and it should stay one.
• The regular who wants to talk to you, not to anything else.
• Anything where judgement, care or a bit of warmth is the actual product. Which, in hospitality, is most of the good bits.

Hours that are just the phone ringing while someone is busy.

• "Are you open on Sunday?"
• "Do you have a table for four at seven?"
• "Do you do gluten free?"
• "What time is check-in?"
• The message that came in at 11pm and got read at 9am.

That second list is not skilled work. It is not why anyone joined hospitality. And it is the work that eats the hours you no longer have.

The honest split: if you are short on the first list, you need to recruit. An agent will not carry a plate and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If you are short on the second list, adding a person to answer the phone is an expensive way to solve it, at £15.80 an hour of cover, for 928 hours, during which the phone still rings at 2am when they have gone home.

Where does this land for a hotel, a restaurant or a bar?

Hotels. The enquiries arrive on six different routes and nobody has one view of them. The front desk is one person deep on a Tuesday afternoon and that person is checking someone in. The maths bites hardest here because the enquiry that goes unanswered was often a direct booking, and the guest who does not get an answer books through a booking site instead.

Restaurants. The chef-patron is also the phone, the inbox and the messages. There is no receptionist to cut, because there never was one. So the arithmetic is not "should I cut a role", it is "should I add one", and at £14,700 a year for 928 hours that is a serious decision for an independent. The phone rings at 7:40pm anyway.

Bars. The message is now the first step in the booking, and it arrives at 11pm on a Friday when every single person is on the floor. There is nobody spare to answer it, and there was never going to be, because the busiest hour and the hour the enquiries land are the same hour. That is the whole problem in one sentence.

What does Sorino actually do, and what does it cost?

One agent, four ways in, all reading from the same knowledge base.

The knowledge base is the part that matters. It is the reason all four channels give the same answer, and it is the difference between an agent and a bolt-on bot that guesses.

On price, plainly: plans start at £299 a month and the first month is free. We confirm your figure after a conversation, because a four-room place and a group are not the same job.

The comparison, since that is the whole point:

And the caveat that keeps this honest: these two things are not the same and the table should not pretend they are. The person can carry a plate, read a room and calm someone down. The agent cannot do any of that, and will not. What it does is take the phone calls and the messages off the people you still have, so they can go and do the part only they can do.

Do not read that table as "one replaces the other". Read it as "these are two different costs for two different jobs, and one of them is probably not worth £15.80 an hour of your rota."

What will you not let it do?

Worth stating plainly, because "AI" covers a lot of sins.

• It does not guess. If it is not in the knowledge base, it does not invent it. It says it will find out and it passes it to a person.
• Allergens come from your record or not at all. Never inferred, never approximated. That is safety, not customer service.
• A person is always reachable. Anyone who wants a human gets one, quickly, without a fight.
• Everything is on the record. Every call and message is there for you to read.
• It works next to your team, not over them. It does not take a shift and it does not have opinions about the rota.

When is an agent the wrong answer?

We would rather say this than have you find out later.

• If your problem is the floor, this is not your fix. Short on hands during service? Recruit. An agent does nothing for you at eight on a Saturday.
• If you genuinely take very few calls and messages, the maths does not work. If the phone rings four times a week, £299 a month is a bad deal and you should not do it. We would rather tell you now.
• If your knowledge base cannot be kept current, do not start. An agent reading a menu from March will confidently tell people about a dish you took off. Wrong answers, fast, are worse than a voicemail.
• If what your guests love is that you personally always pick up, then that is your product. Protect it.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Every figure here, with its source. All links checked on 16 July 2026. Where we did not have a source we could stand behind, we left the number out rather than guess.

• National Living Wage £12.71 an hour from April 2026 for people aged 21 and over. GOV.UK, 2026. https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates
• Employer National Insurance 15%, secondary threshold £96 a week (£5,000 a year). HM Revenue & Customs, 2026/27 rates and thresholds for employers. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-and-thresholds-for-employers-2026-to-2027
• Employer minimum workplace pension contribution 3%, qualifying earnings £6,240 to £50,270. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/workplace-pensions/what-you-your-employer-and-the-government-pay
• Statutory holiday entitlement 5.6 weeks. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights
• April cost increases will force two-thirds of hospitality businesses to cut more jobs. UKHospitality quarterly members' survey, Q1 2026. https://www.ukhospitality.org.uk/insight/quarterly-members-survey/
• 69% of businesses operating at or below 85% of the capacity they need. UKHospitality members' survey. https://www.ukhospitality.org.uk/insight/quarterly-members-survey/
• Our own arithmetic. The £14,660.51 annual cost, the 928 hours of cover and the £15.80 per hour of cover are our calculations from the four GOV.UK sources above. The working is shown in full so you can check it. They are not published statistics and we are not presenting them as such.
• Sorino pricing. Plans from £299 a month, first month free, with the figure confirmed after a first conversation. As published on our pricing page.