Ask the internet what licences you need to open a café in the UK and you get a list of about fifteen things, half of which will never apply to you, priced by people who sell training courses.

The real list is shorter. For a café with no alcohol, no late trading and no tables on the pavement, there are seven things that are actually required, and only one of them has a hard deadline attached.

That one is the one people leave until last. You must register a food business with your council at least 28 days before you trade, and if you learn that in the week you meant to open, you open a month late.

What licences do you need to open a café? Start with what you can cross off

Three questions. Each "no" removes a block of paperwork.

Are you selling alcohol? No means no premises licence, no personal licence, no designated premises supervisor.
Are you serving hot food or hot drink between 11pm and 5am? No means the same again: late night refreshment sits under the same licence as alcohol.
Are you putting tables and chairs on the public highway? No means no pavement licence.

Most independent cafés answer no three times, and if that is you, you can stop worrying about the word "licence" altogether. Cafés are mostly registered, not licensed.

Register a food business: the one deadline that bites

This is the item everything else waits behind. You register with the local authority for the area your premises sits in, at least 28 days before trading.

Two things worth knowing:

It is free. There is no fee at any stage.
It cannot be refused. It is a notification, not an application. Nobody decides whether you are allowed.

Because it is free and cannot be refused, people do it late. The 28 days is the notice period the council needs to know you exist and schedule your first inspection. Put the date in the diary the day you sign the lease, set for 28 days before you intend to open. The FSA asks you not to register too early, so the discipline is knowing the date, not filing on day one.

Do I need a food hygiene certificate to open a café?

Short answer: no, not as a legal requirement. You need something better than a certificate, and the certificate is the easiest way to evidence part of it.

The law asks two things. Gov.uk puts it plainly: you must "train all your staff" and "have a system for managing food safety". No certificate is named, and there is no qualification you personally must hold to run a café.

What you do need:

A food safety management system based on HACCP principles. The free Safer Food, Better Business pack from the Food Standards Agency is the standard answer for a café. Fill it in for your actual menu and fridges, and keep the diary. It covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland; Scotland uses CookSafe.
Trained staff, with proof. Level 2 Food Safety and Hygiene is not the law, but it is the norm, it is cheap, and an inspector can see it in thirty seconds. Whoever runs the kitchen should sit Level 3.

Vendor sites tell you Level 2 is mandatory because they sell Level 2. It is a good idea presented as a legal duty, which is a different thing. Keep a dated, signed induction sheet per person filed with the certificates: that is the part an inspector can score.

Required for every café, whatever you sell

Beyond registration and food safety, five more items apply to almost every café, four of them whatever your staffing.

Employers' liability insurance. The moment you employ anyone you need cover of at least £5 million from an authorised insurer. A genuinely solo owner-operator does not need it. The fine for trading without cover is up to £2,500 for each day you are uninsured, and a further £1,000 for failing to display the certificate. If your only workers are close family members you are exempt, but that exemption is narrower than people assume.

A fire risk assessment. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 you are the responsible person, and you must make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the fire risks and record it. No employee-count threshold lets you off recording it. You can do it yourself for a small café; for a first floor, a cellar or an unusual layout, paying someone is money well spent.

A commercial waste contract. Trade waste cannot go in household bins. Your duty of care means a registered waste carrier and a transfer note for every load, though paper notes give way to the Digital Waste Tracking Service from October 2026. England's workplace recycling rules came in on 31 March 2025: food waste has to be collected separately from general waste and dry recycling. Fewer than 10 full-time-equivalent employees across the business and you are a micro-firm, with until 31 March 2027, though most contractors will move you sooner. Wales has required it since April 2024. It is a bin arrangement rather than a licence: here is what separate food waste collection means for a café kitchen.

Business rates. Not a licence, but it lands in the same fortnight. HMRC sets your rateable value (the Valuation Office Agency became part of HMRC in April 2026) and the council bills you. In England, small business rate relief gives 100% relief at a rateable value of £12,000 or less if it is the only property your business uses, tapering to nothing at £15,000. It is not automatic, so ask the council for it.

Allergen information. Legally required, and the part most cafés do to the letter and no further. It is a system, not a sticker, which is why an ingredient-level allergen matrix beats a "contains nuts" sign the first time a customer asks what a cake does not contain.

Licences that depend on your premises

Planning and use class

In England, cafés and restaurants sit inside Use Class E, the commercial, business and service class created by the 2020 amendment to the Use Classes Order. Class E is England only: in Wales the old classes still apply, so a café is Class A3 and moving into a former A1 shop does need change of use permission.

The practical effect is large. Moving from one use to another inside Class E is not development and does not need planning permission, so in England, turning a former shop into a café usually needs no change of use application at all.

What still needs consent: building works, an external extraction flue, anything taking you into or out of Class E, and anything that is really a hot food takeaway, because premises where the food is mostly eaten off site sit outside the classes altogether. Extraction is the one that catches cafés: the flue is external and your neighbours have opinions.

Pavement licence

In England, tables on the public highway need a pavement licence from the council, under the Business and Planning Act 2020 and made permanent by the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023.

Fees are capped: £500 for a new application and £350 for a renewal. There is a 14 day public consultation, excluding public holidays, then the authority has 14 days to determine it. Miss that window and the licence is deemed granted for two years. Six weeks from application to trading outside is realistic. That regime is England only, so in Wales ask the council what applies before you budget.

Seating on your own forecourt is outside all of this.

Premises licence

You need one to sell alcohol at any time, or to serve hot food or hot drink between 11pm and 5am, both under the Licensing Act 2003. For a daytime café, neither applies. If either does, the fee is set by band and the process involves advertising and consultation, so allow months rather than weeks.

Licences that depend on what you do

Music. Play music anywhere your customers or your staff can hear it, the kitchen radio included, and you need TheMusicLicence from PPL PRS. It is not expensive, but it is the cost nobody budgets for, which is why I set out what a café actually pays for a music licence.

Packaging. Extended Producer Responsibility only bites if you turn over £1 million or more and put more than 25 tonnes of packaging on the market, with the full disposal fees starting above £2 million and 50 tonnes. No independent café is near 25 tonnes. You still pay for it, in the unit price of every cup your supplier sells you.

Martyn's Law. The standard tier starts at a capacity of 200 people, counting staff, upstairs and outdoor areas, and most cafés are comfortably under. The duties are not in force yet either: Royal Assent was April 2025, the implementation period is at least 24 months, and commencement is expected in spring 2027. It is a number to know, not a task for opening week.

CCTV and the data protection fee. If you process personal data you owe the ICO an annual fee under the Data Protection (Charges and Information) Regulations 2018 unless you are exempt. Tier 1, for organisations with a turnover up to £632,000 or no more than 10 staff, is £52, with £5 off for paying by direct debit. Running CCTV for crime prevention is not on the ICO's list of exempt processing, so if you have cameras you almost certainly owe the fee, whatever they point at. The exempt list covers staff admin, your own marketing and your accounts, and little else, so run the ICO's self-assessment.

The hygiene rating sticker. Displaying it is mandatory in Wales and Northern Ireland and voluntary in England. Voluntary is not invisible: the rating is published online either way.

The full list, with costs and lead times

Item	Required?	Cost	Lead time	Who issues it
Food business registration	Every café	Free	28 days minimum	Your local authority
Food safety management system (SFBB)	Every café	Free pack	Half a day to set up, daily diary after	FSA pack, filled in by you
Staff food safety training	Every café	Varies by provider	Before anyone handles food	Training provider
Employers' liability insurance	If you employ anyone	Varies	Days	Authorised insurer
Fire risk assessment	Every café	Free to a few hundred pounds	Days to weeks	You, or an assessor
Commercial waste contract	Every café	Varies	Allow 2 to 4 weeks	Registered waste carrier
Allergen information	Every café	Free	Ongoing	You
Planning or change of use	Outside Class E, or building works	Application fee varies	Weeks to months	Your council
Pavement licence	Highway seating only	£500 new, £350 renewal, capped	14 days consultation, 14 to determine	Your council
Premises licence	Alcohol, or 11pm to 5am hot food	Fee set by band	Allow months	Council licensing team
TheMusicLicence	If you play music	Scales with your space	Days	PPL PRS
Data protection fee	If not exempt	£52 tier 1, £5 off by direct debit	Same day online	ICO
Hygiene rating sticker	Display mandatory in Wales and NI	Free	After your first inspection	Your local authority

The order to do them in, working back from opening day

On signing the lease. Tell the council you have taken the unit for rates and ask about small business rate relief. Diarise the registration for 28 days before opening.
Twelve weeks out. Planning conversation if you are building anything or fitting extraction. Premises licence application if you need one.
Eight weeks out. Quote the waste contract with food waste priced separately. Get insurance quotes. Start the pavement licence if you want outdoor seating.
Six weeks out. Book the training and start filling in the SFBB pack against your real menu.
Four weeks out. Register the food business. Fire risk assessment, once you know where the fryer and the fire door are.
Two weeks out. Music licence. ICO fee if it applies. Allergen matrix from your real recipes.
Opening week. Employers' liability certificate displayed. SFBB diary started on day one.

If you are writing this up for a lender or a landlord, the compliance timeline sits inside what a café business plan actually needs.

Where the numbers behind all this live

The licences are the cheap part. The expensive part is in the line-by-line cost of opening a café, and then the margin on every flat white after that.

Brikly does not track licences or nag you about renewals. CostingBrik does the other half of the opening plan: what each dish and drink actually costs once the ingredients are priced, so the menu you print in week one is not a guess. To sanity-check a couple of items first, the free recipe costing calculator does one recipe at a time with no account. Neither helps you register a food business: only the council can do that.

What to do this week

If you have a signed lease: call the council about rates today, and put the food business registration in the diary for 28 days before you open. Both are free and take under an hour.

If you do not: answer the three questions at the top for the site you are looking at, and price only the items that survive. A café with no alcohol, no late trading and no pavement seating has a one-off compliance bill in the high hundreds, not the thousands the internet quotes at you. Insurance, training and the music licence are the real annual spend.

The list is short, the deadlines are few, and almost none of it is difficult. It just has to start earlier than feels necessary, because the one item that cannot be rushed is the free one.

Ed O'Brien has run Hunters Cake Company for 17 years across cafés in Witney, Burford, and a bakery in Carterton, Oxfordshire. He's building Brikly - modular tools that give independent café owners the same data the big chains have, without the big chain price tag.