The National Living Wage rose to £12.71 an hour on 1 April 2026, and the 18 to 20 rate went up 8.5% to £10.85 (gov.uk). Those two rises came on top of the April 2025 changes to employer National Insurance, which took the rate to 15% and lowered the earnings threshold to £5,000, both of which you are still paying.
UKHospitality put the cost of the 2026 wage increases alone at around £1.4bn across the sector (via Hotel Owner). Several months on, every operator has seen what it means for their own payroll, and the next rise is already in view: the Low Pay Commission’s central estimate for April 2027 is £13.18, with its formal recommendation due in October.
That cost could be calculated in advance, but it can’t be moved now. However, there is a cost you can still do something about: everything else the business spends, which is arguably much bigger and harder to quote.
The wage increase is easy to calculate
Headcount, contracted and typical hours, the 50p uplift on every adult hour, the 85p uplift for under-21s, then employer NIC on top. For an 80-person operator averaging 20 hours a week, that is roughly £42,000 a year in wages before NIC and closer to £48,000 with it.
Your exact figure will differ, but you can know it to within a few hundred pounds, and by now your payroll has confirmed it. This is a figure that won’t be changed by anything you do operationally.
Card spend is only visible three weeks later
Card spend is different. In a normal week across a few sites it might include a cash-and-carry run because a delivery short-shipped, replacement fryer baskets ordered from Amazon, an emergency plumber on a bank holiday and a marketing agency subscription that renewed automatically.
It comes out of the blue, from many different angles, and all of it is legitimate spend. But none of it was approved before it happened, and none of it is visible until the card statement arrives three weeks later and someone matches receipts to lines. So if you’re asked what your sites spent on consumables, repairs and subscriptions last month, the answer is an estimate.
On hospitality’s margins, unplanned spend is harder to absorb than it was a year ago. Take an operator on a 4% net margin with labour at 30% of sales: a 4.1% rise in the hourly rate takes about 1.2 points of margin, close to a third of the profit, before anything else moves.
Every pound that leaks through unplanned card spend is now a pound the business has less labour flex to win back.
Why haven’t cutting hours and raising prices closed the gap?
There are three obvious responses: take hours off the rota, put prices up, or ask the sites to review their spending.
Cutting hours weakens the service you are selling, and the 8.5% rise in the 18 to 20 rate means junior staff are no longer the cheap option they were. Raising prices runs into customers who are already spending less per visit. Both can help at the margin, but neither closes a gap of this size on its own.
Asking sites to review their spending sounds like the third lever, but in practice it’s accounting. The review happens three or four weeks after the purchase, when the money has gone and the only thing left to do is have a conversation with the site manager.
Which half of the P&L still belongs to you?
The wage bill is set by statute and has been in payroll since April. The rest of what the business buys is set by whoever is holding the card. That second half is where the decisions still sit, and the way to make it behave is to make it just as knowable in advance.
In practice that means three changes. Give each site or role its own card with a monthly limit set in advance. Require approval before any purchase over a set amount, instead of asking for an explanation afterwards. Capture the receipt and cost code at the time of purchase, so each transaction reaches the ledger already coded.
Do that and you know non-labour spend before the month starts rather than three weeks after it ends.
Control at the moment of purchase
This is what Moss does for the non-labour side. Sites and individuals get cards with hard limits, approval rules that fire before the money leaves rather than after, and receipts and cost codes attached when the purchase is made. All of this allows finance to see the spend line daily instead of monthly.
Moss has no payroll module so it won’t help you reduce wages or employer NIC. April’s rise landed in full whether or not you use it, and next April’s will too. So, you need to have more discipline on the half of the P&L the business still chooses.
