What This Calculator Does

Pricing a product usually starts with one known value and one unknown one — you know what something costs you and want to know what to charge, or you know both prices and want to know the markup you're actually applying. Rather than force you through one fixed direction, this calculator has three interchangeable modes: give it cost and markup percentage to find the selling price, cost and selling price to find the markup percentage, or selling price and markup percentage to solve backward for cost.

How to Use It

Start by picking a Calculation Mode from the dropdown — the two input fields relevant to that mode are the ones you need to fill in (the third field, whichever value the mode is solving for, is ignored). Cost + Markup % solves for selling price, Cost + Selling Price solves for the markup percentage, and Selling Price + Markup % solves backward for cost. Whichever mode you use, the Markup Results panel always shows all four figures together — Cost Price, Selling Price, Markup Amount, and Markup % on Cost — so you can see the full picture regardless of which two values you started from.

The Formula

All three modes are algebraic rearrangements of the same relationship: Selling Price = Cost × (1 + Markup%). In Cost + Markup % mode, that's applied directly. In Cost + Selling Price mode, it's solved for the percentage instead: Markup % = (Selling Price − Cost) ÷ Cost. In Selling Price + Markup % mode, it's solved for cost: Cost = Selling Price ÷ (1 + Markup%).

Markup here is always calculated on cost, not on selling price — that's the distinction between markup and margin. A markup percentage and a margin percentage on the same transaction are never the same number (a $50 profit on a $100 cost is a 50% markup, but only a 33.3% margin on the $150 selling price), so don't expect this tool's Markup % on Cost figure to match a margin calculation done elsewhere on the same numbers.

A Worked Example

In Cost + Markup % mode, a $100 cost with a 50% markup gives a Markup Amount of $50.00 and a Selling Price of $150.00. Switch to Cost + Selling Price mode and enter an $80 cost with a $100 selling price, and the calculator works the same relationship in reverse: a $20.00 markup amount, which is 25% of the $80 cost. Finally, in Selling Price + Markup % mode, entering a $150 selling price at a 50% markup solves back to a $100.00 cost — the exact inverse of the first example, since $100 cost at 50% markup was what produced $150 selling price in the first place.

Markup vs. Margin, Side by Side

Take a single, concrete transaction: a product that costs $60 and sells for $100 — a $40.00 profit either way you slice it. Run that through this calculator's Cost + Selling Price mode and the Markup % on Cost comes out to ($100 − $60) ÷ $60 = 66.7%. Run the exact same $60 cost and $100 selling price through the separate Profit Calculator and the Gross Profit Margin comes out to ($100 − $60) ÷ $100 = 40%. Same transaction, same $40 profit, same two input numbers — but 66.7% and 40% are genuinely different percentages, because markup divides profit by cost while margin divides the identical profit by selling price, and cost is always smaller than selling price on a profitable sale.

This isn't just a labeling quirk — confusing the two leads to real pricing mistakes. A business owner who wants a 40% margin but mistakenly applies a 40% markup instead will price that $60-cost product at $60 × 1.40 = $84, which actually yields a margin of only ($84 − $60) ÷ $84 ≈ 28.6% — well short of the 40% margin they actually intended, and a real gap in expected profit that compounds across every unit sold. Going the other direction — assuming a target markup is achieved by treating it as a margin — produces the opposite error, an unintentionally higher price and markup than planned. The fix is simple once the distinction is clear: use this calculator's Markup % on Cost when you're thinking "how much am I adding on top of what I paid," and use the Profit Calculator for Gross Profit Margin when you're thinking "what share of each sale dollar is profit" — the two tools answer related but different pricing questions from the same underlying cost and revenue numbers.