Markup calculator
Markup and margin side by side, always, worked from your cost, your price, or a target percentage. Free, nothing stored.
Fill any two boxes
Cost, price, markup, margin: give me any two and the other two work themselves out. It starts on the example this page is built on, 80 in and 100 out. Type over it, or press reset to bring it back.
What one unit costs you, landed.
What one unit sells for.
Profit as a share of your cost. Negative is allowed, down to a floor of -100%.
Profit as a share of your price. Anything from 0% up to just under 100%.
Prices are worked out per unit first, then multiplied out for the order.
Changes the symbol on screen. No conversion happens.
Solving from your cost and price.
Markup
+25.00%
Profit as a share of what it cost you.
Margin
+20.00%
Profit as a share of what you charge.
The same $80.00 of cost sold at $100.00 is a 25.00% markup and a 20.00% margin. Same profit of $20.00 both times, divided by the cost for one and by the price for the other.
- Unit cost
- $80.00
- Unit price
- $100.00
- Unit profit
- $20.00
The arithmetic, with your own numbers
- Profit
- 100.00 - 80.00 = 20.00
- Markup
- (100.00 - 80.00) / 80.00 × 100 = +25.00%
- Margin
- (100.00 - 80.00) / 100.00 × 100 = +20.00%
Markup and margin converter
Percentage in, percentage out, no money needed. Type in either box and the other one follows.
margin = markup / (1 + markup), and markup = margin / (1 - margin), with both written as decimals.
| Markup | Margin |
|---|---|
| 25% | 20% |
| 50% | 33.33% |
| 100% | 50% |
| 200% | 66.67% |
How to work out markup
- Start with what one unit actually costs you, landed. That is the purchase price plus everything you had to spend to have it ready to sell: freight in, duty, packaging, the platform's cut. Markup is measured against that number, so anything you leave out of it inflates every percentage that follows.
- Decide the second number, and notice which one you are giving. If you already know what you charge, enter the price and read the markup off. If you know what you want to earn, enter the target and read the price off. A markup target multiplies: price = cost × (1 + markup). A margin target divides: price = cost / (1 - margin). Those are different sums, and the same percentage in each gives a different price.
- Round the price the way you will actually charge it, then read both percentages back. That order matters. This calculator runs the chain at full precision, rounds once at the end, and derives the markup and the margin from the rounded price, so the figures on screen reconcile with each other and with your till rather than with an intermediate nobody ever charges.
That third step is worth spelling out, because it is where most calculators quietly lose you. If a tool rounds the price for display but keeps computing the percentages from the unrounded figure, the numbers on screen do not add up when you check them by hand, and you have no way of knowing which one is the real one. This page does the opposite: the chain runs at full precision, the price rounds once, and then every percentage is derived from that rounded price. A cost of 80 priced to a 30% margin comes to 114.285714, charged at 114.29, which achieves a 30.00% margin and a 42.86% markup. When the rounding shifts your achieved markup by more than a tenth of a point, which happens on cheap items and fine margins, the calculator says so in a line rather than hiding it.
Markup and margin are not the same thing
They come from the same two numbers. They just divide by different ones. An item that costs you 80 and sells for 100 makes 20 in profit either way. Divide that 20 by the 80 it cost you and you get a 25% markup. Divide the same 20 by the 100 you charged and you get a 20% margin. One item, one price, one profit, two correct percentages. Neither is wrong and neither is interchangeable with the other.
Here is where it costs real money. A contractor is told to hit a 30% margin, so he adds 30% to his costs. On a job that costs him 100 he bills 130, and he feels like he has done what he was asked. He has not. The margin on that job is 30 divided by the 130 he billed, which is 23.08%. He is nearly seven points light on every job he prices that way, and the shortfall grows with the target: chase a 50% margin with a 50% markup and you land at 33.33%. To actually hit 30% he needed to divide rather than multiply. 100 divided by 0.7 is 142.86, which is a 42.86% markup, and that is the number the calculator gives you the moment you type a target margin instead of a target markup.
Because the selling price is always larger than the cost on a profitable sale, dividing by it always gives the smaller answer, so margin is always the lower of the two figures. These pairs are each worked from margin = markup / (1 + markup), and each one reverses cleanly through markup = margin / (1 - margin).
| Markup | Margin | Worked from |
|---|---|---|
| 25% | 20% | 80 cost, 100 price |
| 33.33% | 25% | one third markup |
| 50% | 33.33% | 100 cost, 150 price |
| 100% | 50% | keystone, price is double cost |
| 150% | 60% | 100 cost, 250 price |
| 200% | 66.67% | two thirds of the price is profit |
| 300% | 75% | 100 cost, 400 price |
| 400% | 80% | 100 cost, 500 price |
33.33% and 66.67% are one third and two thirds rounded to two places, so the reverse conversion lands a hair off exact. Everything else in the table is exact.
One more asymmetry, because it catches people on clearance pricing. Markup has a hard floor of -100%, which is the point where the price reaches zero and you are giving the item away. Margin has no floor at all. On a cost of 100, a price of 20 is a markup of -80% but a margin of -400%, and the margin keeps diving as the price approaches zero. Both figures are honest, they just fall apart at different speeds, so a loss looks far more dramatic in margin terms than in markup terms.
Why we do not publish average markup by industry
Search for this and you will find table after table of average markups by industry: restaurants, jewellery, groceries, construction, clothing, a tidy percentage next to each one. I went through the tables that rank for this and tried to trace where the numbers came from. Not one of them names a source with a disclosed methodology. There is no survey, no sample size, no year, no definition of what was measured. The figures simply circulate between vendor blogs, each borrowing from the last, until repetition does the work that evidence should have done. One page cites three real pricing textbooks in its references and then attaches none of them to any figure in its own table, which is the shape of a citation rather than a citation.
Rigorous public data on this does exist, and it is worth knowing exactly what it covers. The US Census Bureau's Annual Retail Trade Survey reports gross margin for retail trade by kind of business, and NYU Stern publishes a margins-by-sector dataset built from company filings. Both are real, both are sourced, and both measure the same thing: margin, for whole firms, across everything those firms sell, over a year. Not markup. Not your product. A supermarket's company-level gross margin tells you nothing about what to charge for one line of cheese, because the same firm runs loss leaders at the door and heavy markups in the aisle, and the reported figure is the blend. Converting a firmwide annual margin into a product-level markup and calling it a benchmark is a category error, and it is what every one of those tables is doing.
There is also a pricing argument against the tables, separate from the sourcing one. Copying an average is a poor way to price even when the average is real. It builds your margin on somebody else's cost base, somebody else's volume, somebody else's rent and wastage and returns rate, and it tells you nothing about what your own customers will pay. The number you need comes from your side of the ledger: what a unit costs you landed, what your operating costs demand you keep, and what the market will actually bear at that price. That is what this calculator is for. It will convert any target you set into the price that reaches it and show you the arithmetic. It will not invent the target for you, because inventing it is precisely the part I cannot do honestly.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between markup and margin?
They are the same profit divided by two different numbers. Markup divides it by your cost, margin divides it by your selling price. Take an item that costs you 80 and sells for 100: the profit is 20 either way, but 20 divided by the 80 cost is a 25% markup, and 20 divided by the 100 price is a 20% margin. Because the price is always the bigger of the two denominators on a profitable sale, margin is always the smaller of the two figures. That is the whole difference, and it is why I show both on screen at once rather than making you pick.
How do I convert markup to margin?
Divide the markup by one plus the markup, with both written as decimals: margin = markup / (1 + markup). A 50% markup is 0.5 / 1.5, which is 0.3333, so a 33.33% margin. Going the other way you divide by one minus the margin: markup = margin / (1 - margin). A 25% margin is 0.25 / 0.75, which is 0.3333, so a 33.33% markup. The converter on this page does both directions live, and the table above it lists the pairs worth memorising.
Can margin be 100%?
No, and it is worth understanding why rather than just being told. Margin is profit as a share of the selling price, so a 100% margin would mean the entire price is profit and the item cost you nothing. The formula shows it plainly: price = cost / (1 - margin) divides by zero at exactly 100%, and above it the answer goes negative, so a 150% margin on a cost of 100 returns a selling price of -200. This calculator refuses the entry and offers to read it as a markup instead, because that is almost always what was meant. What it will not do is quietly clamp the number to 99.99% and hand you a price ten thousand times your cost, which is a wrong answer dressed up as a right one.
What markup should I use?
I am not going to give you a number, and I would treat any page that does with suspicion. There is no sourced public benchmark for markup by industry, so every table you have seen is either a vendor's guess or a copy of somebody else's guess. What you can do instead is work backwards from figures you actually hold. Start with the margin your business needs after every operating cost is paid, convert that margin into the markup that produces it, and check the price it implies against what the market will bear. If the answer is that your costs make the price unsellable, that is real information, and it is worth more than a benchmark.
Do you store my numbers?
No. The maths runs in your browser, nothing is sent to a server, and nothing is saved. Refresh the page and it is gone. Use the copy button if you want to keep a result.