Roadchef’s annual accounts have revealed it made a pre-tax loss of £5.9m in 2024, with the company attributing this performance partly to motorway roadworks.
The firm made £13.4m before tax in 2023, but says “significant roadwork disruption on the M1 and M25 motorways” were behind last year’s loss, alongside “challenging trading conditions” related to “continued economic uncertainty and cost-of-living pressures for our customers”.
Roadchef expects to see a recovery as the roadworks “are lifted in 2025”, though it warns its business is “highly reliant on an uninterrupted flow of traffic on the motorway network”, and that “severe or protracted roadworks present a risk to its operations”.
The firm has 31 service areas across the UK’s strategic road network of motorways and major A roads. It operates Clacket Lane Westbound services on the M25 and a further three MSAs on the M1, plus one on the A1(M).
Roadchef’s accounts also reveal it installed 36 EV charging bays across six hubs in 2024, for a total of 108 bays across its estate, with half of these offering charging speeds of 350kW.
The company plans to have over 1,000 charging bays by 2030, with a dozen new hubs bringing 100 bays planned over the next 12-18 months – though rather than run chargers itself, Roachef outsources EV operations to Gridserve in return for rental and profit-sharing fees.
Some 47m travellers stopped a Roadchef site in 2024, with a further 2.6m visiting one of its drive-through offerings.
