Most restaurant operators think about revenue in terms of sales — how much came in the door on a given night. That is a reasonable starting point, but it is an incomplete picture. Two restaurants can generate identical weekly sales figures while operating with dramatically different levels of efficiency. One might be a well-run, high-capacity machine that serves 300 covers on a Friday night and leaves the dining room dark by 9:30. The other might run the same sales through 180 covers, staying open later, burning more labor, and leaving significant capacity on the table.

The difference between those two operations shows up in table turn rate and, at a more refined level, in a metric called RevPASH — Revenue Per Available Seat Hour. These are not esoteric finance concepts. They are practical tools that tell you whether your dining room is functioning at the level your model requires.

What Table Turn Rate Actually Measures

Table turn rate is the number of times a table is occupied by a new party during a meal period. If a four-top seats two different parties during a dinner service, that table has turned once. If it seats three parties, it has turned twice.

The calculation is simple:

Turn Rate = Total Covers Served ÷ Total Seats Available

If you have 60 seats and served 180 covers at dinner, your turn rate was 3.0 — meaning on average each seat was occupied by three different guests during that service.

Why does this matter? Because your occupancy costs — rent, utilities, insurance — are fixed against the physical space, not against the number of guests who walk through. A dining room that turns 3.0 at dinner is generating three times the revenue per square foot of a dining room that turns 1.0. Those fixed costs are being absorbed by a much larger revenue base in the first scenario. In the second, they are sitting heavily on every cover.

Benchmarks vary by concept. A fast-casual concept might turn 4 to 6 times at lunch. A casual full-service restaurant typically targets 2 to 3 turns at dinner. A fine dining restaurant might be designed around a single turn, with the check average built to compensate. The right number depends entirely on your model — but knowing your number, and understanding how it compares to what your model requires, is non-negotiable.

RevPASH: The More Precise Tool

Table turn rate is useful, but it has a limitation: it tells you how many times tables turned, not how much revenue each seat generated per hour. RevPASH corrects for this.

RevPASH = Net Revenue ÷ (Available Seats × Hours Open)

If your restaurant has 80 seats, runs dinner service for 5 hours, and generates $8,000 in revenue during that period:

$8,000 ÷ (80 × 5) = $20.00 RevPASH

Every available seat in your dining room generated $20 in revenue per hour. That is your baseline. Now the question becomes: what does it need to be for your model to work, and what is pulling it down when it falls short?

RevPASH captures something turn rate misses — the impact of empty seats during peak hours. A restaurant that fills to capacity at 7pm but sits at 40% occupancy from 5pm to 6:30pm has a turn rate that looks fine and a RevPASH that tells a different story. Those early evening empty seats represent real revenue that cannot be recovered once the hour passes.

What Drives RevPASH Down

There are three common culprits when RevPASH is underperforming.

The first is slow turns caused by service inefficiencies — tables that linger not because they are enjoying the experience, but because they cannot get a check, a refill, or a server’s attention. The goal is never to rush a guest. The goal is to eliminate the friction that makes the experience feel slow without adding warmth or value.

The second is poor seat utilization during shoulder periods. If your prime window is 6pm to 8pm and you are not capturing guests from 5pm to 6pm, you are leaving RevPASH on the table. Happy hour programs, pre-theater menus, and early-bird incentives exist precisely to pull forward demand into those underutilized hours.

The third is suboptimal table mix. A dining room built around four-tops that regularly seats parties of two is wasting capacity. Two two-tops seat the same number of guests as one four-top — but can accommodate parties independently and are easier to fill. Understanding how your actual party size distribution compares to your table configuration is a physical plant analysis worth doing at least annually.

Using These Metrics Operationally

The value of turn rate and RevPASH is not in calculating them once — it is in tracking them consistently and using them to guide specific decisions.

Track RevPASH by daypart, not just by day. A restaurant that hits $25 RevPASH at dinner but $8 at lunch has a lunch problem, not a restaurant problem. Understanding where the gap is tells you where to direct attention.

Use turn rate to evaluate service team performance across shifts. A Friday night team that consistently turns 2.8 and a Saturday team averaging 2.2 with the same reservation volume is telling you something about execution, not just demand.

If you are considering adding a reservation system, changing your seating policy, or redesigning your floor, RevPASH gives you a way to model the financial impact before you make the change. Adding 10 seats in a corner that sees low utilization may increase capacity on paper while doing very little for RevPASH — or even hurting it by adding labor complexity.

The dining room is your primary revenue-generating asset. These metrics are the instruments that tell you how well it is working.

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The author is a former CFO for a multi-unit restaurant brand. RestaurantBottomLine.com is dedicated to helping independent operators protect their financial model.