What is the average asking price for a cafe for sale in Australia?
Across 246 Australian cafes advertised with a firm price on seekbusiness.com.au on 2 September 2026, the median asking price was $196,500 in Australian dollars and the arithmetic mean was $297,171. The mean is the misleading figure — a handful of large venues drags it well above what most cafes are advertised at. A quarter were listed under $100,000 and a quarter above $371,250. These are asking prices from one marketplace on one day, not sale prices, and about a quarter also required the buyer to pay for stock on top of the advertised figure.
By the bizflip team · Published 2 September 2026 · Facts checked 2 September 2026 · Sources listed below
The honest answer to this question has to come with a date, a sample size and a source, because nobody publishes Australian cafe sale prices. What follows is a distribution we collected ourselves, disclosed in full so you can judge how much weight it carries.
The figures
| Measure | Advertised asking price (AUD) |
|---|---|
| Lowest in sample | $29,000 |
| 10th percentile | $79,000 |
| 25th percentile | $100,000 |
| Median | $196,500 |
| Mean (average) | $297,171 |
| 75th percentile | $371,250 |
| 90th percentile | $632,500 |
| Highest in sample | $2,150,000 |
Sample: 246 Australian cafes carrying a firm advertised asking price, collected on 2 September 2026.
Why the average is the wrong number to quote
The mean of $297,171 sits more than $100,000 above the median of $196,500. That gap is not noise — it is the shape of the market. Cafe asking prices are heavily skewed: most listings cluster under $300,000 while a small number of large licensed or multi-site venues ask well over $1 million, and those few pull the average up past where almost any individual cafe actually sits. If someone quotes you "the average Australian cafe sells for around $300,000", they are quoting a figure that describes very few real cafes.
The median is the more useful single number, and the percentile spread is more useful than either. Half the cafes in the sample were advertised between $100,000 and $371,250. That range, not a point estimate, is the realistic answer to the question.
| Advertised price band | Share of the 246 cafes |
|---|---|
| Under $100,000 | 24% |
| $100,000 – $200,000 | 28% |
| $200,000 – $300,000 | 17% |
| $300,000 – $500,000 | 16% |
| $500,000 – $1,000,000 | 13% |
| Above $1,000,000 | 3% |
Where the sample came from
We collected the first 44 pages of search results in the "Coffee, Cafes & Restaurants" category on seekbusiness.com.au on 2 September 2026. The category held 3,875 live Australian listings at that moment; the pages we collected yielded 821 unique listings. From those we kept only businesses being sold as going concerns — 659 listings — and discarded 162 new-franchise-store opportunities, where the advertised figure is the cost of opening a new outlet rather than the price of an existing business.
Of the 659, 75 were advertised price-on-application and 12 more showed only a price band, leaving 572 with a firm figure. We then classified each listing as a cafe or a restaurant from keywords in its title and summary, which produced 246 cafes, 209 restaurants, 25 that described themselves as both, and 92 other food businesses that were neither. The 246 cafes are the sample behind every number above.
State by state
| State | Cafes in sample | Median asking price (AUD) |
|---|---|---|
| Victoria | 91 | $158,000 |
| New South Wales | 86 | $250,000 |
| Queensland | 39 | $169,000 |
| Western Australia | 23 | $235,000 |
South Australia, the ACT and Tasmania each returned fewer than ten cafes in this sample, which is too few to quote a median from, so we have not. Even the four states above should be read carefully: 23 listings is a thin basis for a state-wide figure, and the New South Wales number is really a Sydney number — 71 of the 86 New South Wales cafes were in Greater Sydney, where the median asking price was $300,000.
What the advertised price does and does not include
- Stock is often extra. 61 of the 246 cafes — one in four — were advertised "plus SAV", meaning stock at valuation. The buyer pays the headline price and then pays again for the beans, food and packaging counted on settlement day. For a cafe that can be a few thousand dollars; for a licensed venue with a cellar it can be much more.
- The premises are almost never included. What is being sold is the fitout, equipment, goodwill and the assignment of the lease. A buyer takes on your rent and your remaining term.
- Some prices are openly flexible. Fourteen listings were tagged negotiable, and a further 75 hospitality sellers across the wider sample published no price at all. Roughly one in nine sellers preferred not to name a figure in public.
- Nothing here is a sale price. We have no visibility of what any of these businesses settled at, whether they sold, or how long they had been listed. Listings that have sat unsold for a year still show their original asking price.
Turning an asking price into something useful
An asking price on its own tells you almost nothing, because it is a number without a denominator. A cafe asking $250,000 is cheap if it earns $150,000 for a working owner and expensive if it earns $40,000. The question that converts a listing into information is always the same: what are the normalised earnings, and what multiple of them is this price?
So when you are comparing your own cafe to listings, do not compare headline to headline. Ask each listing for its earnings figure, check whether that figure is EBITDA or seller's discretionary earnings — the two are not the same, as we set out in SDE versus EBITDA — and divide. Then check the earnings claim itself against the ATO's published coffee shop benchmarks, which give cost of sales, labour and rent as percentages of turnover for real businesses in each turnover band. A listing claiming a margin far outside those bands is claiming something unusual, and the burden is on the seller to show why.
One structural detail worth noticing in those benchmarks: the ATO's top turnover band for coffee shops is "more than $600,000", where restaurants get bands running past $2 million. That is a reasonable indication of how small most Australian cafes are as businesses, and it is consistent with a median asking price under $200,000.
How to use this, and how not to
This distribution is good for one thing: telling you whether the number in your head is anywhere near the market. If you were expecting $700,000 for a cafe and 84% of advertised cafes sit below $500,000, that is worth knowing before you brief a broker. It is not good for setting your own price. Your price comes from your earnings, your lease and your dependence on the owner, which is the subject of our guide on how much a cafe is worth. For a figure you will rely on in a negotiation or a finance application, have an accountant, a broker or a registered valuer work from your actual accounts.
We will re-collect this sample and move the review date when we do. If you are reading this well after 2 September 2026, treat the figures as a historical snapshot rather than the current market.
Sources
Every load-bearing claim in this guide, and where it comes from:
- Sample source and size: the "Coffee, Cafes & Restaurants" category on seekbusiness.com.au held 3,875 live Australian listings on 2 September 2026. The first 44 result pages yielded 821 unique listings, 659 of them existing businesses for sale, 572 with a firm advertised price, of which 246 were classified as cafes. Median asking price $196,500, mean $297,171, 25th percentile $100,000, 75th percentile $371,250, range $29,000 to $2,150,000. — seekbusiness.com.au (sample collected 2 September 2026)
- ATO small business benchmarks for coffee shops, 2023–24 financial year, with turnover bands topping out at "more than $600,000": cost of sales 33%–42% of turnover, labour 21%–35% and rent 6%–17%. Last updated 16 March 2026. — Australian Taxation Office
- ATO small business benchmarks for restaurants, 2023–24, with turnover bands extending past $2,000,000, for comparison with the coffee shop bands. — Australian Taxation Office
- The ATO publishes small business benchmarks drawn from tax return data across more than 100 industries as a free comparison tool for owners. — Australian Taxation Office
- Guidance on valuing a business, including the market comparison approach that underlies any use of comparable listings. — business.gov.au (Australian Government)
Ready for your own number? The valuation calculator is free and ungated, and its methodology is public.