Profit/Loss Calculator
Find your profit or loss, work out the price you need to charge, reverse-engineer your cost, or calculate how many units you need to sell to break even.
Know what you paid and what you sold it for? Find the profit or loss and the percentage.
Know your cost and the profit % you want? Find the price to charge. Enter a negative % for a planned loss/clearance price.
Know your selling price and the profit % you made? Find out what it originally cost you.
Find out how many units you need to sell to cover your fixed costs before you start making a profit.
How to Use the Profit/Loss Calculator
Pick your calculation
Choose whether you want the profit/loss itself, the selling price to hit a target, the original cost price, or how many units you need to sell to break even.
Enter your numbers
Fill in the fields for your chosen mode. For break-even, make sure your variable cost per unit is lower than your selling price per unit, or the business can never break even.
Click Calculate
Get your result instantly, with profit shown in blue and loss shown in red so it's clear at a glance.
Profit, Loss, and Break-Even: The Numbers Every Seller Needs
Whether you're reselling products, running a small shop, or pricing your own services, the same basic questions come up again and again: did I make money on this, what should I charge, what did this actually cost me originally, and how much do I need to sell before I start turning a profit? This calculator handles all four, and this guide walks through the math behind each one.
Calculating Profit or Loss
This is the simplest and most direct calculation, comparing what something cost you against what you sold it for.
Profit/Loss % = ((Selling Price − Cost Price) ÷ Cost Price) × 100
Example: You bought an item for 800 and sold it for 950. Profit: 950 − 800 = 150. Profit percentage: (150 ÷ 800) × 100 = 18.75%.
If the selling price is lower than the cost price, the result is negative, meaning a loss instead of a profit. A negative 10% "profit" is really a 10% loss.
Finding the Selling Price for a Target Profit
If you know what something cost you and want a specific profit percentage, you can calculate exactly what to charge.
Example: An item cost 800, and you want an 18.75% profit. Selling price: 800 × (1 + 18.75 ÷ 100) = 800 × 1.1875 = 950.
This same formula works for planned losses too, like clearance pricing, just enter a negative percentage.
Finding the Original Cost Price
If you know the selling price and the profit percentage that was made, you can work backward to find the original cost.
Example: An item sold for 950 at an 18.75% profit. Cost price: 950 ÷ (1 + 18.75 ÷ 100) = 950 ÷ 1.1875 = 800.
As with discount and markup calculations, the mistake to avoid here is subtracting the percentage directly from the selling price instead of dividing, since the percentage was originally calculated against the smaller cost figure, not the larger selling price.
Break-Even Analysis: How Many Units Do You Need to Sell?
Break-even analysis answers a different but closely related question: before you can start making any profit at all, how many units do you need to sell just to cover your fixed costs? This requires splitting your costs into two categories. Fixed costs stay the same no matter how much you sell, things like rent, salaries, and equipment. Variable costs scale with each unit sold, like materials or per-unit shipping.
The number in the denominator, selling price minus variable cost, is called the contribution margin. It represents how much each sale contributes toward covering your fixed costs before any of it becomes profit.
Example: A business has 50,000 in fixed costs, sells each unit for 500, and pays 300 in variable cost per unit. Contribution margin: 500 − 300 = 200. Break-even units: 50,000 ÷ 200 = 250 units. The business needs to sell 250 units before it covers its fixed costs and starts making a profit; every unit sold after that is pure contribution to profit (minus its own variable cost).
Why Break-Even Matters for Pricing Decisions
Break-even analysis is one of the most practical tools for anyone starting a business or launching a new product. It answers whether a pricing strategy is even viable given your fixed cost structure, and it shows how sensitive your break-even point is to price changes. Raising your price even slightly increases your contribution margin per unit, which can dramatically reduce the number of units you need to sell to break even, something that's often not obvious without actually running the numbers.
Why Use Our Profit/Loss Calculator
Instant Results
Get your answer the moment you click Calculate, no waiting or reloading.
4 Calculation Modes
Profit/loss, selling price, cost price, and break-even units, all in one place.
100% Private
Everything runs in your browser. Your numbers are never stored or sent anywhere.
Works on Any Device
Fully responsive design, so it's just as easy to use on mobile as on desktop.
Clear Profit/Loss Coloring
Losses show in red and profits in blue, so results are easy to read at a glance.
Completely Free
No sign-up and no limits. Use it as often as you need, at no cost.
Frequently Asked Questions
Subtract cost price from selling price to get the profit amount, then divide by cost price and multiply by 100: ((Selling − Cost) ÷ Cost) × 100.
Profit percentage here is calculated against cost price (similar to markup). Profit margin is calculated against selling price (revenue) instead. They're related concepts but give different percentages for the same numbers.
Divide your total fixed costs by your contribution margin per unit (selling price per unit minus variable cost per unit). That gives the number of units you must sell to cover fixed costs.
Then you lose money on every single unit sold, and there's no volume of sales that will let you break even. The selling price needs to exceed the variable cost per unit for break-even analysis to make sense.
Yes. Cost price can represent your time, materials, or overhead per service delivered, and the same profit/loss and break-even formulas apply.
No. All calculations happen locally in your browser, and nothing you enter is stored or transmitted.
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