The coffee in a cup costs an Australian cafe about 44 to 84 cents at published wholesale bands of A$22 to A$42 a kilogram, which is roughly 15% of the A$4.69 the average Australian cup sold for in June 2026.
Skai Solutions answers the phone for cafes and restaurants in Australia and New Zealand, so we see what a missed order is worth next to what a cheaper bean is worth. This page prices the cup from the only line you can look up, the wholesale coffee, then shows you how to build the other three from your own invoices, what the world green bean price is doing, and why the 40 cent spread on beans is the smallest lever on the page.
Start with the only line you can price exactly, because it is the one your roaster invoices.
Seven Miles Coffee Roasters publishes the wholesale bands most Australian cafes actually pay: from about A$22 a kilogram at the low end with no equipment or support, roughly A$32 to A$38 a kilogram for most cafes, and A$42 a kilogram or more for high quality supply that comes with a machine and a technician. Those figures were published in January 2025, so treat them as the shape of the market rather than today's invoice.
Take the middle of that band, A$35 a kilogram, and a 20 gram double shot. A kilogram is 50 doubles. That is A$0.70 of coffee in the cup. At A$22 a kilogram it is A$0.44. At A$42 a kilogram it is A$0.84. The entire spread between the cheapest and the dearest coffee on the market is 40 cents a cup, which is why Seven Miles can say in the same article that the profit difference between cheap and quality coffee is usually "less than 5c per cup" once you price it properly.
Write that down before you do anything else, because almost every conversation about bean prices in hospitality is about a number under a dollar.
The measured figure, and the one to check yourself against, comes from the Daily Brew Report 2026, published by Hey You with Westpac DataX and reported in August 2026. For June 2026 the national average cup was A$4.69, up 1.65% on the year, which the report describes as the smallest annual rise in six years.
| Where | Average cup, June 2026 | Year on year |
|---|---|---|
| National | A$4.69 | +1.65% |
| Tasmania | A$5.44 | +5.28% |
| Queensland | A$5.17 | +7.81% |
| New South Wales | A$4.66 | not reported |
| Victoria | A$4.61 | +1.1% |
Western Australia and the ACT were reported as above A$5 without an exact figure. South Australia and the Northern Territory were not reported. So the gap between the cheapest and dearest state average is 83 cents, which is larger than the entire wholesale spread on the beans.
Put the two together. At a national average A$4.69 cup and A$0.70 of coffee, the beans are about 15% of what the customer pays. If you have ever been told to fix your margin by changing roaster, that is the size of the lever you were handed.
The reason your invoices moved is upstream of your roaster. The International Coffee Organization publishes a composite indicator price for green coffee, and in September 2026 the monthly average was 262.18 US cents per pound, with a high of 279.85 on 1 September and a low of 248.44 on 22 September. The group averages the same month were Colombian Milds 356.15, Other Milds 329.44 and Brazilian Naturals 290.19 US cents per pound. For comparison, the month end figure in June 2026 was 241.86.
That is the green bean, before shipping, before roasting, before the roaster's margin, and it is quoted in US cents per pound, so do not try to turn it into a per cup figure. Its use to you is as the reason behind a price letter. Wolff Coffee Roasters, for instance, published a price increase effective 3 January 2026 and named four causes: climate impacts in key growing regions, higher production costs at origin, a low Australian dollar and increased freight and logistics. The page lists new prices only and no old ones, so nobody can honestly state the size of that increase, including us.
The official Australian measure tells the same story from the other end. In the Australian Bureau of Statistics monthly consumer price index indicator for September 2025, the final release of that series, coffee, tea and cocoa rose 15.7% over the year while the all groups indicator rose 3.5% and meals out and take away foods rose 3.3%. Your input moved roughly four and a half times faster than your menu.
Four lines, in the order they matter. Only the first can be taken from a published source, so the rest are yours to fill in from your own invoices. We have deliberately not put a number on the milk, because no dated Australian wholesale milk price per litre could be sourced for this page, and an invented figure is worse than a blank.
| Line | How to get it | Worked example |
|---|---|---|
| Coffee | Your price per kilogram, divided by 1,000, times your dose in grams | A$35/kg at 20g = A$0.70 |
| Milk | Your delivered price per litre, times the millilitres you actually pour, including what goes down the sink | Your figure |
| Packaging | Cup, lid and sleeve for takeaway, zero for dine in | Your figure |
| Everything else | Sugar, syrups, alternative milks priced separately, and the surcharge you do or do not add | Your figure |
Two mistakes make this number wrong more often than any arithmetic error. The first is dosing by habit rather than by scale: a 22 gram dose instead of 20 is a 10% rise in your coffee cost that no invoice will ever show you. The second is pouring more milk than the cup holds and tipping the rest, which is a real cost that appears in your milk order and nowhere else.
When you have the four lines, you have a cost per cup. What you do not have is a beverage cost percentage, because that is a venue level number across everything you pour. Our beverage cost percentage page has the Australian bands for that, and our food cost percentage page does the same for the kitchen. A cup can be priced perfectly and a venue still lose money, which is what prime cost measures.
The other lever on the same cup is the machine, and whether you own it or rent it changes the per cup number more than the beans usually do. Our page on leasing against buying a commercial coffee machine works through both.
Almost never, and this is the honest answer rather than the useful-to-us one.
Say you sell 200 cups a day, six days a week. Dropping from A$35 a kilogram to A$22 saves A$0.26 a cup, which is A$52 a day and about A$16,000 a year. That is real money and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Now price what comes with it: no machine on loan, no technician when the grinder goes down mid service, and a cup that your regulars taste the difference in on day one. At an average A$4.69 cup, losing 12 customers a day cancels the whole saving.
The cheaper lever is almost always the same one, and it is not the beans. It is the cups you never sold because nobody answered the phone, or because the queue was six deep and the order ahead did not get taken. At 200 cups a day, three missed orders a day is 900 cups a year at A$4.69, which is A$4,221, for a problem that costs nothing to fix on most days and is the reason this page exists on a Skai Solutions site at all.
And if your phone genuinely only carries two calls a day, do not buy anything from us. Put the number through to a mobile and get on with service. That is the right answer for a lot of small cafes and we would rather say it.
Price is one lever and volume is the other, and the second one is easier to estimate than most operators think. Our page on how many customers a cafe gets a day shows the arithmetic from published figures.
One input that is easy to miss when you price a cup: the made coffee is taxable while the retail bag of beans beside the register is GST-free. Our page on GST on takeaway food sets out the ready to drink line and the other beverage thresholds.
Work backwards from the cost per cup you just built, not forwards from what the cafe up the road charges. If your four lines come to A$1.40 and you charge A$4.50, your beverage gross margin on that cup is about 69%, which you can then test against the bands on our beverage cost page.
The state table above is the useful sanity check. A Victorian cafe at A$4.61 and a Tasmanian cafe at A$5.44 are not in the same market, and a price that reads as greedy in Melbourne reads as under market in Hobart. Australian trade and business press reported during 2026 that industry figures expect A$7 cups, and that is an expectation attributed to industry sources rather than a measurement. The measured average is A$4.69.
If you do raise prices, the mechanics of doing it without losing the room are a separate problem, and our menu price increase page covers the notice, the rounding and the timing. Raising a cup by 20 cents at 200 cups a day is A$12,480 a year, which is most of the way to the bean saving above without touching the cup in anyone's hand.
How much does it cost to make a cup of coffee in Australia?
The coffee itself is about 44 to 84 cents a cup. Seven Miles Coffee Roasters published Australian wholesale bands of about A$22 a kilogram at the low end, roughly A$32 to A$38 for most cafes and A$42 or more for premium supply with equipment, in January 2025. At a 20 gram double shot a kilogram makes 50 cups, so A$35 a kilogram is 70 cents of coffee. Milk, packaging and syrups sit on top and come from your own invoices.
How many cups of coffee do you get from 1kg of beans?
Fifty double shots at a 20 gram dose, 55 at 18 grams, and 45 at 22 grams. That is why dosing by scale rather than by habit matters: moving from 20 grams to 22 raises your coffee cost per cup by 10% and no invoice will ever show it to you.
What is the average price of a cup of coffee in Australia?
A$4.69 nationally in June 2026, up 1.65% on the year, from the Daily Brew Report 2026 published by Hey You with Westpac DataX. By state the same month: Tasmania A$5.44, Queensland A$5.17, New South Wales A$4.66 and Victoria A$4.61. Western Australia and the ACT were reported above A$5 without an exact figure.
Why has wholesale coffee gone up so much?
The green bean price moved. The International Coffee Organization composite indicator price averaged 262.18 US cents per pound in September 2026, with Brazilian Naturals at 290.19 and Colombian Milds at 356.15. Roasters passing that on have also named a low Australian dollar and higher freight. In Australian Bureau of Statistics figures for the year to September 2025, coffee, tea and cocoa rose 15.7% against all groups at 3.5%.
What percentage of a coffee's price is the beans?
About 15% at the national average. Seventy cents of coffee in a A$4.69 cup is 14.9%. That is the honest scale of the bean lever, and it is why changing roaster to save 26 cents a cup rarely survives contact with the customers who notice.
Should I use a cheaper coffee to protect my margin?
Usually not. At 200 cups a day, dropping from A$35 to A$22 a kilogram saves about A$16,000 a year, but it typically also means no machine on loan and no technician mid service, and at an average A$4.69 cup you only need to lose 12 customers a day to cancel the saving. Raising the cup price by 20 cents at the same volume is worth about A$12,480 a year and costs you nothing in the cup.