Should my Peebles pub charge more than pubs in other Borders towns?

Carlton Scott | Scottish Borders Business | September 2026

Usually, yes. Peebles has some of the strongest spending power in the south of Scotland: Edinburgh commuters 23 miles down the road, comfortable retirees, and Tweed Valley visitors who pay city prices for a good pint without a second look. The rents are priced for that postcode too. A Peebles pub charging Hawick prices is carrying Peebles costs on somebody else’s price list, and the gap is repeated on every round, every night.

The trade arrives in waves rather than a steady stream. Glentress and the Tweed Valley trails bring riders off the hill in groups, hungry and thirsty at predictable times and in weather-driven surges; walkers follow the John Buchan Way out of town and the river path back in; and the High Street, long rated among Scotland’s best for independent shops, keeps a daytime trade most Borders towns lost years ago. A pub staffed to the average is overstaffed on a wet Tuesday and short on the Saturday the hill empties.

What is a good profit margin for a pub in the UK?

Whito’s July 2026 pub data report puts net profit at 10% to 15% for a well-run pub, on gross margins of 70% to 80% on drinks. Those are the ends of a wide range, and where a pub sits inside it is decided by its own arithmetic: what each of the top ten lines earns after the brewery or wholesaler price, wastage and card fees. Pubs that know that figure by line hold their prices with confidence. Pubs that do not tend to underprice the lager that pays the bills, then wonder why a full bar leaves nothing behind.

How do I make money from the Glentress bike trade?

By being ready for waves rather than hoping for a flow. Riders arrive in groups at predictable hours, wet, hungry and in no mood to wait, and the pubs that profit from them have a fast filling menu costed for margin, somewhere to lean a bike, a rota built for the Saturday afternoon surge and prices set for the postcode. The forecast is the rota: a dry weekend on the Tweed Valley trails is worth staffing for, and a wet one is worth staffing down.

What we see in Borders pubs is that the rota gets built for Saturday and then runs all week, and the drinks margin is checked on the whole bar rather than line by line. The two together explain most busy pubs that end the month with nothing, and both can be put right without touching the prices on the board.

What should my pub’s staff costs be as a percentage of turnover?

Between 22% and 28% of sales for a wet-led pub, on WorkSchedule’s 2026 UK hospitality labour benchmarks, rising once food is most of the trade. Above that band the cause is nearly always the same: a rota written for the busiest night and copied across the week. Build each day from that day’s takings by hour, start the quiet shifts later, stagger the finishes, and move the kitchen prep to the slow afternoon. Ten staff hours a week is more than 500 hours a year, and nobody at the bar notices the difference.

Is January make-or-break for my Peebles pub this year?

For many pubs it is, with energy, drink costs and rates all up, but Peebles has more cover than most Borders towns: commuters home by seven, retirees who eat out midweek, and riders who do not stop for winter. The pubs in trouble in January are the ones running a summer rota and a summer order against a winter trade. Set both to January’s takings by hour and the month stops being a fright and starts being a quiet month you planned for.

How much does a business coach cost in the Scottish Borders?

Between £500 and £3,500 a month plus VAT for one-to-one coaching, depending on the coach’s experience, according to Alan Wick’s May 2026 guide to UK coaching fees, and the bill runs for as long as the coaching does. What moves the price of any advice is how much of the work the adviser does for you: coaching talks you through it, and a fixed-fee diagnose-and-fix piece of work goes through the numbers with you and makes the changes. The Profit Clarity Framework is the second kind: a fixed £1,495 + VAT for 30 days on your pub’s real numbers, and nothing after that.

In Peebles the first thing we usually change is the price list, because the town has been paying more than the bar has been asking for some time.

Where can a Peebles pub owner get help with the numbers?

That’s exactly what the Profit Clarity Framework™ does: a 30-day diagnose-and-fix process on your real numbers at the fixed fee above, built for owners who are behind the bar every night, and it leaves you with a more profitable pub. We’ve set out how it works for the town’s pubs on our Peebles pub page, including how little of your time it takes and what we’d need to start. There’s also an overview of the framework for pubs, and the same numbers at work in a commuter town in our Galashiels café article. Most clients who commit to the framework and follow our recommendations see a full return on the fee within 90 days.

Photo © Russel Wills, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph (geograph.org.uk/photo/5710279)