How many door supervisors does your venue actually need?

Start with the licence

Most premises licences for late venues carry a door-supervisor condition. Common forms:

• A ratio — usually one SIA door supervisor per 100 customers (or part of), often only after a set time such as 9pm.
• A fixed number on set nights — "a minimum of two SIA-registered door supervisors on Friday and Saturday from 21:00 until close".
• A requirement that at least one officer is at the entrance at all times when the condition applies.

Whatever the condition says is the minimum, not a recommendation. Breaching it is a licensing matter, and the licensing authority can and does check.

Then look at the venue

Three things push the number above the licence minimum:

1. Entrances. Each controlled entrance needs an officer on it for the whole period. Two doors is two officers before anyone's inside.
2. Your busiest hour. Capacity 300 doesn't mean 300 all night — it means the hour when the counter is at 280 and the queue is out the door. Staff for that hour.
3. Closing. Dispersal outside a busy venue at 3am needs more hands than the door did at 9pm. If the last hour is where your incidents happen, add an officer for that hour rather than the whole night.

A worked example

A bar with a capacity of 250, one entrance, open until 2am on Saturdays, with a licence condition of 1:100 from 9pm:

That's three officers from 9pm to close and a fourth for the last two and a half hours — quoted as a fixed weekly figure.

What we'll tell you

Send us your capacity, your licence conditions and a sentence about what a bad night looks like, and we'll recommend a number and explain it. If we think your licence condition is under-cooked for the venue, we'll say so — a condition written when the venue was a restaurant doesn't fit the bar it's become.

Get a written quote — it takes two minutes and we reply within one working day.