The Bar / Pub

How these numbers were built: sale prices, owner earnings, revenue, and resale multiples come from BizBuySell’s 2021-2025 bar, pub, and tavern benchmarks; the bar count and its trend from IBISWorld; survival rates from BLS Business Employment Dynamics; SBA loan volume and charge-offs from the SBA 7(a) loan data for drinking places; liquor license costs from state fee data compiled by Ballotpedia and reported California market prices; and the cost to open from the opening kit, priced item by item from draft, bar equipment, and refrigeration dealers and from taphouse franchise Item 7 tables (The Brass Tap, Mr Brews Taphouse). Pour cost, labor, and occupancy are planning estimates from bar operating norms; the other monthly costs are itemized from their own sources: insurance from Insureon’s bar premiums, utilities and repairs from restaurant expense benchmarks, music licensing from ASCAP’s published minimum, trivia from a hosting company’s rate, card processing from published POS rates, and marketing from SBA budget guidance, and together they put the starting margin inside what sold bars report. Where credible sources disagree, we show the conservative range. These are starting assumptions; the moment you enter a real location’s rent, license cost, and nightly counts, your numbers should replace ours. Figures are current as of 2025-2026.

SDE margin and revenue figures anchor to BizBuySell five-year (2021-2025) sold-business benchmarks for the bar, pub, and tavern category (owner earnings 15.2% to 19.1% of revenue by year). Pour-cost, occupancy, and per-patron figures are estimated from widely cited beverage-program and bar-operating norms since no single public source breaks those out at the unit-economics level.