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RevPAR is your room revenue divided by every room night you had available to sell, whether you sold it or not. Twelve rooms across a thirty-night September is 360 available room nights; £29,040 of room revenue against that is a RevPAR of £80.67. The calculator below does that arithmetic, and then does the part almost no calculator bothers with — it tells you whether £80.67 is a good number or a bad one.
Because on its own, it is neither. RevPAR outside London ranged from £63.40 in the first quarter of this year to £96 in July. The same house, unchanged, produces both. A number without a month attached tells you nothing.
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The three numbers, and which one is doing the work
Occupancy tells you how full you were. ADR tells you what you charged for the rooms you sold. RevPAR multiplies them together, which is why it is the only one of the three you can't game.
What it measures | How to move it | How it misleads | |
|---|---|---|---|
Occupancy | Share of available nights sold | Cut the rate, list on more channels | 100% occupancy means your rate is too low |
ADR | Average paid per room sold | Raise the rate card, sell up | Ignores the rooms sitting empty |
RevPAR | Revenue per available room night | Either of the above, or both | Ignores what the booking costs you to get |
Occupancy and ADR can each be made to look excellent by wrecking the other. Drop your rate to £45 and you will fill the place. Charge £300 and your ADR will be magnificent across the four nights you sell. RevPAR is the number that catches both, which is why it is the one worth tracking. We covered the arithmetic and the traps in more detail in occupancy, ADR and RevPAR.
What to actually put in the boxes
This is where most people get a wrong number, and the wrong number is worse than no number because you will act on it.
Lettable rooms, not total rooms. If a room has been out of service the whole period — refurbishment, a leak, storage — it isn't available and doesn't belong in the denominator. Leaving it in quietly depresses your RevPAR and makes you think you have a demand problem when you have a maintenance one. If it was out for part of the period, work in room nights: eleven rooms for thirty nights plus one room for eighteen is 348 available room nights, not 360.
Room nights sold, not bookings. One room, one night, one unit. A couple staying three nights in one room is three room nights, not one booking. Getting this wrong by a factor of two or three is the single most common error, and your ADR will come out looking absurd, which is at least a useful warning sign.
Room revenue only, net of VAT. Rooms. Not breakfast, not dinner, not dog charges, not parking, not the bottle of wine on arrival. If you are VAT registered — and you must be once turnover passes £90,000 — strip the VAT out, because every published benchmark you will compare yourself against is net. A VAT-inclusive figure will flatter you by twenty per cent, which is roughly the size of the entire gap you're trying to measure. If you're below the threshold and not registered, your figure is already net; use it as it is.
Cancellations and no-shows. Count a night as sold if you were paid for it. A charged no-show is revenue against a room you didn't have to service, and it belongs in the numbers.
So is your number any good?
Here are the three most recent published reference points for hotels outside London. They are the ones the calculator compares you against.
Period | Occupancy | ADR | RevPAR | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Jan–Mar 2026, regional UK | 68.2% | £93.10 | £63.40 | Knight Frank UK Hotel Dashboard |
Full year 2025, regional UK | 79% | ~£100 | £79.00 | Knight Frank Trading Performance Review |
July 2026, England excl. London | 84% | £113 | £96.00 | England Occupancy Survey |
The gap between the winter figure and the July figure is £32.60 per available room night — a 51% swing across the same set of properties. At twelve rooms that is a difference of £391 a night, or around £12,000 across a month, purely from where you are in the calendar.
Which is why "my RevPAR is £72" is not a sentence that means anything until you say when. £72 in February is a strong result. £72 in August is a problem you should be looking at today.
For the months in between, there is no published figure, and the calculator says so rather than inventing one. April, May, June, September and October sit somewhere between the winter and summer numbers, usually nearer the annual average. November and December sit below it, closer to the winter figure than the annual one. Anyone giving you a precise monthly benchmark for a shoulder month outside London is modelling, not measuring.
Two things to hold in mind before you feel good or bad about the comparison
Both surveys sample hotels, and the average hotel in them is a good deal larger than a twelve-room house. Bigger properties carry corporate and meeting business that fills Tuesday and Wednesday nights — the nights independents find hardest. If you are running six rooms in a market town and coming in under the regional figure on occupancy, that is a structural difference in demand mix, not a verdict on how you run the place.
They also measure slightly different universes, which is why Knight Frank's regional ADR (£93.10 in Q1) and the England Occupancy Survey's (£113 in July) aren't directly comparable to each other, let alone stitched into a single curve.
The benchmark that actually tells you something is your own house, same month, last year. Everything on this page is weather. That one is your performance.
What moves the number, and what it's worth
Once you have a RevPAR, the useful question is which lever to pull. There are only two, and they are not worth the same.
Take the twelve-room example at 73.3% occupancy and a £110 rate:
One point of occupancy across a year is 43.8 extra room nights, worth £4,818 in revenue.
One pound on the rate across a year applies to the 3,212 nights you already sell, worth £3,212.
So occupancy looks like the bigger lever. But the extra nights arrive with a bed to strip, a breakfast to cook, laundry, amenities and a card fee. Put that at £15 a night and the occupancy move is worth £4,161 in money you keep, against £3,212 from the rate — which arrives whole, because charging more for a room you were already selling costs nothing to deliver.
The two swap over at an ADR of £88 on those numbers. Below your break-even rate, chase nights. Above it, a pound on the rate card does more for you than a night in the diary. The calculator works your own break-even out as you type, because it moves with your occupancy and your cost per occupied room.
That is also the order to work in. Fix the rate structure first — it's free — and go after volume second. The six specific ways to do that are in how to increase RevPAR at a small hotel, which is the companion piece to this one.
What to do with the number on Monday
Work it out for last month. Work it out for the same month last year. Write both down. If the gap is positive, find out which of the two components produced it — a RevPAR that rose entirely on rate is a different business from one that rose entirely on occupancy, and they need opposite things next.
Then do it again in four weeks. One RevPAR figure is a data point. Twelve of them, month on month against the same month last year, is the only management report a small property genuinely needs.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good RevPAR for a small hotel or B&B in the UK? There isn't a single figure, because RevPAR moves with the season. Outside London, published figures ranged from £63.40 for January to March 2026 to £96 in July 2026, against a 2025 full-year regional average of £79. Compare yourself to the same period, and above all to your own result for the same month last year.
How do I calculate RevPAR? Two ways, and they give the same answer. Either divide total room revenue by available room nights (rooms × nights in the period), or multiply occupancy by ADR. £29,040 across 360 available room nights is £80.67; 73.3% occupancy × £110 ADR is also £80.67.
Should RevPAR include VAT? No. Published benchmarks are net of VAT, so strip it out before comparing, or you will overstate your position by up to 20%. If you are under the £90,000 registration threshold and not registered, your figure is already net.
Does RevPAR include breakfast and other extras? No. RevPAR is a rooms metric — room revenue over available room nights. Breakfast, dinner, parking and pet charges belong in TRevPAR (total revenue per available room), which is a useful second number but not comparable to any published RevPAR benchmark.
Is it better to raise occupancy or raise my rate? It depends on your rate. A point of occupancy beats a pound of rate whenever your ADR is above roughly (100 × your occupancy) + your cost of servicing one more room. Below that, volume wins. Rate is always the cheaper of the two to move, because it costs nothing to deliver.
Why is my RevPAR falling when my occupancy is up? You have bought the occupancy with rate. If the discount you gave away is worth more than the nights you gained, RevPAR falls even as the diary looks fuller. This is the most common reason a busy-feeling season produces a disappointing bank balance.
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