How to start a catering business in Australia: the kitchen, the registrations and the cash before the first deposit

Starting a catering business is mostly three decisions made in the right order: where you’ll cook, who you register with, and how you’ll carry the cash between buying the food and getting paid. Get those three right and the menu is the fun part. Get them wrong and you can end up with a beautiful canapé range and nowhere legal to make it.

Christmas functions are being booked right now, which is why so many people start asking this question in November. Here’s the sequence that works.

Where should you cook: home, a hired kitchen or your own premises?

This choice drives your registration, your running costs and how many events you can take a week.

Route	Good for	Watch out for
Home kitchen	Testing the idea, small orders, low overheads	Council approval and zoning, restrictions on high-risk food, limited volume
Hired commercial kitchen	Growing without a lease or a fit-out	Hourly rates, minimum bookings, shared storage, booking clashes in peak season
Your own premises	Regular volume, staff, a base for vans and equipment	Lease, fit-out, extraction, a grease trap, ongoing rent whether or not you have bookings

Home. It’s often possible, but not a given. In NSW, the Food Authority regulates home kitchens that sell only to other businesses, while councils regulate home-based businesses selling direct to the final customer, and councils can decline operations involving high-risk food. In Queensland, councils list off-site catering as a licensable activity, and licensable home businesses must nominate a food safety supervisor. A quick call to your council’s environmental health team before you spend a cent saves a lot of grief.

Hired kitchen. A real commercial kitchen with none of the lease. Rates vary a lot. A Realcommercial report puts shared kitchen hire at about $30 to $80 an hour, with full-day sessions at $200 to $1,000. Venue-listing sites show Sydney and Melbourne kitchens from roughly $80 to $150 an hour, sometimes with a four-hour minimum or a minimum spend per event. Those are venues’ own listings, so get a written quote that says what’s included: cool room space, dry storage, cleaning, parking for the van.

A simple test: if you’d hire a kitchen for more than a few days a week, put the annual hire cost next to the cost of your own lease and fit-out. At that point, a premises of your own may come out cheaper.

Your own premises. You’ll want the same checks as any food venue. Our guide to opening a café covers site selection, council approvals and the opening budget. A catering kitchen has fewer front-of-house costs but still needs extraction, hand-wash basins, cool rooms and trade waste sorted. The grease trap guide explains why that last item can hold up a start date.

What do you need to register in your state?

Rules differ by state, and councils add their own wrinkles, so use ABLIS, the federal licence and permit finder, to see what applies at your address. The general picture:

• NSW. Catering where food isn’t sold retail directly to consumers is notified to the NSW Food Authority. One council’s ABLIS listing shows combined annual fees by risk for 2025-26: $130 for low risk, $195 for medium and $225 for high. Those are one council’s figures, so check yours.
• Victoria. Councils register most food businesses and assign a class by risk. Businesses mainly handling meat, poultry, seafood or dairy, in the manner Safe Food Victoria describes, need a Safe Food Victoria licence instead. The state’s fixed food premises registration listing on ABLIS is the starting point.
• Queensland. Councils license food businesses under the Food Act 2006, and off-site catering is licensable. Fees vary council to council. As an example, Brisbane City Council lists $889.15 for a minor-category application (under 250m²), which covers most small kitchens. A catering business may also need an accredited food safety program, depending on council.

Mobile caterers working from a van have extra paperwork, which is a separate topic from this guide, which is about catering from a fixed kitchen.

What do the food safety rules require of a caterer?

Caterers handling unpackaged, ready-to-eat, potentially hazardous food (think platters, salads, cooked meats, cold desserts) fall into category one under FSANZ Standard 3.2.2A. That means three things:

1. A certified food safety supervisor. The certificate comes from a registered training organisation and needs renewing at least every five years. A free online course may not meet it.
2. Trained food handlers. Anyone handling that food must have completed food safety training, or an equivalent, before they start. FSANZ’s handler training page lists the topics, which now include allergen management.
3. Records that prove it. You need to show your controls are working, such as temperature logs for the cool room, cooking and cooling.

Then there’s temperature, the rule caterers break most easily because the food leaves the building. FSANZ’s guidance on processing food safely says potentially hazardous food should be kept at 5°C or colder, or 60°C or hotter. Under time as control, ready-to-eat food generally gets a total of four hours between those two numbers before it goes in the bin. A van that sits in traffic, a function room with no bench space and a late-running speech all eat into that window.

If an officer ever finds a problem, it’s far cheaper to have the records and the kit already. Our food safety improvement notice guide shows what the other side of that looks like.

What does a catering startup cost?

Cost it by route, with quotes, not guesses. The lists below are what typically goes on the sheet; the amounts are yours to fill in.

Every route:

• Food safety supervisor course and handler training
• Registration, licence or notification fees
• Public liability insurance, and workers’ compensation if you employ staff
• Business name, ABN, accounting software
• Refrigerated or insulated transport, and cooler bags that hold temperature

Kit (own kitchen or a rented bench):

• Hot boxes and chafing dishes, bain-maries, platters, serving ware
• Combi oven, ranges, cool room and prep benches if you’re fitting out
• Dishwasher and sanitiser, since a function leaves a mountain of dishes

For plan purposes, the fit-out cost estimator will help you total the kitchen side. If you’re buying equipment, the ATO says the $20,000 instant asset write-off is permanent from 1 July 2026 for businesses under $10 million turnover, and it applies per asset. Your accountant can say whether a particular purchase qualifies, and used gear can be a smart way to stretch a budget, as our used kitchen equipment checklist explains.

Need help covering the kit? That’s what our commercial kitchen equipment finance page is for, and you can see if you qualify in about a minute without a credit check at the enquiry stage.

Why does catering cash flow feel different?

A café gets paid at the till. A caterer pays for the event first. A 100-guest Christmas lunch might look like this, as a made-up example: the chef’s prep days, the casual wages, the stock, the kitchen hire and the van fuel all go out in the week before. The client’s balance may not land until days after, and if they’re a business, it can be 14 to 30 days after that.

That gap is the real startup risk, more than the cost of any single machine. A few habits close it:

• Deposit at booking. Many caterers ask for a share up front so stock can be bought without touching their own cash.
• Balance before the event. Set the date in the quote, not in a polite follow-up.
• Written cancellation terms. If a function drops out the week before, you’ve already bought the food.
• Short terms for corporates. Say 7 or 14 days on the invoice and chase on day one.
• Watch the December cluster. Christmas bookings stack in a few weeks, which is when the wage and stock bill peaks, and our Christmas trading cash flow page walks through funding that rush.

If the gap is wider than your savings, working capital can bridge it. For a takeaway-led model with a counter, see takeaway shop loans.

A sensible order of operations

1. Pick your route (home, hired or premises) and call the council or regulator that applies to it.
2. Book the food safety supervisor course. It’s quick and it’s required.
3. Register or notify, and get your insurance in place before the first paid job.
4. Cost a menu with real recipe cards. Our menu costing guide shows the method.
5. Set deposit, balance and cancellation terms before you quote.
6. Line up the money for the first month: stock, wages, hire and the gap before payment.

Starting out? Here’s how we can help

Opening a kitchen for events is a brave move, and almost every new caterer meets the same snag: the money goes out weeks before it comes in. We work with people who cook for a living, so we know what a hot box, a cool room and a Christmas week cost.

Enquiring takes about a minute, and your credit file isn’t touched just for asking. We don’t send your details to a pile of lenders, so your phone won’t light up with strangers; a real person looks at your situation and calls you. Please fill the form in accurately so we can match the right option the first time.

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