Articles · October 28, 2026

Coffee Shop Break-Even Analysis: How Many Cups Do You Need to Sell?

Your coffee shop breaks even when the money left over from each sale, after the cost of the drink and the card fee, adds up to your fixed monthly costs. The formula is break-even tickets = fixed costs ÷ contribution per ticket, and dividing by the days you're open turns it into the number of customers you need every day.

That one number is one of the most useful you can know, whether you're open already or still deciding on a site. Below is how to gather the inputs, a worked example, three quick "what if" checks, and the mistakes that make a break-even look better than it really is. Every number in the example is made up for illustration, not a benchmark. Use your own rent, payroll and invoices.

Step 1: Add up your fixed costs for a month

Fixed costs are the bills you pay whether you sell 50 drinks or 500. For most shops that means:

Rent plus common-area charges, property tax and insurance passed through by the landlord
Scheduled labor for your minimum crew, plus payroll taxes and any salaried manager
Utilities, internet, phone and your POS and software subscriptions
Business insurance, licenses and permits, spread out by month
Loan or equipment lease payments
Repairs, cleaning and other regular monthly overhead

Labor is the tricky one. You'll staff a minimum crew even on a slow day, so it's simplest to treat that scheduled labor as fixed. If you add shifts when sales grow, rerun the math at the new labor number rather than pretending labor never changes.

Step 2: Work out your contribution per ticket

Contribution is what's left from an average ticket after the costs that rise and fall with every sale. Start with your average ticket (total sales ÷ number of transactions). Then subtract the variable costs per ticket:

Cost of goods: coffee, milk, syrups, food and packaging. If your cost of goods runs at 30% of sales, that's 30% of the ticket.
Card processing fees: use the rate on your own processor statement.
Delivery-app commissions, if a meaningful share of your sales come through them.

If you don't know your real cost %, that's the first thing to fix, because a guess here throws off the whole answer. Our guide to coffee shop cost of goods sold shows how to measure it from an inventory count, and the Menu Pricing Calculator gives you the recipe cost % for every drink and size, so the number you use here comes from your actual menu.

Step 3: Divide, then turn it into a daily target

Break-even tickets per month = fixed costs ÷ contribution per ticket.

Break-even sales per month = fixed costs ÷ (1 − variable cost %).

Divide either one by the days you're open in the month. A daily customer count is something your team can actually watch on the POS each afternoon. A monthly sales figure is easy to lose track of until it's too late.

Worked example: a made-up drive-thru

All numbers here are invented to show how the math works.

Fixed costs: $18,000 a month
Average ticket: $7.00
Variable costs: 30% cost of goods plus 3% card fees, so 33% of each ticket ($2.31)
Contribution per ticket: $7.00 − $2.31 = $4.69

Break-even tickets: $18,000 ÷ $4.69 = about 3,838 tickets a month. Open 30 days, that's about 128 customers a day.

Break-even sales: $18,000 ÷ 0.67 = about $26,866 a month, or about $896 a day.

Every ticket past number 128 on a given day adds about $4.69 toward profit. Every day you fall short, the gap comes out of the month.

Three "what if" checks worth running

Once the formula is set up, the real value is testing changes before you make them. Using the same made-up shop:

Average ticket goes up $0.25 (say, from priced add-ons or a food attach): contribution becomes about $4.86, and break-even drops to about 3,706 tickets, or roughly 124 a day. Break-even sales in dollars stay about the same, because the cost % didn't change. You just need fewer customers to get there.
Cost of goods drops from 30% to 28% (tighter recipes, a supplier change, or repriced drinks): contribution becomes $4.83, and break-even falls to about 3,727 tickets (about 124 a day) and about $26,087 in sales.
Rent goes up $2,000 a month on a new site: break-even jumps to about 4,264 tickets, or about 142 customers a day. That's 14 more cars every single day just to stand still.

The last one is why break-even belongs in site selection. Before you sign a lease, compare the break-even count for that rent with the customers you can realistically expect from the traffic going by. If the site needs more cars than the road can plausibly give you, the rent is too high no matter how good the location looks.

Common mistakes

Leaving out owner pay. If you'll pay yourself, it's a fixed cost. A shop that only breaks even because the owner works for free hasn't really broken even.
Using a guessed cost %. Free modifiers, heavy pours and waste push the real number above the recipe number. Use your measured cost % if you have it.
Forgetting card fees and delivery commissions. They're small per ticket but they come off every sale.
Using a "good day" average ticket. Use a full month of transactions, including the slow days.
Dividing by 30 when you're closed some days. Use the days you're actually open.
Doing it once. Rent steps up, wages change and suppliers raise prices. Rerun it whenever a fixed cost or your cost % moves, and at least every quarter.

A simple monthly routine

Update fixed costs from last month's bills.
Pull the average ticket and transaction count from your POS.
Update your cost % from your inventory count.
Recalculate break-even customers per day and post it where the team can see it.

Do this faster

The break-even is only as good as its two hardest inputs: your real cost % and the sales a site can carry. The Coffee Shop Owner Bundle includes the Menu Pricing Calculator for drink-by-drink costs and the Drive-Thru Site Selection Scorecard for rent-to-sales and dealbreakers, so you can check both before the numbers surprise you. If you just want the cost formulas on one page, grab the free cheat sheet below.

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From CoffeeOpsToolkit. Built by a former coffee industry executive who led development for a multi-unit drive-thru chain.

This article was written with the help of AI tools. All example numbers are made up for illustration; use your own invoices.