Markup Calculator

Markup Calculator turns a cost and a markup percentage into a selling price, and shows the profit margin alongside, because those two percentages are different and mixing them up is the most expensive arithmetic mistake in small business pricing.

Markup is the profit as a percentage of what the item cost you. Margin is the same profit as a percentage of what you sold it for. Cost 100, sell 150: that is a 50% markup and a 33.3% margin. The money is identical; only the denominator changed. Anyone who applies a 30% markup believing they have a 30% margin is running on roughly a quarter less profit than they think.

The gap widens as the numbers grow. A 100% markup is a 50% margin. A 200% markup is a 66.7% margin. A 50% margin requires a 100% markup, and a 60% margin requires a 150% one. Because margin can never reach 100% while markup has no upper limit at all, the two scales are not even comparable at the top end.

Both figures are shown on every calculation here, and you can work in either direction: cost and markup to price, or cost and target margin to the markup you need.

This is arithmetic, not financial advice. It tells you what the numbers do; it cannot tell you whether a decision is right for your circumstances. For anything that matters, check the figures against the actual offer and talk to someone qualified.

Everything is worked out inside your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged or stored, which matters for the financial calculators in particular: the figures you put into them are nobody else's business.

• Selling price from cost and markup
• Required markup from cost and a target margin
• Markup and margin always shown together
• Profit per unit in money, not only percentages
• A conversion table between the two scales
• Any currency
• Entirely in your browser

The markup calculator is used by writers, developers, students, marketers and anyone else who needs the job done once without installing software. Common cases include:

• Pricing stock for resale
• Checking whether a quoted margin is really a markup
• Setting a price that hits a target margin
• Working out what a discount does to the margin
• Explaining the difference to somebody who is using them interchangeably