How much is a cafe worth in Australia?
There is no credible published earnings multiple for Australian cafes, so anyone quoting you one number is guessing. What can be observed is what sellers ask: across 246 cafes advertised with a firm price on seekbusiness.com.au on 2 September 2026, the median asking price was $196,500 in Australian dollars, with about a quarter under $100,000 and roughly one in six above $500,000. Asking prices are not sale prices. Your cafe's value is its normalised earnings multiplied by a figure a buyer will accept, and the practical first step is to check your cost of sales, wages and rent against the ATO's published coffee shop benchmarks.
By the bizflip team · Published 2 September 2026 · Facts checked 2 September 2026 · Sources listed below
A cafe is worth what its earnings are worth to a buyer, less the risk that those earnings stop when you leave. That sounds like a dodge, but it is the honest position: there is no published, verifiable Australian dataset of cafe sale prices against cafe earnings, so no one — including us — can responsibly hand you a single multiple and call it the answer. What this guide does instead is show you the numbers that can be checked, and the method to get from them to a figure for your own cafe.
Why nobody can honestly quote you a cafe multiple
Sale prices for small private businesses are not published in Australia. There is no register of completed cafe sales the way there is for residential property, and the ATO, ASIC and the ABS do not publish transaction multiples for small hospitality businesses. Everything you will read online in the form "cafes sell for X times earnings" comes from a broker or valuer summarising their own deal book, unaudited, usually without saying how many transactions it covers or over what period.
Those reported ranges are not worthless — they tell you roughly where the market sits — but they are much wider and softer than the confident single figure they get compressed into. Our own guide to valuation multiples by industry sets out the reported Australian hospitality range and where it comes from. Read it as a sanity check on your own arithmetic, not as a price.
The deeper problem is that "cafe" covers businesses that have almost nothing in common. A 15-seat suburban shop where the owner makes every coffee and the wage bill is one casual, and a 90-seat CBD site with a paid manager, a kitchen and a six-year lease with options, are both cafes. They will not trade on the same multiple, and averaging them produces a number that describes neither.
What can be observed: asking prices
Asking prices are public, so they can be counted. On 2 September 2026 we collected the first 44 pages of results in the "Coffee, Cafes & Restaurants" category on seekbusiness.com.au, a category holding 3,875 live listings nationally at that moment. That produced 821 unique listings, of which 659 were existing businesses offered for sale rather than new franchise-store opportunities. Of those, 75 were advertised price-on-application and a further 12 showed only a price band. We classified the remainder by keywords in the listing title and summary, giving 246 cafes with a firm advertised price.
| Measure | Advertised asking price (AUD) |
|---|---|
| Lowest in sample | $29,000 |
| 25th percentile | $100,000 |
| Median | $196,500 |
| 75th percentile | $371,250 |
| Highest in sample | $2,150,000 |
Spread out into bands, 24% of those cafes were advertised under $100,000, 28% between $100,000 and $200,000, 17% between $200,000 and $300,000, 16% between $300,000 and $500,000, 13% between $500,000 and $1 million, and 3% above $1 million. The long tail matters: the median is a small business, but the same category contains cafes asking seven figures.
Three caveats, and they are not small ones. An asking price is what a seller hopes for, not what anyone paid — we have no visibility of the settled figure, and no way to know how long these businesses had been listed. About one in four of the cafe listings was advertised "plus SAV" (stock at valuation), meaning the buyer pays the headline price and then pays again for the coffee, food and packaging on hand at settlement. And 11% of hospitality sellers in the sample refused to publish a price at all, which is itself a signal about how uncomfortable this market is with public pricing.
The method: earnings first, then a multiple
For a small owner-run cafe, the figure a buyer works from is usually seller's discretionary earnings — the profit left after all real operating costs, with one owner-operator's wage added back, because the buyer intends to do that job themselves. Larger, manager-run cafes are more often quoted on EBITDA, which leaves the manager's wage in the costs. The distinction changes the number materially, and applying the wrong multiple to the wrong base is one of the most common ways a cafe gets mispriced. We cover the difference in SDE versus EBITDA.
Whichever base you use, it has to be normalised: strip out one-off costs, add back genuinely personal expenses run through the business, and — this is the one that catches cafe owners — put a real market wage in for any family member working unpaid. A cafe that is only profitable because a spouse works forty hours a week for nothing is not as profitable as its books suggest, and a buyer's accountant will find it.
Check your inputs against the ATO benchmarks
Before you multiply anything, check that the earnings figure is plausible. The ATO publishes small business benchmarks built from actual tax returns, and coffee shops are one of the industries covered. The figures below are from the 2023–24 benchmarks, last updated in March 2026.
| Annual turnover | $65,000 – $250,000 | $250,001 – $600,000 | More than $600,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost of sales / turnover | 34% – 42% | 35% – 41% | 33% – 38% |
| Average cost of sales | 38% | 38% | 36% |
| Total expenses / turnover | 73% – 86% | 81% – 90% | 86% – 93% |
| Labour / turnover | 21% – 32% | 21% – 32% | 27% – 35% |
| Rent / turnover | 10% – 17% | 8% – 14% | 6% – 10% |
These are not multiples and they will not produce a valuation. They are a check on your inputs. If your cost of sales sits at 50% of turnover when the benchmark tops out at 42%, either you have a pricing or wastage problem worth fixing before you sell, or your bookkeeping is misclassifying something — and either way the profit figure at the bottom is not yet a number you should be multiplying.
One caution on reading a margin out of the total expenses row. The benchmarks pool sole traders, partnerships, trusts and companies, and whether an owner's own wage sits inside "total expenses" depends on the structure. So the gap between 100% and the total expenses figure is an indication of where the money goes, not a ready-made SDE or EBITDA figure for your business.
What actually moves a cafe's value
- Rent as a percentage of turnover. The ATO benchmark puts rent at 10% to 17% of turnover for the smallest coffee shops and 6% to 10% for the largest. A cafe paying well above its band has a structurally thinner business, and no amount of goodwill argument fixes that for a buyer running the same numbers.
- Lease term and options. A buyer is not buying your cafe so much as the right to trade from that address. Two years left with no option is a different asset to five years with a five-year option, and it is often the single largest swing factor in a small cafe sale.
- Owner dependence. If you make the coffee, do the ordering, hold the supplier relationships and are the reason regulars come in, a buyer is purchasing a job with equipment attached. A cafe that runs profitably with a paid manager on the floor is worth more per dollar of earnings.
- Whether the wage bill is real. If the roster only works because you or a family member fill unpaid shifts, the buyer has to add those wages back in and the earnings fall. Award obligations for cafes sit under the Restaurant Industry Award 2020, which covers cafes explicitly, and a buyer's adviser will price in any shortfall.
- Equipment and fitout condition. A machine, grinder, fridges and cool room near end of life are a capital bill the buyer will discount from your price. Age, service history and whether items are owned outright or under finance all matter.
- Trading hours and licences. A cafe already licensed to trade evenings, or holding an outdoor-seating approval from the council, is selling optionality a buyer would otherwise have to apply for.
- Concentration risk. A cafe whose trade depends on one office tower, one school, or one nearby employer carries the same risk as a business with one big customer — and it should be disclosed, because due diligence will surface it.
What is actually changing hands
Most cafe sales are asset sales, not company sales. What transfers is the fitout and equipment, the goodwill, the assignment of the lease, the phone number and social accounts, supplier and staff arrangements, and — priced separately, usually at valuation on the day — the stock. You are almost never selling the premises. That is why a cafe with strong earnings and a weak lease can be worth less than its profit-and-loss suggests: the buyer cannot keep the earnings without the address.
When you need someone to look at your actual numbers
Everything above narrows the range. It will not give you a defensible figure for a bank, a family law matter, a partner buyout or a tax position, because those depend on facts a guide cannot see. For a number you will rely on, have an accountant, a business broker or a registered valuer normalise your earnings and apply a multiple to your circumstances. Our broader guide on what a business is worth covers the valuation methods in more depth. Tax outcomes on a sale, including whether the sale is GST-free and whether you qualify for small business capital gains tax concessions, turn on your specific facts and need your own accountant's advice.
Sources
Every load-bearing claim in this guide, and where it comes from:
- ATO small business benchmarks for coffee shops, 2023–24 financial year: cost of sales 33%–42% of turnover, total expenses 73%–93%, labour 21%–35% and rent 6%–17% depending on the turnover band. Last updated 16 March 2026. — Australian Taxation Office
- The ATO publishes small business benchmarks drawn from tax return data across more than 100 industries, as a free tool for owners to compare their performance against similar businesses. — Australian Taxation Office
- Observed asking prices: the "Coffee, Cafes & Restaurants" category held 3,875 live Australian listings on 2 September 2026. From the first 44 result pages we collected 821 unique listings, 659 of them existing businesses for sale; 246 cafes carried a firm advertised price, with a median of $196,500, a 25th percentile of $100,000 and a 75th percentile of $371,250. — seekbusiness.com.au (sample collected 2 September 2026)
- The Restaurant Industry Award 2020 clause 4.2 defines the restaurant industry as including cafes, so cafe employees are covered by that award unless another listed award applies. — Fair Work Ombudsman
- Standard business valuation methods include market comparison, net asset valuation, return on investment, replacement cost and capitalising future profit. — business.gov.au (Australian Government)
- Guidance for owners on preparing for and working through a business sale. — business.gov.au (Australian Government)
Ready for your own number? The valuation calculator is free and ungated, and its methodology is public.