Break-Even Sales & Units Calculator
Calculate exactly how many units and how much revenue you need to cover fixed costs and break even.
Break-even point
334 units
Break-even revenue
$8,350.00
Contribution margin / unit
$15.00
Contribution margin %
60.0%
Time to break even
6.7 months
About this tool
How to use it
- Enter your fixed costs for the period (rent, salaries, software, anything that doesn't change with sales volume — usually monthly).
- Enter the price you sell one unit for, and the variable cost of that one unit (materials, packaging, payment processing — anything that scales with each sale).
- Optionally enter your expected sales rate (units per month) to see how many months it will take to reach break-even at that pace.
- Click Calculate, or just keep typing — the break-even point and every supporting figure update live.
Why it matters
Knowing you're 'profitable per unit' doesn't tell you whether the business as a whole is profitable — fixed costs have to be covered first, no matter how good the per-unit margin looks. Break-even analysis answers the actual question: how many units, or how much revenue, before the business stops losing money and starts making it.
When to use it
Planning a new product or service launch and checking whether the projected sales volume is even close to realistic. Deciding whether a price increase, a cost-cutting measure, or a marketing push aimed at volume is the more realistic path to profitability. Setting a sales target for a team or a launch period that's actually tied to the numbers, not a guess.
Good to know
This is a standard single-product break-even model: break-even units = fixed costs ÷ (price − variable cost per unit), where (price − variable cost) is the 'contribution margin' each unit makes toward fixed costs. Break-even units is rounded up to a whole unit (you can't sell a fraction of a unit), and break-even revenue is that whole-unit count multiplied by price — so it's the revenue you'd actually collect at the break-even point, not a theoretical fractional-unit figure. This model assumes a single product/price and doesn't account for step-changes in fixed costs (e.g. needing to hire more staff or rent more space past a certain volume) — for a multi-product or non-linear-cost business, treat this as a starting estimate.
Common questions
What counts as a 'fixed cost' versus a 'variable cost'?
Fixed costs stay the same regardless of how much you sell in the period — rent, salaries, software subscriptions, insurance. Variable costs scale directly with each unit sold — raw materials, packaging, a per-transaction payment processing fee, shipping. If a cost would still be there at zero sales, it's fixed; if it only exists because you made a sale, it's variable.
Why does it say break-even is impossible?
This happens when your price is at or below your variable cost per unit — every sale then contributes nothing (or actually loses money) toward covering fixed costs, so no sales volume, however large, would ever reach break-even. The fix is to raise the price, lower the variable cost per unit, or both.
Why is the break-even revenue not exactly fixed costs divided by contribution margin percentage?
Because you can only sell whole units. The break-even unit count is rounded up to the next whole unit (you can't sell 333.3 units), so the revenue shown is what you'd actually collect selling that many whole units — slightly above the theoretical continuous break-even revenue, by design.
Does this work for a service business, not just physical products?
Yes — 'units' can be anything sold repeatably at a roughly consistent price and cost: a client project, a subscription seat, an hour of billed time. The same fixed-cost/contribution-margin math applies.
What if I sell multiple products at different prices and costs?
This calculator models one product at a time. For a realistic multi-product break-even, you'd need a weighted-average contribution margin across your actual sales mix, which is beyond a single price/cost pair — treat a single-product run here as a simplified estimate for one line, not the whole business.