Convert between markup and margin. Stop under-quoting — see what your real margin is on every job.
This tool converts between markup and margin, and shows what each one does to a sell price. They are not the same number, they are routinely used as though they are, and the gap between them is where a lot of small building businesses quietly lose money.
Markup is a percentage of what the job cost you. Margin is a percentage of what you sold it for. The same dollar of profit produces two different percentages depending on which number you divide it by.
Put 20% markup on a job that cost 1,000 dollars and you sell it for 1,200. The profit is 200 dollars — but as a share of the 1,200 you actually invoiced, that is 16.67%, not 20%.
To genuinely make a 20% margin on that job you need a 25% markup: 1,000 divided by 0.8 is 1,250, and the 250 dollars of profit is a quarter of the cost and a fifth of the sell.
That gap widens fast as the percentages rise, which is why a builder working to markup and a client's accountant talking about margin can be describing the same job and disagreeing about whether it made money.
Enter a cost and a markup and the tool gives you the sell price, the profit and the equivalent margin. Enter a cost and a target margin instead and it works backwards to the sell price and the equivalent markup.
The base selector — all costs, or materials only — mirrors the same setting inside a CostMate project. With a single cost input here the arithmetic is unchanged either way; it is there so the vocabulary matches what you will see when you set margin on a real estimate.
That distinction matters on a live job: a margin applied to materials only, on a labour-heavy job, is a very different number from the same percentage applied to everything.
Markup and margin are arithmetic; what percentage your business needs is not. Confirm your target with your accountant, and check which basis a number is quoted on before you compare it with anyone else's.