What Coffee Shop Owners Actually Make: The Math

Search “how much do coffee shop owners make” and you will find a number. Confident, specific, and usually without a verifiable basis. The Federal Trade Commission built its franchise rule around exactly that problem, and this article is going to explain how, 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 no franchisor pays us for coverage or placement, 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. Under 16 CFR 436.5(s)(1), financial performance information that differs from what is in Item 19 may be given only if the franchisor provides the actual records of an existing outlet you are considering buying, or supplements Item 19, for example with information about possible performance at a particular location. A verbal “our average owner clears six figures” that fits neither route is not a disclosure, and it is the kind of claim you should ask to see in writing in Item 19.

Reasonable-sounding averages hide enormous store-to-store variation, and the rule’s approach is to require a reasonable basis and written substantiation for any financial performance representation and to put the substantiated ones in 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 position the rule puts every franchisor selling you a coffee concept in.

What’s actually published: three real Item 19s

Here’s what three coffee brands disclosed in their most recent FDD filings, each covering fiscal year 2025, read from the FDDs themselves:

Brand (FDD issued)	Format	Average gross sales	Margin figure	Reporting units (sales / margin)
Scooter’s Coffee (April 2026)	Kiosk	$999,869 avg / $966,739 median	14.6% avg EBITDA margin	761 / 621
7 Brew (May 2026)	Drive-thru (franchised stores)	$2,646,063 avg / $2,550,624 median	Not disclosed in Item 19	297 / none
Biggby Coffee (April 2026)	Drive-thru	$756,742 avg / $722,832 median	14.0% avg EBITDA margin	347 / 216

Sources: Item 19 of each brand’s Franchise Disclosure Document (Scooter’s issued April 3, 2026; 7 Brew issued May 11, 2026; Biggby issued April 30, 2026). Wisconsin’s Department of Financial Institutions franchise database, as we searched it on September 29, 2026, lists each of these filings as registered, with effective dates of April 3, May 12 and April 30, 2026. 7 Brew reports “Total Sales” rather than gross sales.

Three caveats belong with that table, and none is small. The three Item 19s do not measure the same stores. Scooter’s reports its kiosk stores separately from its end cap stores. Biggby’s sales chart covers only drive-through stores that were open seven days a week and excludes kiosk and non-drive-through stores. 7 Brew’s covers every store open for the full fiscal year and reports its franchised stores separately from its company-owned ones. 7 Brew’s stores are young: its 297 franchised measured stores had been open an average of 24.7 months at the end of fiscal 2025, and they average approximately 510 square feet. And 7 Brew is not currently selling franchises at all: its own support page states, as checked on September 29, 2026, that “we are not accepting new franchise applications or expressions of interest.” Its numbers are here as category context for what a drive-thru coffee business does, not as an opportunity you can act on. Scooter’s and Biggby both invite franchise inquiries on their own franchising sites, as loaded September 29, 2026; see our coffee franchise cost breakdown for their current figures taken from their own sites.

Look at the spread before you look at any single number. 7 Brew’s franchised-store average is more than 2.6 times Scooter’s kiosk average and about $1.9 million above Biggby’s drive-through average. Do not read that gap as one brand being better than another. The three FDDs describe different store types, include different sets of stores and measure different things, and a gap in average gross sales says nothing by itself about profit. Comparing gross sales across brands 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, and they build it differently. Scooter’s FDD says its card-processing and overhead expenses are estimates and that it imputed the 6% royalty, the 2% marketing contribution and a $350 monthly technology fee. Biggby’s chart rests on 216 stores that self-report financials electronically in its standard format, and its own notes say EBITDA and profit margin do not reflect a store’s actual net income and should not be relied on to calculate profitability. 7 Brew’s May 2026 Item 19 reports Total Sales only, with no margin figure; its May 2025 FDD had included EBITDAR-based margins, which additionally exclude rent. Scooter’s table labels its 14.6% figure a “Net Profit Margin,” and by our arithmetic it equals EBITDA divided by net sales, while Biggby defines its margin as EBITDA divided by gross sales. None of these figures is 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 2026 FDD discloses an EBITDA range across its 621 reporting kiosks running from a loss of $250,144 to a gain of $613,869 in fiscal 2025. Same brand, same disclosure, wildly different outcomes depending on the specific store. Biggby’s shows the same pattern, from a loss of $30,984 to a gain of $352,213 across its 216 stores. Those ranges are the most reliable thing in either 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.

Three terms worth knowing: EBITDA/EBITDAR, unit economics, and comp sales

A few phrases have already shown up above without being defined. All three matter for the same reason: they tell you exactly what you’re looking at, so you don’t accidentally compare two different things and assume you’re comparing the same thing.

EBITDA, EBITDAR, and net income are three different measurements. EBITDA stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. EBITDAR is the same idea with rent added back on top of that. Neither one is net income, which is what’s actually left after every cost, interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, rent, and everything else, has already come out. The gap between EBITDA and EBITDAR matters in practice because rent is routinely one of the largest fixed costs a coffee or food business carries (see the rent range in the cost table below). Adding rent back, the way an EBITDAR figure does, produces a systematically higher margin than an EBITDA figure would show for that same location. That’s why a filing that shows EBITDAR and a filing that shows EBITDA aren’t handing you two versions of the same number. One of them has already excluded a cost the other one hasn’t, and a reader who doesn’t notice the extra letter will assume the EBITDAR brand runs a tighter operation than it necessarily does.

Unit economics is the profit picture of one location, as opposed to the brand’s total sales or total store count across the whole system. Average gross sales, cost of goods percentage, labor percentage, contribution margin, and break-even, the figures covered in the cost table and the break-even framework elsewhere on this page, are all pieces of unit economics. A buyer cares about the economics of one unit rather than the brand’s totals for a simple reason: you’re not buying the brand’s totals. You’re opening one location, on one lease, in one labor market, and that location either covers its own costs or it doesn’t. A brand’s combined system sales can look enormous while a real share of its individual units are barely covering theirs, and the system total alone will never show you which kind of unit you’re about to open.

Comp sales, short for comparable sales or same-store sales, is a growth rate: the year-over-year change in sales at locations that have been open at least twelve months. That makes it a different kind of number than average unit volume (AUV), the average gross sales figure in the Item 19 table above. AUV is a level, what one location does in a year. Comp sales is a rate of change over time, measured only at units that already existed a year earlier. The two can move in opposite directions at once. A brand can grow its total system sales purely by opening new locations while sales at its existing stores go flat or slide, because the growth is coming from unit count rather than from each store selling more. A buyer trying to judge where a brand is actually headed, not just how big it already is, should ask for both figures rather than assume one tells you the other.

That’s the vocabulary. None of it changes the answer from the section above, there still isn’t a single number that tells you what you’d make, but it should make the disclosures you do see easier to read correctly instead of at face value.

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% (median salaries and wages including benefits, limited-service, 2025 Abstract)	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 salaries and wages (including benefits) for limited-service respondents 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, plug them into our coffee shop monthly budget template, 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 points the same way: Gusto’s payroll data on solopreneurs (owner-only businesses with no W-2 employees) shows the average owner paying themselves about $41,000 in year one and about $76,000 in year two. That figure is not specific to coffee shops, and it should not 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 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.