Pour Cost: How to Calculate It and Stop the Leaks Behind Your Bar
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Pour cost is the bar’s version of food cost: the cost of the liquid in the glass divided by what you charge for it. Most owners can recite their food cost to the decimal and go blank when you ask about pour cost, which is a problem, because a busy bar pours hundreds of drinks a shift and a point or two of pour cost on each one adds up faster than almost anything on the food side.
The good news is the math is the same thirty-second formula you already use for plates. The work is in the counting: knowing what actually goes into each drink, and knowing how much of it never makes it onto a ticket.
TL;DR: Pour cost = cost of the liquor and mixers in a drink, divided by its menu price. Healthy ranges are roughly 20 to 25% for beer, 30 to 45% for wine, and 15 to 24% for spirits and cocktails. A bad pour cost is almost always an operational leak (overpouring, waste, comps, theft), not a pricing mistake. Measure it monthly, by category, and fix the leaks before you touch prices.
What is pour cost?
Pour cost is a percentage. It answers one question: of every dollar a drink brings in, how much went to the stuff inside the glass?
If a cocktail costs you $2.50 in liquor and mixers and you sell it for $12, your pour cost on that drink is 2.50 ÷ 12, or about 21%. The other 79% is contribution margin, the money left to cover labor, rent, glassware, the broken bottle, and profit.
This is the exact same relationship as food cost percentage, applied to liquid. If you have read that piece, the only new vocabulary here is the word “pour.”
The formulas
Pour cost for one drink = ingredient cost ÷ menu price × 100. A margarita that costs $2.40 to build and sells for $12 runs 20%.
Overall pour cost (the number you track) = total cost of beverages used ÷ total beverage sales, over a period. This is the one you get from inventory: opening inventory, plus what you purchased, minus closing inventory, gives you what you actually used. Divide that by what you rang up.
Price from a target = ingredient cost ÷ target pour cost. Want that $2.40 margarita at an 18% pour cost? 2.40 ÷ 0.18 = $13.33, so you price it at $13.
Contribution margin = menu price minus ingredient cost. The $12 margarita contributes $9.60. As with food, keep the dollar margin next to the percentage at all times. A low-percentage well drink can contribute fewer dollars than a “worse” percentage craft cocktail that pours for $20.
What is a good pour cost percentage?
There is no single target, because beer, wine, and spirits behave differently. A keg sells with almost no labor and little waste, so bars can run it tight. Wine by the glass carries the risk of the open bottle going off, so the target is looser. Spirits have the most room, which is exactly why cocktails are where bar profit is made or lost.
| Category | Typical pour cost | Why it sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Draft beer | 20 to 25% | Low labor, but foam and over-pour eat the keg fast |
| Bottled and canned beer | 25 to 30% | Fixed cost per unit, little room to improve |
| Wine by the glass | 30 to 45% | Open-bottle spoilage and generous pours push it up |
| Well and call spirits | 15 to 20% | High markup, the engine of bar margin |
| Craft cocktails | 18 to 24% | Premium spirits and fresh ingredients, but strong pricing power |
A common overall target for a bar program is around 20%, which usually means pricing so each category lands in its range above and then actually hitting those pours. If your overall number is sitting at 28 to 32% and prices look normal, you do not have a menu problem. You have a leak.
How to calculate pour cost for a drink
Work bottom up, the same way you cost a plate. Take a well-known build, a classic margarita.
A 750 ml bottle holds about 25.4 ounces. Say a bottle of your tequila costs $24. That is $24 ÷ 25.4, or about $0.945 per ounce. The build:
| Ingredient | Amount | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Blanco tequila | 1.5 oz | $1.42 |
| Triple sec | 0.75 oz | $0.38 |
| Fresh lime juice | 1 oz | $0.35 |
| Agave syrup | 0.5 oz | $0.15 |
| Salt rim and lime wheel | garnish | $0.20 |
| Total ingredient cost | $2.50 |
Sell it for $12 and the pour cost is 2.50 ÷ 12 = 20.8%, with a $9.50 contribution margin. That is a healthy drink. Now watch what one bad habit does to it: a bartender free-pouring the tequila who runs a quarter ounce heavy is adding roughly $0.24 per drink. Across 300 margaritas a week, that single quarter ounce is about $72 a week, or $3,700 a year, on one cocktail. Multiply that across every spirit on the rail and the “mystery” in your bar number stops being a mystery.
Where pour cost actually leaks
When the number is high, the cause is almost always one of these, and none of them are the price on the menu:
- Free pouring. The most common and most expensive. Eyeballed pours run heavy, and heavy is invisible one drink at a time. Jiggers and measured pour spouts are the single highest-return fix in most bars.
- Untracked comps and spills. A comped round, a remade drink, a bottle dropped on the floor. If these do not get logged, they show up as pure shrinkage and you have no idea which leak to chase.
- Over-portioned wine. A “generous” glass that is really 7 ounces out of a bottle you costed at 5-ounce pours quietly turns a 35% wine into a 49% wine.
- Draft waste. Foam, line cleaning, and the first pour of a fresh keg. A poorly balanced system can waste 15 to 20% of a keg before anything reaches a guest.
- Theft. Overpouring for bigger tips, undercharging friends, or bottles walking out. Inventory variance is how you catch it, which is why you have to count.
The thread connecting all of these: you cannot fix what you do not measure. A monthly liquor inventory, matched against sales, is the single discipline that makes pour cost real instead of a vibe.
How to control pour cost: the checklist
- Measure every pour. Jiggers or metered spouts on the well, full stop. Train to them and spot-check.
- Cost every drink on paper first. Build sheets with ounces and costs, like the margarita above. You cannot manage a number you never calculated.
- Take inventory on a schedule. Monthly at minimum, weekly for high-volume spirits. Variance between used and sold is your leak detector.
- Log comps, spills, and remakes. Give staff a fast way to record them so waste stops hiding inside theft and vice versa.
- Standardize wine pours. Mark the glass or use a measured pourer. Count open-bottle spoilage as a real cost.
- Review by category, not in aggregate. A 22% overall number can hide a 48% wine program being carried by a tight beer margin.
- Reprice only after the operations are clean. If you raise prices to cover a free-pour habit, you have just made the habit more expensive without fixing it.
Pricing is the last lever, not the first. When you do reach for it, the presentation of those prices matters as much as the number itself, which is the whole subject of menu pricing psychology. And if happy hour is where your margins get tested, the structure of that program decides whether it builds traffic or just discounts your regulars, covered in how to build a happy hour menu.
Pour cost in the bigger picture
Pour cost is one input to the same engineering you run on food. Once you know the cost and contribution of every drink, you can sort the list the way you sort entrees: the high-margin crowd-pleasers get the best spots on the page, the profitable sleepers get promoted, and the slow, low-margin pours get cut or reworked. That is the menu engineering matrix applied to the bar, and the costing work on this page is what makes it trustworthy. For the drink list itself, layout and sequence do real work, which is the focus of drink menu design.
The last mile is simple and easy to forget: the number only holds if guests order from the current menu. When you reprice a cocktail or 86 a seasonal pour, the QR menu on the table, the printed list, and the menu on Google all have to match the new reality. VisibleMenus keeps those in sync from a single upload, so a price change behind the bar does not leave an old number live on Google for three weeks.
Pour cost FAQ
What is a good overall pour cost? Around 20% is a common target for a full bar program, though the honest answer depends on your mix. A beer-heavy bar will run higher than a cocktail-driven one. Track your own baseline and work to improve it rather than chasing a universal number.
Is pour cost the same as liquor cost? Close. “Liquor cost” usually refers just to spirits, while “pour cost” and “beverage cost” cover everything you pour: beer, wine, and spirits together. The formula is identical in each case.
How often should I take beverage inventory? Monthly is the floor, weekly is better for fast-moving spirits. The point is to compare what you used against what you sold often enough to catch a leak while it is still small.
Does lowering pour cost mean cheaper liquor? No. The biggest gains come from measured pours, less waste, and tracking comps, not from downgrading your well. You can run premium spirits at a healthy pour cost if you portion them correctly and price them right.
How does pour cost relate to food cost? They are the same calculation on different inventory, and both roll up into your overall cost of goods. Get food cost percentage and pour cost both under control and you have your kitchen and your bar pulling in the same direction.
