Markup and margin calculator
The same job, two percentages — and pricing with the wrong one costs you on every invoice. Free, nothing to sign up for.
- You charge
- £1,300.00
- Profit
- £300.00
- Markup on cost
- 30.0%
- Margin on the sale
- 23.1%
Same job, two percentages. Markup is profit as a share of what it cost you. Margin is profit as a share of what you charged. If you want to keep 23.1% of the invoice, you have to add 30.0% to the cost.
Markup is on the cost; margin is on the sale
Markup answers “how much did I add?” Margin answers “how much of the invoice did I keep?” Both are correct and they are never the same number, because they are divided by different things.
The word people use loosely is margin, and the number people type into a price list is usually a markup. That mismatch is the single most common quiet leak in a trade business’s pricing.
Why it matters more than it sounds
Pricing at 30% when you meant to keep 30% is roughly 7p in every pound. On £200,000 of turnover that is about £14,000 — not a rounding error, and invisible because every individual job still looks profitable.
It compounds with discounting. Knock 10% off a price set at 30% markup and you are working for about 13% markup; do it at 30% margin and you are at about 22%.
Which one should I price with?
Whichever your business actually measures. The important thing is that the price list and the profit report use the same definition, so a job that looks right in one does not come out wrong in the other. TaskMyJob stores markup on cost on every line and says so on the reports page, so the two cannot disagree.
A note on what this is
A guide, not advice, and it cannot know everything about your arrangement. Check anything that matters with your accountant.
Built by TaskMyJob, which does this on every invoice it raises. More free reading: pricing a line by its marginreading the profit reportsall the guides.