What Coffee Shop Owners Actually Make: The Honest Math

Search “how much do coffee shop owners make” and you will find a number. Confident, specific, and worthless, because nobody selling you a franchise or a course is legally allowed to hand you a real one. The Federal Trade Commission built its franchise rule around exactly that problem, and this article is going to explain why, then show you what actually gets published instead.

We are not going to guess at your income, and we are not going to dress up someone else’s number as a projection of yours. What follows is desk research: real Item 19 disclosures from coffee franchise filings, industry-published cost-structure percentages from restaurant operations data, and a break-even framework built from arithmetic you run yourself. Every figure below has a named source and a filing year or publish date attached to it. Where two sources disagreed, we say so instead of picking the one that sounds better.

Franchise Feast is an independent publisher. We do not sell any franchise and take no money from any franchisor, and any referral fee we earn is flat and does not depend on which franchise, if any, you choose (see our affiliate and referral disclosure).

Why nobody, including us, can tell you what you’ll make

The Federal Trade Commission’s Franchise Rule, codified at 16 CFR Part 436, does something specific: it lets a franchisor talk about financial performance in Item 19 of the Franchise Disclosure Document, but only if the claim has a reasonable basis and written backup the company can produce if challenged. If a franchisor chooses not to make any financial performance representation, the FDD has to say so in plain language, and the rule adds a second layer that matters more than people realize: no sales rep, no broker, no discovery-day slide deck is allowed to hand you a number that isn’t in that disclosed Item 19. A verbal “our average owner clears six figures” from someone trying to sign you is not a disclosure. It’s a violation.

That legal structure exists because the FTC spent years watching franchisors promise income that individual franchisees never came close to earning, and reasonable-sounding averages hide enormous store-to-store variation. The rule doesn’t ban honesty about numbers. It bans unsubstantiated promises, and it channels the substantiated ones into one place you can actually check.

So when we say we can’t tell you what you’ll make owning a coffee shop, that’s not a hedge. It’s the same legal position every franchisor selling you a coffee concept is required to take, whether their sales team acts like it or not.

What’s actually published: three real Item 19s

Here’s what three coffee brands disclosed in their most recent FDD filings, each covering the 2024 fiscal year:

Brand (FDD year)	Format	Average gross sales	Margin figure	Reporting units (sales / margin)
Scooter’s Coffee (2025)	Kiosk	$914,719 avg / $880,794 median	14.1% avg EBITDA margin	605 / 555
7 Brew (2025)	Drive-thru	$1,989,229 avg / $1,921,485 median	28.99% avg EBITDAR margin	Not disclosed
Biggby Coffee (2025)	Drive-thru	$747,227 avg / $726,499 median	13.1% avg EBITDA margin	300 / 213
Biggby Coffee (2025)	Non-drive-thru	$582,042 avg / $554,389 median	8.8% avg EBITDA margin	58 / 40

Sources: Scooter’s Coffee and Biggby Coffee figures via Franchise Chatter’s 2025 reviews of each brand’s FDD. 7 Brew figures via BizFranHub’s review of its 2025 FDD.

Look at the spread before you look at any single number. 7 Brew’s average gross sales run more than double Scooter’s kiosk average, and Biggby’s non-drive-thru stores average roughly $1.4 million less than 7 Brew’s drive-thru locations. That gap is not one brand being “better” than another. It’s format. A drive-thru built for high car-count traffic is a different business than a walk-up kiosk, and a walk-up kiosk is different again from a non-drive-thru cafe. Comparing gross sales across formats without adjusting for that is the fastest way to draw the wrong conclusion from real data.

The margin figures need their own caveat. Scooter’s and Biggby disclose EBITDA, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. 7 Brew discloses EBITDAR, which additionally excludes rent. That’s a meaningfully bigger number than a true bottom line, since rent is frequently one of the largest fixed costs a coffee shop carries. None of the three figures above are what an owner actually deposits after debt service, which is the number most people mean when they ask what a coffee shop owner makes, and none of these filings show it.

One more detail worth sitting with: Scooter’s own 2025 Item 19 discloses an EBITDA range across its reporting kiosks running from a loss of roughly $296,663 to a gain of roughly $631,779 in the same fiscal year. Same brand, same disclosure, wildly different outcomes depending on the specific store. That range is the most honest thing in the entire filing.

For a deeper walkthrough of how to read any coffee brand’s Item 19, including what the “reasonable basis” standard actually requires and how formats vary across brands, see our guide to reading a coffee franchise Item 19.

What it actually costs to run one

Item 19 shows revenue and, sometimes, a margin figure. It rarely shows the cost structure underneath that margin. Industry-published operating benchmarks fill in some of that gap, and they don’t all agree with each other.

Cost category	Typical range	Source	Note
COGS (ingredients + packaging)	28-32% of revenue	7shifts, published 2025-03-24	Quick-service and coffee formats trend toward the lower end due to simpler menus and bulk ordering
Labor	20-25% (typical range) vs. 31.7% (2025 median, limited-service)	7shifts Prime Cost Guide, 2026-01-06; National Restaurant Association, 2025 Restaurant Operations Data Abstract	These two sources disagree by seven to twelve points depending on where you measure from; treat 20-25% as an efficient range, not the current median
Prime cost (COGS + labor)	55-60% for quick-service	7shifts Prime Cost Guide, 2026-01-06	Above 65%, the guide notes, there’s often little left for rent, utilities, and profit
Rent / occupancy	5-8% typical; 9-15% in high-traffic locations	Paytronix, published 2025-03-27	Coffee shops chasing walk-up and drive-thru traffic often land at the higher end of this range

The labor disagreement is worth pausing on. 7shifts frames 20-25% as a typical range for a well-run quick-service operation. The National Restaurant Association’s 2025 Restaurant Operations Data Abstract, drawn from more than 900 operators, puts the median labor cost for limited-service restaurants at 31.7% of sales, several points above where the 7shifts range tops out. If you’re building your own numbers, don’t assume you’ll land at the optimistic end just because a guide says it’s achievable. Build your plan around what’s actually happening in the category, and treat anything better as a win rather than a baseline.

Add COGS and labor together and you’re most of the way to prime cost, the single number most restaurant operators watch weekly rather than monthly. At 55-60% for a disciplined quick-service operation, that leaves 40-45% of revenue for rent, utilities, insurance, royalties, debt service, and whatever’s left as profit. At the 31.7% labor figure the National Restaurant Association reports as the current median, prime cost climbs closer to 60-64%, and the remaining margin for everything else gets thin fast.

Build your own break-even number

This is the part where you stop reading someone else’s disclosure and start running your own arithmetic. A break-even framework needs three inputs, and you can gather all three before you sign anything:

Fixed monthly costs. Rent, insurance, base payroll (the staffing you’d carry even in a slow month), loan payments, and any royalty minimum your franchise agreement requires regardless of sales. Our guide to royalty and ad fund math walks through how those percentage fees stack on top of a fixed base in some agreements.

Average ticket. What a typical order actually rings up at, not what you hope it rings up at. Pull this from a comparable location if you can get a franchisee on the phone, or build a conservative estimate from your planned menu and pricing.

Ingredient cost per ticket. Your COGS percentage applied to that average ticket. Using the 28-32% range above, a $6.50 average ticket carries roughly $1.82 to $2.08 in ingredient cost.

Here’s the mechanics, using round illustrative numbers only, to show how the pieces fit together. This is not a projection of what any real coffee shop earns:

Say your fixed monthly costs run $18,000. Your average ticket is $6.50, and your ingredient cost per ticket, using a 30% COGS assumption, is $1.95. That leaves a contribution margin of $4.55 per drink, the amount each sale contributes toward covering your fixed costs before anything becomes profit.

$18,000 divided by $4.55 comes out to roughly 3,956 drinks a month. Spread across a 30-day month, that’s about 132 drinks a day just to break even, before a single dollar becomes owner pay or profit.

Run that same arithmetic with your actual lease, your actual planned staffing, and your actual expected ticket, and you’ll have a number specific to your situation instead of an industry average that may not apply to your market.

Owner pay: draw, salary, and why year one is often zero

Once a location clears break-even, the next question is how the owner actually gets paid, and the mechanics depend on how the business is structured. A sole proprietor or single-member LLC typically takes an owner’s draw, pulling money out of business profits as needed rather than running a fixed paycheck. An S-corp structure generally requires the owner to take a “reasonable” W-2 salary for tax purposes, with any remaining profit distributed separately. Either way, the money available to draw or pay as salary is whatever’s left after every other cost, including COGS, labor, rent, and debt service, has already come out.

That ordering is exactly why year-one owner pay is so often zero. A new location typically carries a startup loan, and loan payments come out of cash flow before owner pay does, not after. Sales usually ramp gradually as a location builds a regular customer base rather than arriving at full volume on opening day, which means the contribution margin covering fixed costs is thinner in month one than it will be in month twelve, if it gets there at all. And most new owners deliberately hold back on paying themselves early, using that cash instead to build a working-capital buffer against the inevitable slow month or unexpected repair.

This isn’t unique to coffee. General small-business owner pay data backs up the pattern: newer owners typically pay themselves less than they will several years in, according to Gusto’s payroll data on solopreneurs, and the broader small-business owner population reports median cash wages around $57,600 a year as of 2025, well below what many owners eventually draw once the business stabilizes. Neither of those figures is specific to coffee shops, and neither should be read as a prediction of what you’d take home. They’re context for a pattern that shows up across small-business ownership generally: pay yourself less early, and expect that to change only once the business proves it can support both the debt and your paycheck.

The honest bottom line

The math that actually matters here is yours to build, not ours to hand you. Item 19 disclosures tell you what specific locations did in a specific past period, cost-structure percentages tell you roughly where the money goes, and a break-even framework tells you how to combine your own lease, staffing plan, and pricing into a number you can actually test against reality. What none of it can do, by law and by simple honesty, is tell you what you personally would make.

If you’re comparing a franchise route against going independent, our piece on franchise economics versus building your own cafe looks at how the cost side of that decision differs. And if you want the full sourcing standard behind every figure on this site, including how we handle disagreements between sources, see our editorial methodology.