In this article
Sundays and public holidays are exactly the days your guests most want to eat out — and exactly the days a shift costs the most to run. Most owners know the surcharge percentage. Almost nobody counts the second cost that comes attached to it in many sectors.
Ask a hospitality owner when the restaurant is busiest, and the answer comes without thinking: Sunday afternoon, and the holidays around New Year and in spring. Ask that same owner how much those days cost extra in staff each year, and the answer turns vague — "there's a surcharge on it", with no figure ever attached.
That's not reluctance. A surcharge percentage sits on the payslip as a calculation rule, not as a visible total. And the second cost — the compensatory rest day that comes with Sunday and holiday work in many sectors — never shows up as a separate line at all, even though in practice it's often larger than the surcharge itself.
This article treats it not as a legal question but as arithmetic, the same way the drinks-margin and benchmark tools on this site treat cost and revenue: how many days it touches, what the surcharge does on top, what a compensatory rest day really adds, and what that comes to over a year.
The percentage itself isn't the same everywhere — that depends on country, sector and agreement, and changes regularly. The arithmetic around it is. You build that here, with your own numbers in the calculator further down.
Why this is a different number from overtime or the 13th month
Overtime is tied to the number of hours worked in a week — work fewer, and the cost disappears. Sunday and holiday pay works differently: it's attached to the CALENDAR DATE, not the hour count. A four-hour Sunday shift carries as much premium as an eight-hour Tuesday shift carries overtime only after the tenth extra minute worked.
The 13th month is one large sum, once a year. Sunday and holiday pay is the opposite: a small amount, repeated dozens of times, that never shows up as a single line on any year-end statement — and is therefore never recognised as one figure, let alone reconsidered.
And it's a different cost from the split-shift gap or the 11-hour rest rule between shifts: those two are about the SHAPE of a working day. This is about which CALENDAR DAY it is. A Sunday shift can be perfectly contiguous, well-rested, and still be the most expensive shift of the week — purely because it's a Sunday.
The 7 numbers behind the Sunday and holiday bill
None of these numbers is one imposed national percentage — that varies by sector and by country, and shifts again with every new collective agreement. What stays the same everywhere is the ARITHMETIC: how many days it touches, what the surcharge does on top, and what a compensatory rest day really adds. You build that arithmetic here, with your own numbers.
1. 54 days a year — more than 1 in every 7
A restaurant open on 48 of the 52 Sundays and rostering staff on 6 public holidays runs on a different rate on 54 days a year. That's not an occasional exception — it's at least one day every single week, plus a handful of fixed dates you can already mark on the calendar right now.
Most rostering happens week by week: how many people do I need for the coming weekend? That question never answers how much that weekend structurally costs above an ordinary Thursday. This number does — and it's the base every other number in this article builds on.
54 of the year's 365 days run on a different rate than the rest — more than 1 in every 7.
54 of the 365 days (15%) are a Sunday or a worked public holiday — and so carry a different labour-cost rate than the rest of the week.
2. What a Sunday or holiday premium typically looks like
There is no EU-wide percentage for Sunday or holiday work in hospitality — like the split-shift gap, it's a patchwork of national law and sectoral collective agreements. What IS a recognisable pattern: many hospitality collective agreements price a Sunday or holiday hour above the normal rate, usually expressed as a percentage on top of the base wage.
That percentage differs not only from country to country, but often from one joint committee to another within the same country, and it gets revised regularly at contract negotiations. That's why the calculator below asks for YOUR OWN rate — your sector's, your country's, your current agreement's — rather than assuming one. What we do fix is the arithmetic that happens with that rate, and that's the same everywhere.
3. The obligation almost nobody counts: the compensatory rest day
This is where most budgets miss a cost. In many sectors, a Sunday or holiday shift comes with more than a higher hourly rate — it also carries a right to an equivalent rest day, one the employee has to be able to take elsewhere in the roster without the venue's coverage taking a hit.
On paper, that compensatory day costs nothing: it's a day off, not an extra payroll line. But the HOURS that person would normally have worked on that rest day don't disappear — they have to come from somewhere. In practice that means an extra shift someone else has to cover, or a team running thinner than planned on the make-up day. Both cost money, even when there's no separate invoice line for it.
Count that replacement shift at the same normal rate, and the "small" surcharge above gets company from a second, often larger cost — one that never appears as "Sunday premium" on any payslip, but still has to be absorbed somewhere in the roster every single time.
4. What one premium shift really costs
Take the worked example: 4 people on the floor, 8 hours a shift, at €16.00 an hour — that's €512 for an ordinary shift. On a Sunday or holiday, at a 50% surcharge, that adds €256 on top.
If a compensatory rest day is required, add another €512 — the replacement shift that covers the make-up day. Together that's €768 extra, on top of the €512 the shift already costs. That's not "a bit more" — that's one and a half times the cost of the shift itself, before a single extra guest has been served.
An ordinary shift costs €512. A Sunday or holiday shift starts at the same figure and stacks the surcharge — and possibly the replacement shift — on top.
The surcharge itself adds €256. If a compensatory rest day is required, add another €512 — often the largest slice of the bar, and the slice that never gets booked anywhere as "surcharge".
5. How that compounds into an annual figure
Multiply that extra cost per shift by the 54 days from the first number, and an amount that still feels manageable per shift becomes €41,472 a year — on top of the €27,648 those same 54 days already cost at plain wages.
That's exactly the pattern the 13th month already showed: a cost small enough per event to ignore, that only becomes a figure once someone bothers to add up every event in a year. With the 13th month, that happens once. Here it happens 54 times, quietly, spread across every payslip of the year.
6. The margin question: do you actually earn the surcharge back?
A Sunday brunch or a holiday menu often does bring in more revenue than an ordinary shift — higher average spend, full tables, sometimes an adjusted menu. The question almost nobody asks: does that extra revenue also cover the extra labour cost, or is the busiest day of the week actually running on the thinnest margin?
That's not a question you answer once and leave settled. A collective-agreement rate changes, a team grows, the number of Sundays you're open shifts with the season — and every change also shifts the tipping point between "Sunday is worth it" and "Sunday costs more than it brings in".
7. What to do with this now
This number isn't a reason to close on Sundays — for most restaurants, Sunday is exactly the day that keeps the week's revenue afloat. It IS a reason to stop treating those 54 days as "just a busy weekend" and start treating them as their own cost line, one that deserves the same attention as rent or purchasing prices.
The calculator below runs on YOUR OWN numbers — your own surcharge rate, your own team, your own count of Sundays and holidays. Fill them in, and the figure it produces stops being an estimate.
Calculate your own Sunday and holiday cost
Fill in the seven fields below with your own restaurant's numbers: how many Sundays you're open, how many holidays you staff, how many people are on the floor, and the surcharge percentage that applies in your own sector or agreement.
Not sure whether a compensatory rest day applies to you? Flip the toggle to "no" and watch the difference — that difference IS exactly the cost most budgets overlook.
The Sunday & holiday calculator
Your own numbers, your own annual figure.
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A calculator, not legal advice — the surcharge percentage and the compensatory-rest requirement differ by country, sector and agreement. Check your own rate before building next year's roster on this figure.
This is a calculator, not legal advice. The surcharge percentage, whether a compensatory rest day is required, and which public holidays count toward the total all differ by country, sector and collective agreement — and change regularly. Check your own rate with your payroll provider or sector body before building next year's roster on this figure.
What stays the same everywhere is the arithmetic itself: how many days, what percentage, and whether a second shift is involved. Change any one of those three and you immediately see what it does to the annual figure.
Before you build next year's roster
Three things most restaurants only discover after the year is already over:
Put the amount on paper, not just the percentage
- Convert the surcharge percentage into an annual euro figure once — a percentage feels small; an annual figure doesn't.
- Repeat that sum every time the percentage or the number of Sundays changes, not just at year-end.
- Put the figure next to rent or purchasing prices: it's often the same order of magnitude, but rarely gets the same attention.
If a compensatory rest day is required, plan it in
- Assign the make-up day at the moment you roster the Sunday or holiday shift, not afterwards.
- Count the replacement shift in that same week's labour cost, not as a separate, invisible cost.
- Spread Sunday and holiday shifts fairly across the team — whoever always works them also stacks up the most make-up days.
Price the Sunday separately, if the margin calls for it
- Compare average Sunday spend against an ordinary shift, and test it against the extra labour cost from this article.
- Consider an adjusted menu or a minimum spend on the most expensive days, the way some venues already do for group bookings.
- Review each quarter whether the number of Sundays you're open still matches your team and your margin.
The number that never appears on a payslip
No payslip ever shows the line "Sunday and holiday cost: €41,472 this year." The amount is spread across 54 separate payroll calculations, each too small to notice, and that's exactly why it stays, for most owners, a figure that never really exists — until someone bothers to add it up.
That's not a reason to fear Sunday. For most restaurants, Sunday is the day that rescues the whole week's revenue, and public holidays are often the busiest days of the year. It IS a reason to treat those 54 days as what they are: a structural cost line, not a series of unrelated coincidences.
Whoever knows the arithmetic — the rate, the make-up day, the annual figure — can price, staff and plan those days with numbers instead of a gut feeling. And that starts with working the amount out once, properly, instead of reading the percentage off a payslip and moving on with the rest of the week.