Get our free one-page cheat sheet of pizzeria cost benchmarks: food, labor, rent and delivery, with a blank for your own numbers.
Sales per labor hour (SPLH) is net sales divided by the total hours your people worked in the same window: a lunch block that does $1,200 on 16 labor hours runs $75 an hour. The formula is that simple. What isn’t simple is which sales go on top and which hours go underneath, and in a pizzeria where the manager works the make line, the default POS report can leave part of the bottom half out.
We’ve already covered where your slow shifts stop paying for themselves and how to rebuild a schedule around your sales curve. This piece is about getting the number right first.
Net sales go on top, hours worked go underneath
Start with the numerator. Toast defines gross sales as the regular price of items plus service charges, not including tax or tip, and net sales as gross minus discounts and refunds. Scheduling vendor 7shifts uses the same idea: net sales, after discounts and comps. Use net. A $5 coupon didn’t make anybody on the line more productive.
Watch the service charges. Because Toast counts them in gross sales, a delivery fee you ring as a service charge rides into net sales too. Either way is fine. Pick one and keep it.
The denominator is hours worked, not hours scheduled. 7shifts counts all paid hours in the period, including managers if they’re on the clock. That last clause is where most shops’ numbers break.
The salaried manager is the hour your report forgets
Toast’s help center says it plainly: “Labor cost calculations do not include salaried jobs.” Its suggested fix is to give salaried employees an approximate hourly rate and have them clock in. Toast’s platform guide also lets you exclude hourly roles you treat as fixed, such as hourly managers, which removes their hours from the sales-per-hour column. Square’s labor vs. sales report only works when team members have a wage assigned to their profile.
So the default answer to “do salaried managers count?” in your POS may be no. The operator’s answer should be yes. If your manager spends Tuesday lunch stretching dough, those hours made the sales. Leave them out, or leave your own hours out, and the shift looks more productive than it is.
Run two numbers. Crew SPLH is what the POS gives you. All-hands SPLH adds every hour a salaried manager or owner actually worked the floor. An illustration, not a benchmark: a $900 Tuesday lunch on 10 crew hours is $90. Add four manager hours and four of yours and it’s $50. Schedule from the $50.
Pull it by daypart, one day at a time
In Toast, the Labor Cost Breakdown report shows hourly labor costs and sales by job, employee, hour, day or week, and you can set it to net or gross sales. The catch: it breaks down by hour only when you’re viewing one day. On Toast’s community board, a Toast community manager said the report shows 15-minute intervals, “but it looks like you can’t export it.”
Square’s report filters by day, week, month, team member or location, exports as a CSV, and requires a Shifts Plus subscription.
So pull one day at a time. Take the same weekday for four weeks, copy each block’s net sales and clocked hours into a sheet, add the hours the report leaves out, and divide. The labor-by-daypart tool does the division for you.
The published benchmarks are thin, and none of them are pizza
The SPLH targets you’ll find online come from scheduling and POS companies. We’ve covered those vendor ranges and why to discount them. No independent body publishes an SPLH benchmark for pizzerias.
The closest independent number comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ industry productivity data. Limited-service eating places produced $493.2 billion of sectoral output in 2025, roughly their revenue, over 7.36 billion hours worked. By our arithmetic, that’s about $67 per hour. BLS counts the hours of wage and salary workers, the unincorporated self-employed and unpaid family workers, which is the all-hands version. The trend isn’t helping: output per hour fell 1.1% in 2025.
That $67 blends burger drive-thrus, coffee counters and pizza delivery into one average. Use it as a rough check, not a target.
If the owner’s hours aren’t in the denominator, the number isn’t measuring the shop. It’s measuring how much free labor the shop is getting.
SPLH and labor percentage answer different questions
7shifts calls SPLH a productivity metric, not a cost metric, and that’s the cleanest way to hold the two apart. The link between them is one line of arithmetic: labor percentage equals your loaded cost per labor hour divided by SPLH. At $18 an hour loaded and $72 SPLH, labor runs 25%. Those are illustration numbers.
That line explains why the two move apart. Give the crew a raise and labor percentage climbs while SPLH doesn’t move. Raise menu prices and SPLH climbs even if nobody works a second faster. For comparison, the National Restaurant Association’s limited-service median was 31.7% of sales in labor costs in 2024.
Use SPLH to decide how many hours a block deserves. Use labor percentage to judge the P&L. When you’re ready to turn an SPLH target into a crew, we walk through how many people a pizza shop needs.
Free cheat sheet: 15 pizzeria cost benchmarks on one page
Prime cost, labor, delivery and rent, each with its source and a blank for your shop’s number. Enter your email and the download opens right away.
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The limitation: SPLH punishes delivery. Every driver hour sits in the denominator, while the tips that pay a lot of that driver’s evening never show up in net sales. A delivery-heavy shop will post a lower SPLH than a counter-only slice shop with the same kitchen and the same crew. Compare yourself with your own past weeks and with shops on the same delivery model, never with a number that blends both.
Common questions
How do you calculate sales per labor hour?
Take net sales for a window and divide by the total hours people worked in that same window. Net sales means after discounts and refunds, and without tax or tips. $1,200 in a block worked by 16 labor hours is $75 an hour.
Should salaried managers count in sales per labor hour?
Yes, if they're working the shift. Toast's own help pages say salaried jobs are left out of its labor cost math unless you give them an hourly rate and have them clock in. Count your own hours on the line too, or the number looks better than the shop really is.
What is a good sales per labor hour for a pizza shop?
Nobody independent publishes one for pizzerias. Federal productivity data works out to about $67 of output per hour worked across all limited-service restaurants in 2025, by our math. Use that as a rough check, and judge your own shop against its own last four weeks.
What's the difference between sales per labor hour and labor cost percentage?
Sales per labor hour tells you how much you sell for every hour worked. Labor percentage tells you how much of every sales dollar goes to pay. A raise moves your labor percentage without changing sales per labor hour. A price increase raises sales per labor hour even if nobody works faster.
