Construction break-even & job profitability calculator.
Enter your overhead, your average job margin, and a typical job's value, and see exactly how many jobs a month keep the lights on, and how many actually hit your profit target. Runs entirely in your browser.
This calculator turns your overhead, job margin, and typical job size into one number: how many jobs a month you actually need, both to break even and to hit a real profit target on top of that. Enter your numbers below, the exact math is broken out further down.
See exactly how many jobs you need each month to cover costs, and how many to actually hit your target profit.
You need 0 jobs a month to hit your target, 0 just to break even.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored.
How the math works›
Three numbers, run two ways:
- Profit per job = average job value × average margin. What a typical job actually contributes toward overhead and profit, after labor, materials, and equipment are already paid for.
- Break-even = monthly overhead ÷ profit per job (for jobs), or monthly overhead ÷ margin (for revenue). The floor: the point where you've covered costs and made nothing yet.
- Your real target = (monthly overhead + target profit) ÷ profit per job (or margin). This is the number to actually plan around, not break-even.
Change the margin or the average job size and watch how much it moves the jobs-per-month number. A small margin improvement usually beats chasing more jobs at the same margin.
Why break-even isn't the goal
Break-even means revenue exactly covers overhead: rent, insurance, software, the truck, the phone. Zero profit. It's useful as a floor, the number below which the business is losing money every month, but it's not a target. If you're only ever tracking whether you cleared break-even, you can run a busy, exhausting year and end up with nothing to show for it.
This is also where cash flow visibility and job pricing connect: a thin margin means more jobs are needed to hit the same target, which means more crews, more scheduling, more overhead, which raises the break-even point further. Improving margin on the markup and margin calculator is usually a faster path to the target than adding volume.
From a number to a plan
Knowing the target is one thing, staying on top of it job by job is another. This calculator gives you the monthly number, Sitetraq shows you, day by day, whether your real jobs and margins are on pace to hit it. If your target is 7 jobs a month, Sitetraq's pipeline shows how many are booked versus quoted, with the margin on each, so you can tell whether you're short on volume or short on price, instead of finding out at tax time whether the year worked.
Break-even calculator FAQ
Divide your monthly overhead by your average profit margin to get break-even revenue. Divide monthly overhead by your average profit per job to get the number of jobs you need to run each month just to cover costs.
Anything you pay whether or not a job runs that month: rent or a home office allowance, insurance, software and subscriptions, vehicle payments and fuel, phone, and any office or admin salary. It does not include the labor, materials, or equipment cost of an individual job, those are already priced into your job margin.
It depends entirely on overhead, job size, and margin, there's no universal number. A shop with $6,000 in monthly overhead, a 20% average margin, and $8,000 average jobs needs about 4 jobs a month just to break even, before any actual profit.
Break-even is the point where revenue exactly covers overhead, zero profit. A profit target adds the amount you actually want to keep on top of that. Most owners should plan around the profit-target number, not break-even, break-even just tells you the floor.