Profit Calculator
Calculate your profit — the actual dollar amount left after costs, not a percentage — alongside your profit margin, so you can see both what you kept and how efficiently you kept it.
Fees last verified: 2026-08-02
Your numbers
Results update instantly as you type.
Total sales revenue before any costs are deducted.
All costs involved in producing and delivering the sale.
Profit
$3,500
Profit margin
35.0%
Profit as a share of revenue.
Breakdown
- Total cost$6,500.00
- Profit$3,500.00
How the Profit Calculator works
Enter your total revenue and total cost. Profit is calculated as revenue minus cost, and profit margin is that profit divided by revenue, shown as a percentage. Both update live as you adjust the numbers, so you can test pricing or cost scenarios instantly. Three mistakes are common here: leaving your own labor out of cost, which quietly turns unpaid work into inflated profit; excluding taxes you'll owe on the income, which overstates what you actually get to keep; and mixing a one-time cost (equipment, a big annual renewal) into a single month's numbers without spreading it out, which can make one month look far worse and every other month look artificially better than reality.
Who this is for
For freelancers pricing a project who want to know what they'll actually keep, not just what they'll invoice. Small business owners use it to track monthly profitability in dollar terms, since a bank balance can look healthy even in a month that lost money once every cost is counted properly. Side-hustlers use it to decide whether a product line or side project is genuinely worth continuing, or whether the time and cost going into it is quietly outpacing what it brings back.
Worked example
Say you sell a product for $10,000 in total revenue, and it cost you $6,500 to produce, ship, and deliver (including materials, labor, and fees). Your profit is $10,000 − $6,500 = $3,500. Your profit margin is $3,500 / $10,000 × 100 = 35%. That means for every dollar of revenue, you keep 35 cents as profit after costs. Whether that $3,500 actually makes the project worth doing depends on what's missing from 'cost.' If this took 30 hours of your own unpaid time to deliver, that $3,500 is really compensation for your time and profit combined — closer to $117/hour once you back out the work, which may or may not be worth it depending on what else you could have been doing with those 30 hours. And if a chunk of that $6,500 cost was actually a one-time tool purchase that won't recur next time, the real ongoing profit on a repeat project would be higher than $3,500 — the number only means what it claims to mean once every real cost, including your own time, is actually in it.
Profit, margin, and markup — and why the dollar figure alone can mislead
Profit, margin, and markup describe the same underlying number from three different angles, and mixing them up is one of the most common and costly pricing mistakes. Profit is a dollar amount: revenue minus cost. Margin expresses that profit as a percentage of revenue (profit ÷ revenue) — the standard way to compare efficiency across projects of very different sizes. Markup expresses profit as a percentage of cost instead (profit ÷ cost), the more natural frame when building a price up from a known cost. A 50% markup on a $100 cost prices at $150 and works out to a 33% margin, not 50% — the same dollars, described differently, and treating them as interchangeable is a fast way to underprice something. A raw profit figure also means little without the revenue it came from. $3,500 profit on $10,000 revenue (35% margin) reflects a very different business than $3,500 profit on $200,000 revenue (1.75% margin) — the first has real room to absorb a slow month, the second is running on a knife's edge despite an identical headline number. Always read the dollar figure next to its margin, not on its own. Two pitfalls beyond the math: mixing personal and business expenses in one 'cost' figure quietly distorts profit and makes month-to-month comparisons meaningless. And judging a single month in isolation, without accounting for irregular annual costs that don't land evenly across the year, can make a healthy month look like a loss purely based on billing timing rather than real performance.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between profit, margin, and markup?
Profit is a dollar amount — revenue minus cost. Margin is that profit as a percentage of revenue (profit ÷ revenue), comparable across projects regardless of scale. Markup is profit as a percentage of cost instead (profit ÷ cost), the more natural frame when building a price up from a known cost. A 50% markup on cost and a 50% margin on revenue imply very different prices — confusing the two is one of the most common pricing mistakes.
What counts as 'cost' in this calculator?
Everything it actually took to make and deliver the sale: cost of goods, direct labor you paid someone else for, shipping, platform or processing fees, and any other direct expense. Leaving real costs out will overstate your profit — the calculator only knows what you enter.
Should I count my own time or salary as a cost?
For a freelancer or solo operator, this is the single most common way profit gets overstated. Leave your own labor out and the profit shown here is really your time and actual profit combined — $3,500 after 40 unpaid hours is a very different outcome than $3,500 after 4. Estimate a fair hourly rate for your own time and add it into cost before judging whether the number is actually good.
Is this the same as net profit?
Depends what you include in 'cost.' Only cost of goods sold, and this is closer to gross profit. Every direct and overhead expense — rent, subscriptions, insurance — and it becomes a genuine net profit figure. The calculator computes revenue minus whatever you enter, so the result is only as complete as the costs you actually included.
How should I handle irregular or annual expenses in a single month's numbers?
Spread them. An annual renewal or once-a-year purchase paid for entirely in the month it lands makes that month look artificially unprofitable, and every other month look artificially better. Divide the annual cost by 12 and include that monthly share in 'cost' instead, so a single month reflects a fair ongoing share rather than whatever happened to be billed then.
Why does my margin look low even though I'm profitable?
Margin measures efficiency, not just profitability. A business can be profitable in dollar terms but have a low margin if costs are high relative to revenue — often a sign there's room to raise prices or cut costs, even while the raw number looks fine.
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