For a full service restaurant, payroll is the single biggest thing standing between a busy dining room and a profitable year. The National Restaurant Association’s 2025 Restaurant Operations Data Abstract, built on financial data from more than 900 operators nationwide, put salaries and wages including benefits at a median of 36.5 percent of sales for full service restaurants. Among the operators who actually cleared a pre-tax profit, that same line ran 34.2 percent. The gap is about two points. In the same report, full service restaurants posted a median pre-tax income of 2.8 percent of sales.
Two points of labor is most of the margin. That’s the arithmetic pushing a growing number of Santa Clarita Valley operators to price out what a second location, or a whole relocation, would look like in metro Phoenix. The headline wage numbers only tell part of that story, and the part they leave out is where the real money sits.
Santa Clarita doesn’t have one wage floor. It has three…