Enter your costs, pick a target margin or markup, and see exactly what to charge. Get your price, profit, true margin, markup, and break-even on one screen.
Pure arithmetic on the numbers you enter. No regional pricing is assumed. Use it to sanity-check a bid before you send it.
Underpricing is the quiet killer in the trades, and most of it comes from one mix-up: treating markup and margin as the same thing. They are not. This calculator takes your real costs, lets you target either one, and shows the price to charge, the profit in dollars, your true margin, your true markup, and the break-even floor, all on one screen.
Markup is profit measured against your cost. Margin is profit measured against your price. Same dollar of profit, two different denominators, so the percentages never match (except at zero).
Markup % = profit ÷ total costMargin % = profit ÷ price
Worked example on a job that costs $100:
Charge a 50% markup thinking it is a 50% margin and you leave $50 on the table on a $100 job. Scale that across a year of work and it is real money.
First we add up your direct costs (material + labor + other). Then we layer in overhead and your target.
With a target margin and flat overhead:
Price = (direct costs + overhead) ÷ (1 − margin)
With a target markup and flat overhead:
Price = (direct costs + overhead) × (1 + markup)
When overhead is a percent of price, overhead and price depend on each other, so the tool solves them together (for a margin target, Price = direct costs ÷ (1 − overhead% − margin)). You always get a price that actually delivers the target you set.
Break-even price is direct costs + overhead with zero profit. It is the number you cannot go below without losing money on the job. Knowing it before you negotiate keeps you from "buying" work that quietly costs you to do.
Real job costing is usually locked behind a subscription. Jobber gates margin tracking in its Grow plan (around $149 a month and up), and Buildertrend and Housecall Pro bundle it into higher tiers too. The free markup calculators those companies publish are deliberately bare, one box in and one number out. This tool puts markup, margin, overhead, break-even, and the target price together on one screen, for free, with no signup.
The Pro version tracks actual job costs and margins across all your work with profit dashboards, so you always know what is making money.
Get early access, book a free call →Material, labor, and other direct costs go in first, with permits, rentals, dump fees, and subs belonging in that third box. Then an overhead figure, flat dollars or a percent of the final price, and a target, either a margin or a markup. The tool adds the three cost fields into direct costs, then solves for the price that actually delivers the target you asked for. With flat overhead and a margin target, price is total cost divided by one minus the margin. With a markup target, it is total cost times one plus the markup.
Overhead expressed as a percent of price is the case most spreadsheets fumble, because overhead and price each depend on the other. The tool solves the two together instead of stacking one on the other, so a 10 percent overhead setting really does land at 10 percent of the price it returns. Out the other side you get the price to charge, profit in dollars, the resulting margin and markup side by side, and the break-even price, which is your costs plus overhead with zero profit in it. Impossible combinations are refused rather than answered: a 100 percent margin has no finite price, and the tool says so instead of printing a number.
All of it runs in your browser on the numbers you type. No regional pricing is assumed and nothing is sent to a server. That is also the boundary. The calculator cannot tell you whether your labor figure is burdened, whether your material quote is still current, or whether your market will pay the price it returns. It does not carry sales tax, card processing fees, a warranty reserve, or the hours you never bill, and it prices one job rather than a year. Feed it soft inputs and it will hand you a confident wrong answer. A version on your own site, with your real cost bands built in, is custom tools work.
Take a full year of overhead, rent, trucks, insurance, admin pay, phones, software, and divide it by that same year's revenue. The result is the percent to carry into the field. The calculator will not derive it for you: it uses whatever number you type, so a guess in produces a guess out.
No. It treats the labor figure you enter as final. If that number is a bare hourly wage with no payroll taxes, workers compensation, benefits, drive time, or callback time inside it, the price it returns will be too low and the margin it reports will not survive contact with your books. Build a burdened rate first.