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Restaurant No-Show Fees and Deposits in the UK: What You Can Charge, What It Costs, and Which Policy to Pick (2026)

A UK restaurant can keep a deposit or charge a no-show fee, but only up to what the empty table costs it, and a deposit kept in full should be a small share of the price. A default policy for a single venue, the arithmetic behind it, what the booking tools add, and when to charge nothing.

Alex Riesenkampff

12 October 2026 · Updated 15 October 2026 · 17 min read · Markdown

A UK restaurant can charge for a no-show, but only up to what the empty table costs it, and a deposit it keeps in full should be a small share of the price. Whether you should charge is a separate question. For a single venue serving ordinary dinners, start with a reminder the day before and an easy way to cancel. Add a card guarantee for parties of six or more and your busiest nights, keep deposits for set menus and large groups, and charge nothing on a table for two in a quiet week. OpenTable puts the average no-show for two at £55.70, and your own loss is usually lower once you count only the margin you lose and the tables you resell.

What the law lets you charge

The CMA's guidance, updated on 22 July 2026, says a deposit may be kept in full if it works as a binding reservation and the diner is told upfront when it is non-refundable, but it will not normally be more than a small percentage of the price. There is no 14-day cooling-off right to complicate this. Citizens Advice lists restaurant bookings among the "catering or leisure activities for specific dates" that have none, which follows regulation 28(1)(h) of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. The test that applies is fairness under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

The guidance goes on to say a deposit "will not normally be more than a small percentage of the price" and that a larger prepayment may be a disguised penalty. For a no-show fee with no money taken, the same document treats "a requirement to pay more as compensation for a breach than a reasonable pre-estimate of the loss caused to the trader" as likely to be unfair. It also lists a term that ignores the business's chance to reduce its loss "by finding another customer". Schedule 2 of the Consumer Rights Act puts a "disproportionately high sum in compensation" on its list of terms that may be unfair.

GOV.UK's guidance for businesses says the same thing in plainer words: "any prepayments or deposits you keep must take into account what your business will actually lose as a result." Citizens Advice tells diners that a business may "hold some or all of your deposit to compensate for their financial loss".

Three practical rules follow:

• Say it at the point of booking, in plain words, where the diner cannot miss it. The CMA looks for the circumstances in which a charge becomes due to be "clear, upfront and objectively reasonable", and for a charge the diner can easily avoid.
• Tie the charge to your loss. A flat £50 a head on a £25 lunch cannot be explained by your costs.
• Give a free cancellation window. A deadline such as 24 or 48 hours before the booking lets the diner avoid the charge, and lets you resell the table.

Nothing the CMA has published deals with restaurants by name, and the examples in CMA37 are from other trades. The principles are general, which is why they apply here, so what follows is a careful reading of the guidance rather than case law. Enforcement has also changed. Since April 2025 the CMA can fine firms directly for breaking consumer law, up to 10% of global turnover or £300,000, whichever is higher. For a single venue, the day-to-day risk is a complaint or a chargeback.

What a no-show costs you

OpenTable's survey puts the average UK no-show for a table of two at £55.70, but the figure you can defend is your own lost contribution after the tables you resell. The £55.70 comes from the platform's Restaurant Impact Report, covered by Restaurant Online on 6 October 2026, and the report's sample size is not stated. The same coverage says UK no-shows fell by 6% year on year, and that 60% of restaurateurs had turned away other bookings because of them.

The CMA's wording points at net loss: what you would have earned from the table, less what you save by not serving it, less what you recover by filling the seats. The calculator below does that sum. It uses gross margin on the whole bill, so enter the margin on food and drink together, not food cost alone. Use the share of no-show tables you resell as a rough guess from the last month: a Tuesday seat is rarely refilled at 8pm, a Friday seat sometimes is.

Two things stand out. First, a flat £25 a head on a £32 spend would exceed the £16.80 loss per head in this example, unless the table is almost never resold or the food is bought in for a set menu. Second, at a 2.3% rate a venue taking 600 bookings a month sees about 14 no-shows, and a £145 booking tool has to prevent four of them to pay for itself through no-shows alone. That is realistic for a busy venue and a stretch for a quiet one, which is why the cheaper steps come first.

Before you set a number, count last month's no-shows, late cancellations and the tables you refilled.

What a policy buys you, and what it costs

Most of what a no-show policy earns comes from the cancellations it prompts, not the fees it collects: Oxeye's £50 deposit left the London restaurant with no no-shows or late cancellations apart from real emergencies, and those guests rebooked. A diner who knows a booking carries a cost tends to cancel instead of vanishing. A cancellation the day before is a table you can give to the waiting list or a walk-in, and that is worth more than any fee, because you keep the whole bill and the guest.

The largest dataset points the same way without proving it. Resos's 2026 index of 3,768,761 reservations at 2,417 restaurants recorded a 0.80% no-show rate on bookings that required protection, against 2.47% on bookings that did not, and a 16% lower rate where an SMS reminder was delivered. Resos adds the caveat that matters: "Everything in this section is an observed association, not a measured effect." Venues that take deposits may simply attract more committed diners.

The fee itself is the backstop, and it rarely brings in much. You will waive some charges, some cards will fail, and every charge you take can start an argument. On the other side of the scale:

• Bookings. Some diners will not hand over a card for a casual dinner, and younger diners are the least willing.
• Time. Someone has to check who did not come, decide whether to charge, and answer the email that follows.
• Disputes. A charge to a stored card can be disputed with the bank. Stripe charges £20 when a dispute arrives and another £20 if you contest it, refunded only if you win, so one lost dispute over a £35 charge costs you the £35 and up to £40 on top.
• Goodwill. If the first person you charge is a regular whose child was ill, you lose more than the fee.
• Fees. Booking tools and card processors take a cut of every deposit, as the next sections show.

So build the policy in steps and stop at the first one that works. Start with a reminder the day before and a one-tap way to cancel. OpenTable's survey has 43% of restaurateurs rating confirmation reminders effective, ahead of 36% for cancellation windows and 32% for deposits, and that ranking comes from a company that sells deposits. Add a card guarantee where an empty table hurts, and a deposit where you buy food in for the booking. Some restaurants instead take one or two extra bookings on nights with a steady no-show rate, which costs nothing until everyone turns up at once.

Card guarantee, deposit or prepayment

A card guarantee is the right default for ordinary dinners, a deposit for set menus and large groups, and full prepayment only where the food is bought in for the booking. The three policies move different amounts of money at different moments.

A card guarantee depends on a clear agreement. Stripe's documentation says a card saved for later use needs an agreement up front, sometimes called a mandate, that covers the diner's permission, how often you may charge and how the amount is set. It also warns that a later payment may still need the customer to authenticate, so have a way to bring a diner back to complete it. Expect more disputes over a charge made afterwards to a stored card than over a deposit taken and explained at booking.

The questions are deliberately blunt. The decision turns on whether you can resell the seat, because that is also what decides what the law lets you keep.

What the booking tools charge

On deposits, the tools charge in different places: some add a surcharge to the card fee, some fold the cost into a per-diner fee, and the OpenTable service charge reported in the US has not been confirmed for the UK. The vendors' own pages say this as of 12 October 2026.

On a £50 deposit, ResDiary's surcharge plus Stripe's standard rate comes to about £1.45 to £1.55, or 2.9% to 3.1%, a sum worth knowing before you advertise a "free" deposit. OpenTable's 2% charge is documented for the US only, so ask your account manager whether it applies to you. Our booking systems comparison covers what each platform charges for seated covers, and explains why the marketplaces' fees are marketing costs rather than software costs. Your card processor's own charge on a deposit is separate; our guides to Dojo fees and Square fees show the card rates.

VAT and the paperwork

VAT is due on a retained deposit or no-show charge, because HMRC will not treat money you keep for a meal that was never served as outside the scope of VAT. Section 8.13 of VAT Notice 700 says VAT is due on all charges, deposits and fees that are full or part payments for a supply, and that a payment "cannot be reclassified if the supply is unfulfilled".

HMRC's guidance on deposits adds that VAT remains due on money you keep, and that the tax point is the earlier of the date you issue a VAT invoice and the date you receive the advance payment. HMRC has no page on a fee charged afterwards to a card you only held, so ask your accountant how to treat it.

Keep a record of each policy as it stood when the booking was made. When a diner disputes a charge, the question is what they were shown and agreed to, so save the wording and the date it went live.

Wording that holds up

The terms a diner accepts should fit on a screen, and a disputed charge is most often lost on the wording rather than the amount. Copy and adapt the text below to your own booking confirmation, then read it as a diner would.

We hold your table for [day, time] for [number] guests. To secure it we ask for a card, which we do not charge when you book.

If you cancel or change the booking up to [24 hours] before, there is no charge. If you cancel later, or do not arrive within [15 minutes] of your time, we may charge up to £[amount] per guest. This is our estimate of what an empty table costs us, and we will tell you before we take it.

If you are ill or have an emergency, call us on [number] and we will talk it through. You can reply CANCEL to this message at any time before [deadline].

When not to charge

A no-show fee costs goodwill with the diners who are most likely to turn into regulars, so the venues that skip it are making a judgement, not an oversight. Evidence on what deposits do to demand is thin. Kimes' Cornell survey of US diners (fall 2008, stated attitudes only) found "table-holding policies and credit card guarantees" the most acceptable and fairest of the five policies it tested, a list that did not include deposits, and that familiarity made diners more accepting. The Zonal and CGA survey in 2021 found 65% willing to pay a deposit for a special occasion and 41% for a casual meal, but only 28% of 18 to 24 year olds. A deposit may put off the younger diners who would otherwise fill a quiet Tuesday.

London chef Sven-Hanson Britt of Oxeye tested exactly this on his tasting menu, and explained in April 2023, as reported by The Staff Canteen, why he went back to a deposit:

He cut the deposit from £50 to £5 for three months. Cancellations rose, the first no-show arrived within a week, and bookings did not change at either price, so he restored the £50. That is one tasting-menu restaurant, not a controlled study, and a neighbourhood bistro will not behave the same way. Chef Mark Greenaway met the same problem at a larger scale in 2018: 450 cancellations or no-shows in December at a 42-seat restaurant, which led him to take card details on every booking and charge £30 at lunch and £50 at dinner. The numbers are old, but the logic has not changed.

Three situations are better handled without a charge. A diner who is ill or bereaved will remember how you treated them for longer than they will remember the £30. A venue that resells nearly every table has no loss to point to. And a place whose regulars book by phone and are known by name will damage more than it gains by sending a policy text.

How you charge matters as much as whether you do. When a table does not turn up, call or text first: some no-shows are a mix-up over the date or time, and a diner who rebooks is worth more than the fee; our guide to what a repeat guest is worth puts a figure on that. Charge the bookings that do not answer, and decide in advance who can waive a charge, so a server is not left arguing on the phone at 9pm. Be careful with parties that arrive short. Kimes found short-show penalties "the least understandable and acceptable" of the policies diners were asked about, because a host cannot always control who drops out. If you charge for missing guests at all, set a threshold, such as more than a third of the party, and put it in the terms.

What would make you reverse course? If bookings drop in the weeks after you introduce a fee, if your reviews start to mention it, or if the charges you collect cost more in goodwill and disputes than they return, drop to a reminder and review in a month. Our guides to filling a quiet weeknight and to where overtime comes from cover what happens when empty tables or a staffing no-show eat the week. If the answer to a thin Tuesday is a delivery app rather than a stricter policy, our guide to what delivery apps really cost runs the same contribution sum on an order a platform brings you.