Markup Calculator
Calculate markup percentage, resulting margin, and profit from cost and selling price.
About the Markup Calculator
Markup tells you how much you added on top of cost to arrive at a selling price — the number retailers and manufacturers plan pricing around. This calculator converts your cost and selling price into markup percentage, the equivalent margin percentage, and the dollar profit per unit, so you can sanity-check pricing from both angles.
How It Works
The calculator subtracts cost from selling price to find profit, then divides that profit by cost to get markup percentage. It also computes the same profit divided by selling price to show margin, since the two percentages describe the same sale from different reference points and are frequently confused.
Markup (%) = (Selling Price − Cost) / Cost × 100; Margin (%) = (Selling Price − Cost) / Selling Price × 100.
Example
Scenario: An item costing $40, sold for $60.
Result: Markup of 50%, which corresponds to a profit margin of about 33.3%, and $20 profit per unit.
Assumptions & Limitations
- Cost is assumed to be the direct unit cost, before any markup is applied.
- Selling price is assumed to be the final price before tax.
- Does not account for volume discounts or price elasticity effects on actual sales.
- A 100% markup is only a 50% margin, not a 100% margin — treat the two figures as distinct.