Break-even calculator
Fixed costs ÷ gross margin — the revenue floor for the year, turned into a monthly number and a job count.
Costs & margin
Rent, insurance, van finance, software, fixed wages.
Revenue left after materials and subcontractor costs.
Used to convert break-even revenue into a job count.
Break-even revenue
— roughly £6,250 a month to cover costs.
Planning number, not a guarantee. Treats gross margin as flat across all work and doesn't account for seasonality.
Break-even revenue is the point where what's coming in exactly covers what's going out — not a target, but a floor. Below it, the business is funding itself out of savings or credit every month; above it, every extra pound of revenue starts contributing to actual profit. Knowing where that line sits changes how a quiet month gets read.
Why margin, not revenue, is the multiplier
Fixed costs — rent, insurance, van finance, software, wages that don't flex with workload — have to be covered regardless of how much work comes in. But not every pound of revenue is available to cover them: materials, subcontractor costs and other job-specific expenses come off the top first. What's left, the gross margin, is the share of each pound that actually goes towards fixed costs and profit. Divide fixed costs by that margin fraction and the result is the revenue needed before anything is left over — a lower margin means a bigger multiplier, and a much higher revenue target for the same fixed costs.
A worked example
£30,000 a year in fixed costs, a 40% gross margin: break-even revenue is £30,000 ÷ 0.4 = £75,000 a year, or roughly £6,250 a month. At an average job value of £500, that's 150 jobs a year — a useful number to check against last year's job count, since it turns an abstract revenue target into something that can be counted on a calendar. Improve the margin to 50% without changing fixed costs at all, and break-even revenue drops to £60,000 — the same fixed costs, spread over fewer jobs.
What this isn't
This treats gross margin as a single flat percentage across all work, which is a simplification — a business running a mix of high-margin call-outs and low-margin supply-and-fit jobs will see the real margin move with the mix of work in a given month. It also doesn't account for seasonality, so a break-even figure that works as an annual average can still mean a genuinely tight quarter in the slow season even while the year as a whole clears it comfortably. Treat it as a planning number, revisited as fixed costs and pricing actually change, not a one-off calculation.
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