Margin & markup calculator
Enter a cost and a sale price to get profit, margin and markup. Or set the margin you want and get the price to charge. No sign-up, and it explains the bit everyone gets wrong: margin versus markup.
Enter what an item costs you and what you sell it for.
Margin vs markup: what is the difference?
They both describe the same profit, measured against different things, which is why they trip people up.
- Margin is profit as a percentage of the sale price. It tells you how much of each pound the customer pays that you keep.
- Markup is profit as a percentage of the cost. It tells you how much you added on top of what you paid.
Take an item that costs you £60 and sells for £100. The profit is £40 either way. But that is a 40% margin (£40 of the £100 sale) and a 66.7% markup (£40 on top of the £60 cost). Same profit, two very different numbers. Confuse them and you can badly under-price: a 40% markup is only a 28.6% margin.
The formulas
- Margin % = (sale price − cost) ÷ sale price × 100
- Markup % = (sale price − cost) ÷ cost × 100
- Price for a target margin = cost ÷ (1 − margin as a decimal)
- Price for a target markup = cost × (1 + markup as a decimal)
Which should you use?
Use markup when you are setting a price from a cost (add X% on top). Use margin when you are judging how healthy that price is, because margin is what actually lands on your bottom line. Most finance and reporting is done in margin; most day-to-day pricing is done in markup. Knowing both, and being able to convert between them, is what stops you selling at a loss you did not see.
Pricing per customer, not per calculator
Jeanus is a B2B CRM that holds confirmed prices per customer and flags any line that drops below your margin floor before it goes out, so nothing gets sold too cheap by accident. Built for wholesale, products, agency, recruitment and services.