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Break-Even Calculator

How many units you must sell before the business starts making money.

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Rent, salaries, software, insurance — everything you pay whether you sell anything or not.

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€

Materials, packaging, payment fees, shipping — costs that only occur when you sell one.

units

Results update as you type. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Break-even point — Units per month.
Revenue needed to break even —
Contribution per unit — What each sale leaves towards fixed costs.
Contribution margin —
Profit at your expected volume —
Margin of safety — How far sales could fall before you make a loss.

How this is worked out

Every sale leaves something behind after its own direct costs. That leftover is the contribution:

contribution per unit = price − variable cost

Fixed costs do not care how much you sell. So the break-even point is simply how many contributions it takes to cover them:

break-even units = fixed costs ÷ contribution per unit

The number people underuse is the margin of safety: how far sales could fall before you start losing money. Two businesses can both break even at 250 units a month, but one expecting 260 sales and one expecting 600 are in completely different positions. The first is one quiet month from trouble.

If your contribution is zero or negative, no volume saves you — every sale makes the loss bigger. The calculator stops and tells you rather than returning a meaningless number. The fix is price or unit cost, never more sales.

A worked example

Fixed costs 4,000 a month, selling at 25, unit cost 9, expecting 300 sales:

  • Contribution per unit: 16 (a 64% margin)
  • Break-even: 250 units, which is 6,250 of revenue
  • Profit at 300 units: 800
  • Margin of safety: 17%

That 17% is the real story. Sales could fall by a sixth and you would be at zero. Now raise the price by just 2, to 27:

  • Contribution becomes 18, break-even falls to 223 units
  • Profit at 300 units rises to 1,400 — a 75% increase in profit from an 8% increase in price
  • Margin of safety improves to 26%

Price is almost always the most powerful lever in this calculation, because it goes straight to contribution. Cutting a fixed cost by 2 per unit sold would require finding 600 of savings a month to achieve the same thing.

What this doesn't cover

  • This is a single-product model. If you sell several things at different margins, run it on your average contribution, or on each product line separately if their volumes differ a lot.
  • Payment processing fees, marketplace commissions and shipping are variable costs, not fixed. Putting them in the wrong box is the most common error here and it flatters the result.
  • Your own wages: if the business must pay you, that is a fixed cost. Leaving it out produces a break-even point that looks achievable and is not.
  • Tax is not modelled. The profit figure is before tax.

Common questions

Is a higher contribution margin always better?

It gives you more room, but it is not the whole picture. A low-margin, high-volume business can be perfectly sound, and a high-margin product that nobody buys is worth nothing. The margin of safety combines both halves, which is why it is usually the more useful figure.

Should I include my own time as a cost?

If the business is meant to replace a job, yes — otherwise you are measuring whether the business breaks even while quietly working for free. Put a realistic salary for yourself in the fixed costs and see whether the numbers still work.

What if my fixed costs change as I grow?

They usually do, in steps — a bigger unit, another member of staff. Run the calculation separately for each step. The break-even point jumps at each one, which is exactly the moment to check whether the extra volume really justifies it.

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