It is one of the first questions owners ask: what should my average spend per head be? They usually want one number they can hold their own figure against. There are published numbers for Spain, the Balearics and the UK, and they are worth knowing. But each one measures something slightly different, and none of them was measured in your dining room.
Here is what the public figures say and how to use them without fooling yourself.
The Balearic figure: €35 in 2024
In July 2025 Ultima Hora reported a CaixaBank Research study of restaurant performance in 2024, built from card payment data. Its headline finding was that the Balearics had the highest ticket medio in Spain, at €35 (2024), which the paper put at €14 above the national average.
Two other figures from the same report explain why. Foreign visitors made up 54% of restaurant spending in the Balearics, the highest share of any province, and residents only 39%. And 61% of the year's billing fell between June and September, against a Spanish average of 40.5%.
So the €35 is mostly a summer number paid by foreign guests. If you run a bar in Inca that lives on locals and a menú del día, it tells you very little about what you should expect.
The Spanish figure: €27 in 2025
TheFork's annual review for 2025, reported by Vinetur in January 2026, put average spend per diner in Spain at €27 (2025), up from €26 the year before. The same review gave an average of 2.9 diners per booking, and more than half of bookings were for two people.
The price bands are more useful than the average. Around 23% of bookings were at restaurants priced under €20, 25% between €20 and €25, 20% between €25 and €30, and 21% between €30 and €40. The remaining ~11% were at restaurants priced above €40. Most of Spain eats out, at least through that platform, in a fairly narrow band.
Keep in mind who is in that sample: people who book a table online. That leaves out the walk-in terrace, the beach bar, the café and the hotel restaurant where nobody books at all.
One more Spanish data point puts the euro figures in perspective. Delectatech's report on Spanish restaurants in 2025, which tracked more than 250,000 venues and was covered by Vinetur in February 2026, found the average ticket rose 2.5% in 2025 while sector inflation was 4.6%. The average bill went up in euros but bought less. In real terms, guests spent less.
The UK figures: what British guests are used to
Your British guests carry a sense of what eating out costs at home, so the UK numbers matter on the island too.
In February 2012 The Caterer reported Zolfo Cooper's Leisure Wallet survey of 3,000 UK consumers putting average restaurant spend at £15.90 per visit (early 2012), down 8% on a year earlier. In November 2012 Restaurant Online reported the same survey at £17.06 (2012), up 7.3%, while visits were falling. Paul Hemming of Zolfo Cooper said the rise came from the cost of going out, "rather than an extra indulgence by the consumer". Those figures are well over a decade old. I include them because the pattern is the one the 2026 UK data shows again: bills rising mainly because menus cost more.
More recent UK numbers:
- £18.35 per eating-out visit (Q1 2026), up 5.5% year on year, from Lumina Intelligence's Eating and Drinking Out Panel. The panel covers dine-in, takeaway and delivery occasions, so it is not a pure restaurant figure, and Lumina put the rise mainly down to menu price inflation and operators passing on costs.
- £26.89 per head in pubs and bars (April 2026), from The Oxford Partnership's market watch report, as reported by Vinetur in May 2026, close to March's record level.
The figures side by side
| Figure | Year | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| €35 | 2024 | Ticket medio, Balearics, from card payments | CaixaBank Research, via Ultima Hora |
| €27 | 2025 | Spend per diner, Spain, online bookings only | TheFork, via Vinetur |
| +2.5% (vs 4.6% inflation) | 2025 | Change in ticket medio, Spain | Delectatech, via Vinetur |
| £17.06 | 2012 | Restaurant spend per visit, UK survey | Zolfo Cooper, via Restaurant Online |
| £18.35 | Q1 2026 | Spend per eating-out visit, UK, dine-in, takeaway and delivery | Lumina Intelligence |
| £26.89 | April 2026 | Spend per head, UK pubs and bars | The Oxford Partnership, via Vinetur |
Why these numbers don't line up
Before you put your own figure next to any of these, check what is actually being counted.
- Per head, per visit or per payment. A per-visit figure for a table of four is not the same as a per-head figure. A card-payment figure depends on how the study treats one card paying for the whole table. Read the method before you compare.
- With or without IVA. Guests pay prices with IVA included, and many till reports show net sales. A €35 ticket with IVA is roughly €32 without it at the 10% rate that usually applies to restaurant service. Check with your gestor how your own reports are set up.
- Who is in the sample. Online bookers, card payers, survey respondents and pub customers are all different groups. None of them is your mix of guests.
- Season. With 61% of Balearic restaurant billing in four months, an annual average flattens out the very swing that decides your year.
- Inflation. Every one of these figures has been pushed up by menu prices. A higher number in euros or pounds can still mean guests ordered less.
The only benchmark you can act on is your own
A good average spend per head is one that is higher than your own figure for the same service, the same season and the same menu, after allowing for any price changes. Everything else is background.
Take a worked hypothetical. Say a seafood terrace in Port d'Alcúdia averaged €40 a head at dinner in July 2025, and raised menu prices by about 5% for 2026. Just to stand still, it needs roughly €42 in July 2026. If it comes in at €41, it is above the Balearic 2024 figure, far above TheFork's Spanish average, and still behind where it was. The published benchmarks would say it is doing well. Its own numbers say guests ordered less.
Now a hypothetical café in Palma averaging €9 a head at breakfast, where most tables stop at a café con leche and a tostada. Against €35 it looks weak. But if the same winter mornings move to €10 with no price change, that is an extra euro on every head, which in practice means a lot more tables adding a fresh orange juice or a second coffee. That is a real improvement, and no regional average would show it.
So break your own figure down further than any study can:
- Lunch and dinner separately, because they are different businesses.
- By month, so July is compared with July and not with an annual average.
- By server, because the spread inside one team is often wider than the gap between your venue and the regional figure.
- By line: drinks per head, how many tables order dessert, how many coffees and digestivos per table.
Getting that number out of your till and recording a clean baseline week are covered in other posts in this series. The short version: use the published figures to understand the market your guests come from, then judge yourself only against yourself.
How to use the public benchmarks well
- Label every figure with its year and source when you share it with your team, so nobody mistakes a 2012 survey for this year's target.
- Use them for context in conversations with your team about guest expectations, not as targets.
- Compare like with like: per head with per head, IVA included with IVA included, summer with summer.
- Adjust for your own price changes before you call a rise an improvement.
- Set targets against your own baseline, in small steps you can measure by service and by server.
When we start with a venue, the first step is a baseline week from its own till. Whether the training is worth paying for depends on that number, not on any regional average.