Break-Even Calculator

Break-even analysis answers a single, unavoidable question: how many units do you need to sell before a business, product line or service stops losing money? This calculator takes your fixed costs — rent, salaries, software, anything that doesn't change with volume — plus the price you charge per unit and the variable cost of producing one more unit, and returns the exact point where total revenue catches up with total cost.

The core idea is contribution margin: every unit sold contributes price minus variable cost toward covering the fixed costs. Once enough units have contributed enough margin to cover those fixed costs, every unit after that is profit. Break-even units = fixed costs ÷ contribution margin, and multiplying that by the price gives the break-even revenue. Worked example: fixed costs of 10,000, a price of 50 and a variable cost of 30 give a contribution margin of 20, so break-even is 10,000 ÷ 20 = 500 units, or 500 × 50 = 25,000 in revenue.

If variable cost ever reaches or exceeds the price, the calculator stops with a clear message instead of a nonsensical answer — there is no volume of units that recovers fixed costs when each additional sale loses money by itself. When you enter your actual or expected sales volume, the calculator also reports the margin of safety: how far above or below break-even you actually are, expressed in units, in revenue and as a percentage, which is the standard way to communicate how much room for error a plan has before it turns unprofitable.

Because a break-even point is easiest to understand as a picture, the calculator draws a real chart from the two underlying straight-line equations — total cost = fixed costs + variable cost × units, total revenue = price × units — sampled directly from your numbers, not a generic illustration. The crossing point is marked exactly where the two lines meet. Every value is a plain number with no currency symbol, so the tool works for any product, service or market, and nothing you enter is uploaded or stored — the whole calculation runs in your browser.