Markup & margin calculator
Most contractors confuse markup with margin and quietly lose money on every job. Enter your cost and either a markup or a target margin, and see your price, profit, and margin side by side.
Markup is not margin. A 40% markup on cost is only a 28.6% margin. Pricing off markup when you mean margin is how contractors quietly underprice every job.
How to use it
- 1
Enter your job cost
Add up labor and materials, everything it costs you to do the job.
- 2
Pick markup or margin
Enter the markup you add, or the margin you want to keep, and we do the rest.
- 3
Quote with confidence
Use the price and margin to quote a job that actually makes money.
Common questions
What's the difference between markup and margin?
Markup is the percentage you add on top of your cost. Margin is the profit as a percentage of the final price. A 50% markup is only a 33% margin, which is why pricing off the wrong one quietly costs contractors money.
What margin should a contractor aim for?
It varies by trade and overhead, but many residential contractors target a 30 to 50% gross margin on jobs to cover overhead and leave a real profit. Use the calculator to back into the price that hits your number.
Is this calculator really free?
Yes. It runs entirely in your browser with nothing to download and no account required. If you want pricing built into your quotes automatically, that's what RevCore's estimating does.
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