How Much to Charge as a Private Chef: A Simple Way to Set Your Prices
There is no single right price for a private chef. Rates depend on your city, your clients and what you include. What you can control is how you build the number. New chefs usually price the cooking and forget everything around it. This is a way to work it out from your real costs.
Choose how you charge
- Per person. The usual choice for dinner parties. Easy for a host to understand and to compare with a restaurant.
- Per event or per day. A flat fee for your time, with groceries billed separately. Common for holiday and villa work.
- Per week. For weekly meal preparation. A fixed fee for a set number of meals, plus groceries.
Count all the hours
A four-hour dinner is rarely four hours of work. Add menu planning and messages with the client, shopping, travel, prep, service, cleaning the kitchen and getting home. The total is often much more than the time spent at the client's house.
Build the price from your costs
Add up four things: ingredients, your hours multiplied by the hourly rate you need to earn, travel, and a share of your overheads (insurance, equipment, software, taxes).
A worked example with made-up numbers, for a dinner for eight:
- Ingredients: $240
- Eight hours of your time at $50 an hour: $400
- Travel: $20
- Overheads at 15% of the above: $99
That comes to $759, or about $95 per person. These figures are only an illustration. Put your own in: your grocery costs, the hourly rate you need, and your own overheads.
Decide what is included
Say clearly whether groceries are in the price or billed at cost, whether you bring serving staff, and whether cleaning the kitchen is part of the service. Most price arguments start with something nobody wrote down.
Set a minimum and take a deposit
A dinner for two costs you nearly as much time as a dinner for six. Set a minimum spend per booking. Take a deposit to hold the date, and say when it stops being refundable.
Check it against your market
Look at what other private chefs and the better restaurants in your city charge per head. You do not need to match them, but you should know where you sit and be able to say why.
Show a starting price
Chefs often hide prices for fear of scaring people off. A "from" price on your website helps guests who can afford you write with a date and a budget, and saves you an evening of messages with the ones who can't. It is one of the points in our website checklist.
Raise it when you are full
If you are booked several weeks ahead, or nobody ever questions your price, you are probably too cheap. Raise the rate for new clients first and keep existing ones on their current price for a while.