Dark kitchen space in Melbourne and Brisbane was advertised at A$2,500 to A$5,000 a month in July 2024, but Skai Solutions puts the real break-even near A$450,000 of annual revenue once a 30% marketplace commission is priced in.
The rent saving on a ghost kitchen is genuine and it is large. The problem is that it is not the number that decides whether the business works. A delivery-only kitchen trades away the one channel that costs nothing to serve, the customer who walks in, and buys in exchange a channel that charges up to 30% of every order. That trade, not the rent, is the whole economics. Here is both halves with the figures shown.
Published Australian figures on this are thin, so date what you find and treat it as a market shape rather than a quote. An Australian commercial kitchen operator's own guidance, in a post dated 3 July 2024, puts dark kitchen rental in Melbourne and Brisbane at A$2,500 to A$5,000 a month, and says a business can be operating from as little as A$10,000 against A$200,000 or more for a traditional restaurant fit-out.
| Line | Advertised figure | What it does not include |
|---|---|---|
| Dark kitchen rent, Melbourne or Brisbane | A$2,500 to A$5,000 a month | Utilities, cleaning, dry storage, peak-hour surcharges |
| Getting started in a shared kitchen | From about A$10,000 | Stock, packaging, marketing, working capital |
| Traditional restaurant fit-out, for contrast | A$200,000 or more | Lease incentives and landlord contributions vary |
| Delivery marketplace activation, first site | A$700 excluding GST | Commission, promotions, advertising |
The first three lines are a single operator's advertised rates from July 2024, so they are two years old at the time of writing. The Melbourne hourly rates in the section above were advertised in October 2026 and are the current figure on this page; the monthly band and the hourly rates are different products, so do not read one as a correction of the other. The activation fee is a headline rate read from a published merchant pricing page in September 2026. None of them are Skai Solutions' prices and none of them are a quote for your venue.
What sits outside the base rent matters more here than in a leased restaurant, because a shared kitchen unbundles things a lease usually bundles: power and gas by usage, cleaning, dry and cold storage charged separately, and a higher rate for peak preparation hours. Ask for each of those in writing before comparing one facility to another.
In Australian usage, yes. Dark kitchen, ghost kitchen, cloud kitchen and virtual kitchen all describe the same thing: a production kitchen with no dining room, selling through delivery marketplaces and its own ordering channels. The words came from different places, "dark" from UK trade press by analogy with dark stores, "ghost" from US coverage, and Australian operators and landlords now use them interchangeably. Nothing legal or structural hangs on which one you say.
Two distinctions that are real, and worth keeping straight when you are reading a lease. A HOST KITCHEN is an existing restaurant renting out spare capacity in its own kitchen to another brand; you are a tenant in someone's working service, so your access is only as good as their quiet hours. A VIRTUAL BRAND is a menu with no kitchen of its own at all, cooked inside a restaurant that already exists, usually the same one that owns it. A virtual brand can run out of a dining restaurant without any dark kitchen being involved.
The one that changes the arithmetic on this page is which of those you are signing. A seat in a shared dark kitchen facility is priced per station per month. A host kitchen arrangement is usually a revenue share, which means the rent line above does not apply and the commission stack does the work instead.
Where the sites actually are matters as much as what they cost. Australian dark kitchen capacity clusters in the inner ring of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, because the economics need a dense delivery radius.
That is why the answer changes with the city. Search dark kitchen Melbourne and you are looking at the deepest shared-facility market in the country, which is also where the A$2,500 to A$5,000 a month figure above was advertised. Search ghost kitchen Brisbane and the same rent band applies to a thinner supply, so the facilities that exist fill and the negotiation goes the landlord's way. Ghost kitchen Melbourne and ghost kitchen Brisbane are the same question with different competition for the station, and nothing about the commission arithmetic further down this page changes between them.
Before you commit to any of it, the fixed costs that do not disappear with the dining room are on restaurant overhead costs, and the kitchen equipment side is on commercial kitchen equipment cost.
A restaurant in a leased shop pays rent at 6% to 17% of turnover depending on size, on the ATO's 2023-24 small business benchmarks, which our page on restaurant occupancy cost sets out in full. Removing the dining room genuinely removes most of that. It also removes front-of-house wages, which is real money.
What replaces it is commission, and commission is charged on a much bigger base. Delivery marketplaces advertise 30% of order value where the platform lists you and does the delivery, 16% where you list and deliver with your own driver, and 6% where the customer collects, as published in September 2026. An ordering site built on your own domain by the platform is 25% where they deliver and 6% where you do. Our page on delivery app commission fees has the full schedule and the New Zealand comparison, which is that the percentages are identical.
A dine-in restaurant pays 30% on the delivery slice of its trade, perhaps a fifth of turnover. A ghost kitchen with no walk-in trade and no direct channel pays it on nearly all of turnover. That is a completely different business, and the rent it saved does not come close to covering the difference.
This is the arithmetic, and every input is named so you can change it for your own numbers.
That leaves 100% minus 35% minus 30% minus 25%, which is 10% of turnover to cover rent and everything else. A$45,000 of rent divided by 10% is A$450,000 of annual revenue to break even at zero profit, before packaging, utilities, insurance, software, accounting or a cent of return for the operator.
The multiplication is Skai Solutions' own, on inputs that are each sourced and dated above. Change one input and the answer moves a long way: at a 16% commission because you run your own driver, the contribution is 24% and break-even falls to A$187,500. That single change is worth more than any rent negotiation available to you.
Less than a restaurant, and the gap is the real attraction. Against A$200,000 or more for a traditional fit-out, a shared kitchen can be A$10,000 on the same operator's July 2024 figures, because the extraction, the grease trap, the three-bay sink and the certification already exist. Our page on commercial kitchen equipment cost compares new, used, lease and rent for the gear you still have to bring.
What does not get cheaper:
It can be, and the condition is narrow: the direct channel has to do real work. The gap between 30% for a marketplace-delivered order and 6% for an order that comes through your own site and is collected is 24 points of order value. On the ATO's figures the implied pre-tax margin for a restaurant in the A$500,001 to A$2 million band is about 12%, so that channel gap is twice the entire margin of an average Australian restaurant.
Which means every direct order is worth roughly three marketplace orders in profit terms. That is the sentence to keep. A ghost kitchen that only exists inside a marketplace is renting a customer list it will never own, and the operators who make it work treat the marketplace as acquisition and then move repeat customers to a channel they control.
The phone is part of that, and here is the honest version rather than the sales version. A phone order carries no commission at all, which on this arithmetic makes it the most profitable order in the business. But a ghost kitchen with no shop front gets few inbound calls to begin with, so the phone is a channel to build rather than one to rescue. If your delivery-only kitchen is not yet getting calls, an AI receptionist is not your first purchase, and we would rather say that than sell you one. Where it starts to matter is the kitchen that has built a direct following and is dropping its calls at 7pm on a Friday, which is what AI phone ordering for takeaways is about.
This is the unit most shared kitchens in Melbourne actually sell in, and it is the figure the monthly band above does not give you. Across eight listed Melbourne commercial kitchen spaces, advertised starting rates in October 2026 run from about A$40 to A$100 an hour, with individual listings at A$40, A$65, A$66, A$71, A$80 and A$100. Session-priced spaces ran A$180 to A$578. The same source puts its Melbourne summary range at A$71 to A$176 an hour and an average near A$100. Those are advertised starting rates from a venue hire marketplace, dated October 2026, so treat them as the market shape rather than a quote.
Now convert them, because an hourly rate and a monthly rate are not the same product and comparing them without the arithmetic is how operators get this wrong. Six hours a day, five days a week, is about 130 hours a month. The conversion is Skai Solutions' own, with the inputs on show so you can change them.
| Advertised rate | 130 hours a month | Against the 2024 monthly band |
|---|---|---|
| A$40 an hour | about A$5,200 | above the A$2,500 to A$5,000 band |
| A$70 an hour | about A$9,100 | roughly double the top of it |
| A$100 an hour | about A$13,000 | more than double |
So the hourly route is dearer per month than a dedicated monthly space, and that is the honest reading. What you buy for the difference is the ability to stop. An hourly booking can be cut to two days a week in a bad month; a monthly lease cannot. If you are testing a brand, pay the hourly premium. If the volume is proven, the monthly deal is the cheaper home for it.
We re-read that operator's page on 23 September 2026. It still carries the same date, 3 July 2024, and the same numbers, so there is no newer published Australian dark kitchen rate to give you. Rather than guess at one, here is what has demonstrably happened to the thing the page compares itself against.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics measures construction output prices every quarter. In the Producer Price Indexes release for the June quarter 2026, published 31 July 2026, non-residential building construction prices rose 4.4% over twelve months. The year before they rose 3.3%. Ours, from those two published figures: 1.033 multiplied by 1.044 is 1.0784, so the same fit-out scope is about 7.8% dearer than it was two years ago.
| Figure | As published, July 2024 | In June 2026 money, ours |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional restaurant fit-out, the contrast figure | A$200,000 or more | About A$215,000 or more |
Escalation from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Producer Price Indexes, Australia, June 2026 and June 2025. Applied to the fit-out line only. Rent is not construction and does not move with this index, so the A$2,500 to A$5,000 a month figure is left exactly as published and exactly as dated.
Which way that cuts: the capital gap between a shared kitchen and a room of your own is wider in 2026 than the 2024 comparison suggests, not narrower. Our page on what it costs to fit out a cafe sets out the current per square metre bands, and the same ABS series is where that page starts.
A kitchen with no front of house still has a phone, and nobody standing near it. The smallest version of that problem is covered on our page on whether an AI receptionist works for a coffee shop.
Who should: an existing venue with spare brand equity and a second cuisine it can cook in a kitchen it already pays for, or an operator with a direct customer base already built.
Dark kitchen space in Melbourne and Brisbane was advertised at A$2,500 to A$5,000 a month by an Australian commercial kitchen operator in a post dated 3 July 2024. Treat that as the shape of the market rather than a current quote, because it is two years old and utilities, cleaning, storage and peak-hour surcharges usually sit outside the base rate.
Skai Solutions puts it near A$450,000 a year on stated inputs: A$45,000 of annual kitchen rent, cost of sales at the ATO's 35% restaurant average, a 30% marketplace commission on delivered orders, and labour at 25% of turnover. That leaves ten cents in the dollar to cover rent, so A$45,000 of rent needs A$450,000 of sales before anything else is paid.
On fit-out, yes and by a wide margin. On revenue economics, usually not, because a delivery-only kitchen has no walk-in trade, so close to every order carries a marketplace commission. A dine-in venue pays commission on a slice of turnover; a ghost kitchen pays it on nearly all of it.
Packaging, which rises with delivery volume rather than with covers. Utilities, cleaning and dry storage where they sit outside the base rent. Peak-hour rate surcharges. Marketplace activation fees, advertised at A$700 excluding GST for a first location as at September 2026. Merchant-funded promotions and in-app advertising, which are separate again.
It can be, but only where the direct channel does real work. At a 30% commission for a marketplace-delivered order against 6% for an order on your own site that you deliver or the customer collects, the gap between the two channels is larger than most restaurants' entire profit margin.
Yes. A delivery-only kitchen is a food business. In Australia that means a food safety supervisor and council registration; in New Zealand it means a registered food control plan. Shared commercial kitchens are often already certified for the premises, which removes some but not all of the work.