Most function drinks packages in Australia are priced by looking at what the venue down the road charges, adding five dollars, and hoping. That works right up until the night a 120-person Christmas party drinks like a 120-person Christmas party, and you discover your premium tier was never actually the profitable one.
A per-head beverage package is not a pour cost. It's a bet. You are quoting a fixed price against variable consumption and carrying the difference yourself. That's fine — it's a good bet, and packages are easier to sell and easier to staff than consumption bars — but you have to price the bet, not the drink.
Here's how to build the number from the bottom up, with real figures from a mid-sized Australian function room.
Start with drinks per head, not dollars per head
The planning assumption most Australian venues work to is two drinks in the first hour and one per hour after that. On a four-hour package that's five drinks a head. It's a reasonable average and it will be roughly right for a conference dinner or an awards night.
It will be wrong for a wedding, wrong for an end-of-year party, and badly wrong for a 30th. Those run seven to eight drinks a head, and the first hour can be closer to three. If you cost every package at five and sell a lot of December parties, you're underwriting the difference out of your own margin.
Cost at five. Stress-test at eight. If the package still works at eight, you can sell it to anyone. If it only works at five, you need to say no to certain bookings or price them separately.
The liquid cost is smaller than you think
Take 100 guests, four hours, a standard package of tap beer, house white, red, sparkling and soft drink. That's 500 drinks. A typical spread on a corporate function is roughly 40% beer, 35% wine, 15% sparkling, 10% soft.
Wholesale cost per serve, ex GST:
- Tap beer — a 50L keg at $260 gives you about 117 schooners after line loss. Call it $2.20 a schooner.
- House white or red — $9 a bottle, five 150ml pours. $1.80 a glass.
- House sparkling — $8.50 a bottle, six 125ml pours. $1.42 a glass.
- Post-mix soft drink — about $0.25 a glass.
Blended, that's $1.75 a drink. Five hundred drinks is $875. Add 10% for overpour, spillage, breakage and the bottle someone puts through the dishwasher rack, and you land at about $9.60 a head in liquid.
Nine dollars sixty. If you're selling that package at $65 a head including GST, the beverage itself is running at roughly 16% of the ex-GST price. Comfortably inside the 18–24% pour cost band most Australian bar operators work to. So far so good — which is exactly why so many venues stop the calculation here and get burned.
Labour is what actually eats the margin
A hundred guests on a package needs two bartenders and a bar supervisor. Each of them is paid for an hour of setup, four hours of service and an hour of pack-down. That's 18 paid hours before anyone has poured anything.
From 1 July 2026 the Fair Work Commission's annual wage review lifted modern award minimums by 4.75%, taking the national minimum wage to $26.44 an hour. Under the Hospitality Industry (General) Award, a Level 1 casual sits at $33.05 an hour with the 25% loading included, and bar work with experience classifies higher again. Check your own classifications against the Fair Work Ombudsman's award summary rather than guessing.
At the Level 1 casual rate, 18 hours is $594.90. Add the 12% superannuation guarantee and you're at $666 — about $6.66 a head on a weekday. Put that same function on a Saturday night with penalty rates on top and it's closer to $800, or $8.00 a head.
So the true direct cost of that standard package on a Saturday is $9.60 plus $8.00, or $17.60 a head. Labour is 45% of it. Any pricing conversation that only talks about pour cost is missing nearly half the picture.
Where premium tiers quietly lose money
Now build the premium tier: same four hours, but add basic spirits, better wine and two cocktails on the list. Consumption goes up, not down — cocktails are moreish and people order them because they're included.
Say six drinks a head, with 40% of them cocktails. A 60ml cocktail with modifiers and garnish costs you $5.00 to make. Everything else averages $2.00. That's $19.20 a head in liquid, $21.10 with wastage. Cocktails also need more hands: one bartender per 40 guests instead of one per 50, so you're at three bartenders plus a supervisor, 24 paid hours, roughly $10.60 a head on a Saturday.
Total direct cost: $31.70 a head. Nearly double the standard package.
Here's the trap. Plenty of venues price standard at $65 and premium at $85, a $20 gap, because $20 feels like a fair upgrade to the client. Ex GST that's $59.09 and $77.27. Contribution per head: $41.49 on standard, $45.57 on premium. You've doubled your cost and added four dollars.
Sell the same premium package at $75 and you've gone backwards — you'd earn more per guest if the client had booked the cheaper tier. The rule to hold onto: the price gap between tiers should be at least two and a half times the cost gap. A $14 cost gap needs a $35 price gap, not $20. If that number frightens the client, the answer isn't to shrink the gap — it's to make the premium tier visibly worth it, which is a different problem and a cheaper one to solve.
What Australian venues are charging in 2026
Rough bands, per head including GST, drinks only:
- 2 hours, standard (tap beer, house wine, soft) — $35–45
- 3 hours, standard — $45–58
- 4 hours, standard — $55–70
- 4 hours, premium (basic spirits, upgraded wine) — $75–95
- 5 hours, all-inclusive with cocktails — $88–120
Wedding packages that bundle food and beverage together land between $130 and $180 a head, which is a different calculation and one you should never quote off the back of a drinks-only model.
One more thing worth saying out loud to clients: under about 70 guests, a bar tab is usually cheaper for them and less risky for you. Offering it honestly when it's the better answer buys you more repeat business than squeezing an extra $400 out of a small booking. We've written more on how to structure the offer in function venue packages clients actually say yes to, and on the à la carte side of the equation in building a signature cocktail menu that pays for itself.
Cheap inclusions that let you charge premium prices
The fastest way to widen the gap between tiers isn't more expensive liquor. Guests can't reliably taste the difference between a $32 gin and a $55 gin in a G&T, but they can absolutely see the difference between a drink that looks standard and one that looks like it was made for them.
Branded ice is the cheapest version of that. A custom logo ice tray is $199.95 once — that price includes the mould made to your artwork, not a per-order fee. Each fill produces six 45mm cubes and takes about eight hours at -18°C to set hard enough to demould. Amortised across a couple of hundred fills, you're at roughly 17 cents a cube plus water and freezer time.
Charge $3–5 a head for it as a premium-tier inclusion and a single 100-guest function returns $300–500 against a one-off $199.95. The mould pays for itself before the first night is over, and every function after that is close to pure margin. The full range of designs sits in the branded ice cube tray collection.
Two honest limitations, because they matter to whether this works for you:
It only works in spirit serves. A 45mm cube belongs in a rocks glass. It does nothing for beer, sparkling or a tall highball with crushed ice. So it lifts your premium tier and your spirits list, not the package as a whole. If your function business is 80% beer and wine, spend the money elsewhere.
Freezer space is the real constraint, not the trays. Serving 100 branded spirit drinks means 100 cubes, which is about 17 tray-fills. Four trays running eight-hour cycles gets you there in roughly a day and a half, and then you need somewhere to store 100 loose cubes. In December, when your walk-in freezer is already full of everything else, that space is scarcer than the $199.95. Plan the freezer before you plan the order. If you're already tight on cold storage, our breakdown of commercial ice costs in Australia and the per-function maths in how much ice per person for a function will tell you whether you've got room to move.
Venues that want the branded look without a company logo sometimes go the other way and run a letter and number tray at $69.95 — the client's initial and the year of their event, which sells beautifully on weddings and milestone birthdays and doesn't tie the tray to one brand. Everything else we make is in the full range.
Five clauses that belong in your package terms
Costing is half the job. The other half is making sure the number you quoted is the number you get paid.
- Final numbers lock seven days out, and you charge on the confirmed number — not on who walks through the door. Twelve no-shows shouldn't be your loss.
- The package starts at the time on the run sheet, not when the last guest arrives. Say it in writing or you will be arguing about it at 11pm.
- Name what's actually in the tier. Not "house wine" — the varietal and the label. Ambiguity here is where clients feel short-changed and where staff over-serve to compensate.
- RSA and last drinks override the package. The package ends when your licence says it ends, and you can refuse service without refunding a share of the per-head price.
- Set a minimum spend or minimum numbers with a stated remedy. Usually charging the shortfall is fairer and more commercial than cancelling the booking outright.
If you want branded ice ready for the function season
The minimum order is one tray at $199.95, which covers the custom mould made to your artwork — there's no separate tooling fee and no volume minimum. You supply a one-colour vector file (AI, EPS or SVG) or a high-resolution PNG on a transparent background; at 45mm cube scale you need a minimum stroke width of about 1.5mm and a cap height of 6mm, so a fine-serif wordmark with hairline strokes won't survive the freeze. Send the icon or a simplified lockup instead and it will read cleanly across the room.
Production runs about two to three weeks from artwork approval on a new logo mould, with one to three business days' dispatch on existing designs. For the November–December function season that means getting artwork approved by mid-October — two to three weeks to make the mould, then a week or so to batch-freeze stock before your first big night. Start at the branded ice collection, or read how other operators are using it in branded ice for bars.
Frequently asked questions
How many drinks does a guest actually have on a four-hour package?
Five on average — two in the first hour, one per hour after. Cost at five, but stress-test your pricing at eight, because weddings, end-of-year parties and milestone birthdays consistently run seven to eight a head.
When is a bar tab better than a package?
Generally under about 70 guests, and for daytime or lunch functions where consumption is naturally lower. Below that headcount a package usually costs the client more than they'd drink, and telling them so is worth more in repeat bookings than the extra margin.
What does a custom logo ice tray cost, and what's the minimum order?
$199.95 for one tray, and the minimum order is one. That price includes the mould made to your artwork — there's no separate setup or tooling fee, and no volume commitment.
What artwork do I need to supply?
A one-colour vector file (AI, EPS or SVG) is ideal; a high-resolution PNG on a transparent background also works. Keep the minimum stroke width at about 1.5mm and cap height at 6mm at 45mm cube scale. Simple marks freeze and read far better than detailed ones.
How far ahead do I need to order for the Christmas function season?
Have artwork approved by mid-October. Production is two to three weeks from approval, and you'll want another week to build frozen stock before the first December function. Existing designs dispatch in one to three business days if you're leaving it later than that.