Costa or Caffè Nero: The high street coffee clash: who is brewing up the biggest profits?

Which chain is bigger on the filings?

Costa, clearly. Costa Limited reports turnover of £1,232m for the year to December 2024, against £588m at Caffè Nero Group Holdings for the year to May 2025, a gap of £644m and a ratio of 2.1 to 1. Headcount follows the same shape but less steeply, 17,957 against 9,870.

Because turnover falls faster than people do, the two land in different places on productivity. Costa turns over about £68,600 per employee and Caffè Nero about £59,600. Average staff cost per head runs the same way, £22,000 against £19,000, which is what you would expect of two estates with a different mix of site formats and trading hours.

The working capital picture is more one-sided than turnover. Costa holds £136m in cash and £290m of current assets, with £39m of debtors. Caffè Nero holds £15m in cash and £47m of current assets, with £9m of debtors. Both are cash businesses that collect at the till, so debtors are small on either side, but the buffers behind them are not comparable in size.

A note on like for like: the Costa row is an unconsolidated trading company and the Caffè Nero row is a consolidated group, so the Caffè Nero figures already include its subsidiaries while the Costa figures cover one company. The year ends are five months apart.

Which one is growing?

Caffè Nero, on both measures the filings offer. Its turnover moved 13.0 per cent and its employee count 41.7 per cent. Costa’s equivalents are 0.7 per cent and 0.8 per cent, close enough to flat that the estate looks held rather than pushed.

Profit direction is the reverse. Costa’s estimated result before tax improved from (£10m) in the prior year to £65m, a swing into positive territory. Caffè Nero’s estimated result went from (£34m) to (£41m), a deeper loss on higher sales. Both profit figures are estimates derived from the filings rather than a reported statutory line, and they are labelled as such throughout.

The 41.7 per cent headcount movement is large enough to be worth a caveat. The filings carry the movement but not the reason for it, so it is reported here as filed and not read as organic hiring.

Where does each £100 of turnover go?

Almost to the same places, until you reach the financing line. Take £100 of turnover at each chain. Payroll takes £32.00 at Costa and £32.48 at Caffè Nero. Everything else, the rent, the coffee, the energy, the depreciation and the rest of the running cost base, takes £61.61 and £61.22. Then the columns separate: interest takes £1.14 at Costa and £13.27 at Caffè Nero, and what is left is £5.28 of estimated profit on one side and £6.97 of estimated loss on the other.

Two things are worth pulling out of that. The first is how similar the operating halves are. Strip financing out and the two chains convert turnover into cost at almost the same rate, which is a reminder that the argument between them is about capital structure rather than about how a coffee shop is run. The second is the dividend tail. Costa paid £80m up to its parent in the period, which is £6.49 of every £100 of turnover and more than its estimated profit for the year. Caffè Nero paid nothing and spent its equivalent money on interest.

Why does Caffè Nero show negative net assets and Costa does not?

Because one row is a group balance sheet carrying group borrowings and the other is a single trading company sitting underneath a parent. Caffè Nero Group Holdings reports net liabilities of £259m with estimated borrowings of £481m. Costa Limited reports net assets of £264m with estimated borrowings of £442m. The two borrowing figures are within £39m of each other, but they sit on turnover of £588m and £1,232m respectively, so the load per pound of sales is £0.82 against £0.36.

Neither position is unusual for its type. A trading subsidiary of a large corporate group tends to look clean because the acquisition financing sits somewhere else in the structure and is not visible in this filing. A privately held group that has financed its own expansion tends to carry that borrowing openly on the consolidated balance sheet, and the interest with it.

Who controls each chain?

Both are controlled from a single place, but the two places could hardly be less alike. Companies House records The Coca-Cola Company, company 00088529, as a person with significant control over Costa Limited, in the 75 to 100 per cent ownership band, notified on 3 January 2019. Caffè Nero Group Holdings Ltd records Rome Pik Holdco Ltd, company 05936498, in the same band, notified on 15 September 2016.

Those are control bands, not stake sizes and not prices. The register tells you who sits above the company, not what they paid or what proportion they hold within the band.

The officer records point the same way. At Caffè Nero, two directors appointed in November 2006 are still in post, including the founder, so the board has continuity going back to the holding company’s incorporation. Costa’s filed officer history is a long sequence of appointments and resignations typical of a subsidiary whose board is refreshed from the parent, with the most recent appointment recorded in July 2025.

What is in scope, line by line?

Two companies, one on each side, both active. The ledger below is the whole of the analysis, and every figure elsewhere on the page traces back to a cell in it or to a ratio derived from it.

How was this put together?

From filed Companies House data for the two named companies, transcribed to a spreadsheet, checked for alignment and analysed in Python. The working notes below cover the judgements that shape the figures.

• Scope is two companies, Costa Limited (1270695) and Caffè Nero Group Holdings Ltd (5936386). No other entity is included on either side.
• The comparison is not like for like. Costa’s row is unconsolidated and covers one trading company. Caffè Nero’s row is consolidated, so its subsidiaries are already inside the turnover, staff and net assets figures and are not added on top.
• The year ends are five months apart, December 2024 against May 2025, and the accounts were submitted two months apart.
• Profit before tax is estimated from the filings rather than lifted from a statutory line, and is labelled estimated wherever it appears. Estimates for a group and its subsidiaries never reconcile exactly, so the consolidated line is the anchor.
• No figure on this page adds the two chains together. Differences are expressed as a gap, a ratio or a share of a single company’s own turnover.
• Ownership is stated as the control band recorded at Companies House, not as an exact stake or a price.
• Costa’s filings carry a substantial freehold and leasehold estate, but every entry shows a price paid of zero, meaning not disclosed or nominal, so no property value is quoted here.
• Directors’ remuneration is held at roughly £1m granularity in the source and is treated as a flag rather than an amount, so it is not quoted.
• Figures are rounded: below £0.1m in thousands, £0.1m to £2m to one decimal place, and £2m and above to the nearest million. Negatives appear in brackets.

Costa and Caffè Nero: the questions people ask