TL;DR
- Sales per labor hour (SPLH) is total sales divided by total clocked labor hours. It measures what each labor hour returns, not just what it costs.
- Cutting hours alone tends to slow service and cost sales. Adding staff alone raises hours faster than sales. Both sides of the ratio are coupled.
- Moving order taking off the crew and making upsell consistent can move both sides of SPLH at once: hours down, ticket up.
- A worked example shows roughly a 10% SPLH improvement from 3 to 8 fewer labor hours per store, per day, and a 1 to 2% ticket lift, per store, never multiplied across a portfolio.
- Build your own number using a representative week, your fully baked labor rate, and ranges rather than a single figure.
The definition, plainly
Sales per labor hour, or SPLH, is total sales divided by total clocked labor hours over the same period. If a store rings up $4,000 in a shift and pays for 60 clocked hours to do it, SPLH is $66.67. That is the whole formula. Everything else in this piece is about how to move it, honestly and with arithmetic you can check yourself.
This article is the calculator-style companion to our broader piece on how AI order taking reshapes labor scheduling and profitability. That post covers the strategic scheduling story. This one stays close to the number itself: what it means for a franchisee, the worked example, and a step-by-step way to model your own stores.
Why franchisees watch it
Labor costs move independent of your control, and food costs do too. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for food services and drinking places puts average hourly earnings at $21.95 as of June 2026, and $20.24 for production and nonsupervisory employees. Those are national averages across the sector, not drive-thru specific, but the direction is the point: franchisees need a metric that survives rising labor costs rather than one that just reports them.
SPLH does that because it measures what each labor hour returns, not what it costs. A labor cost percentage tells you how much you spent. SPLH tells you what you got back for it. For an owner running 10 or more stores, that distinction is the difference between managing to a budget line and managing to a performance number you can actually improve.
The problem with the usual interventions
Here is the trap. Cut hours on the schedule, and service tends to slow down. Guests wait longer, orders get missed, and sales fall along with the labor line you just trimmed. Add staff instead, and sales may rise, but hours rise faster, because you are paying for coverage the sales lift does not fully justify.
Both sides of the ratio are coupled. Pull one lever and the other lever pulls back. Plenty of labor optimization work gets stuck here, because it is really just trading one side of SPLH for the other. Sales up, hours up. Hours down, sales down. Net SPLH barely moves.
What moves both sides at once
Ryan Weaver, CEO of Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, put it plainly:
“The technology pays for itself with the labor hours we are able to take out of our budget every week, and then the sales lifts, which we think is about 1-2% is just kind of gravy on top of that.”
Ryan Weaver, CEO, Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken. Nift “Marketing Bites: Restaurant Growth Unwrapped” podcast, Ep. 32, 1 April 2025. Watch the clip
That is the SPLH argument in one sentence from an operator who lives it. Order taking comes off the crew, so clocked hours come down. At the same time the upsell stops depending on how busy the lane is, so average ticket comes up. Two levers, moving in the same direction, at the same time.
The upsell side has a clear before-and-after in his own restaurants. As Weaver described it in the same conversation:
“You might get an upsell 20% of the time with humans in the Drive-Thru. With Hi Auto, our voice order taking partner, we’re getting it 100% of the time.”
Ryan Weaver, CEO, Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken. Nift “Marketing Bites: Restaurant Growth Unwrapped” podcast, Ep. 32, 1 April 2025. Watch the clip
Those are Weaver’s figures for his own chain rather than an industry rate, and the gap they describe is a job-design gap. During a rush, the upsell is one of a dozen things an order taker is holding at once, so it moves in and out of the flow with the lane. Making it a fixed part of every order is what lifts the upsell conversion rate without adding a single extra labor hour to earn it.
There is a third factor worth naming, even though it sits slightly outside the ratio itself. A reported reduction in employee turnover in the 17% to 25% range means fewer hours lost to retraining and more shifts run by a settled crew who already know the store, both of which make the hours side of SPLH more stable, not just lower.
The worked example
Take the arithmetic from the companion post, since the numbers should stay consistent across our content.
Before: $4,000 in sales divided by 60 clocked labor hours equals $66.67 per labor hour.
After: order taking moves off the crew and upselling becomes consistent. Sales come in at $4,060 (about a 1.5% lift), and clocked hours come down to 55. That is $4,060 divided by 55, which equals $73.82 per labor hour.
That is roughly a 10% improvement in SPLH, driven by both sides of the equation moving together rather than one side compensating for the other. Note what did not change: this is one store’s numbers. It is not a platform average, and it should never be multiplied across a multi-unit portfolio to produce a bigger number. Every store has its own check average and its own baseline, and that is where your own number has to start.
Run your own number
You do not need Hi Auto’s numbers to do this. You need your own.
- Pull a representative week. Total sales and total clocked labor hours for a store that reflects your normal volume, not your best week or your worst.
- Calculate your current SPLH. Sales divided by hours. Write it down before you model anything.
- Estimate the hours you could remove from order taking. The approved range is 3-8 labor hours per store, per day, with single-lane operations typically at the lower end (3-5 hours) and dual-lane at the higher end (6-8 hours).
- Apply a ticket lift range, not a single figure. Model 1% and 2% separately against your weekly sales, since average ticket size movement varies by concept and menu.
- Recalculate SPLH with the adjusted hours and adjusted sales. You now have a low and a high scenario for that store.
- Translate the hours into dollars using your fully-baked labor rate, not base wage. At $25 an hour or more fully baked, the approved monthly range is $1,500 to $4,000 per location.
- Keep it per store. Do not multiply the monthly figure across your store count. Volume, labor rate, and operating model differ enough store to store that a portfolio-wide number would be a guess dressed up as math.
The honest caveats
Savings vary with average unit volume and operating model. A high-volume dual-lane store and a lower-volume single-lane store will land in different places within the same range, and that is expected, not a flaw in the method.
Use ranges, not a single number, when you present this internally or to a franchisor. And always build the ROI case on fully-baked labor cost, the real cost of an hour including taxes, benefits, and overhead, not the base wage on the schedule. Base wage alone will understate the case and overstate how quickly it pays back.
None of this requires assuming how scheduling gets tuned behind the scenes. The outcome, hours down and sales up, is what shows up in your SPLH. How a system arrives at consistent execution is a separate question from what the number does once it changes.
Want to model this against your own stores before you commit to anything? Download the Labor ROI One-Pager for the fuller worked framework and a template you can apply store by store.