Wait Time Calculator
Work out how long the next customer will wait from how many are ahead, how many tables or chairs you have, and how long each one takes. Free, no signup.
How many are ahead of the new arrival.
How many can be served at once.
Minutes one table or chair takes.
Quote them
55–95 min
3 turns of 25 minutes across 2 stations.
Quote the top of the range. Being early is a nice surprise; being late is the thing people remember and repeat.
Stop recalculating this every time someone asks
The reason you are doing this arithmetic is that somebody is standing there asking. A waitlist gives every guest their own link showing their place in line, so the question stops being asked at all. Free to start, and there is nothing for them to download.
Make a free waitlistHow to use it
- Count the parties already waiting.
- Enter how many tables, chairs or rooms can be in use at once.
- Enter how long one of them takes, start to ready-again.
- Quote the top of the range you get.
Why quoted waits go wrong
Almost always for one of two reasons. The average is taken from a quiet service rather than a busy one, so every estimate is optimistic exactly when it matters. Or the turnaround is left out - the time between one party leaving and the next being able to sit down is real, and on a busy night it is a significant share of the cycle.
What to say when you are not sure
Give a range and the reason: “about forty to fifty minutes, there are six ahead of you”. People are far more tolerant of an honest range than of a confident number that turns out to be wrong, and telling them the count lets them judge for themselves.
Questions
Divide the number of parties ahead by the number of tables or chairs that can be served at once, round up, and multiply by the average service time. Six parties across two tables at twenty-five minutes each is three turns, so about seventy-five minutes. The arithmetic is the easy part; the average is what most people get wrong.
Because service times vary and a single number pretends they do not. The range is roughly plus or minus a quarter, which is about how much real service times scatter around their average. Quote the top of it: being seated early is a pleasant surprise, and being seated late is what people tell their friends about.
Use your own, measured on a busy day rather than a quiet one - they differ more than you expect. If you have no number yet, start with the time from seating to the table being cleared and ready again, not just how long people eat. For a barber's chair or a treatment room, it is the appointment length plus the turnaround between clients.
Yes, and it is more accurate there than in a restaurant. Chairs and treatment rooms free up fairly independently and appointments cluster tightly around their average, which is exactly what this model assumes. Restaurant tables of different sizes break that assumption, so treat the estimate as looser.
Yes, with no signup. It runs entirely in your browser and your numbers stay on this device.