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Calculate markup percentages and profit margins for construction projects. Built for contractors and estimators to maintain healthy profit margins.
Calculator inputs
Enter measured project values. Results update only when you choose Calculate.
Method
Add 20 percent markup to a $100,000 cost and you sell at $120,000 — a 16.67 percent margin, not 20. Repeat that confusion across a year of bids and a contractor on $5M in revenue gives back roughly $165,000 in profit they thought they were earning. Markup and margin are inverse calculations from the same numbers, and they do not produce the same answer.
Use this anywhere a percentage gets added to cost: base bids, change orders, material resale, sub markup, T&M caps, allowance reconciliations. CFMA data shows GC net margins clustering around 2 to 4 percent and specialty subs at 4 to 8 percent — the difference between contractors who hit those numbers and contractors who miss them is often this exact math.
Direct costs plus burden plus allocated overhead — not just material and labor. If overhead lives outside the cost number, the markup needed to hit a real net margin will be higher than you think.
Markup ("add 20 percent to cost") and margin ("hit a 20 percent gross") use different formulas. If your accountant reports margin and your bid uses markup, you have to translate every time.
Round bid totals up to a clean number, never down. Rounding $124,375 to $124,000 silently shaves 0.3 percent off the bid — the kind of slow leak that shows up as a 1.5 percent miss on the year.
A 30 percent margin on a $20,000 job is $6,000 — usually not enough to cover risk on a complex remodel. Always look at the dollar number against what could actually go wrong.
Markup is profit divided by cost. Margin is profit divided by sell price. A $100,000 cost sold at $125,000 is a 25 percent markup but a 20 percent margin — same job, two different denominators.
33.3 percent. The formula is target margin divided by (1 minus target margin): 0.25 / 0.75 = 0.333. Plug into a $100,000 cost: $100,000 x 1.333 = $133,333 sell price, $33,333 gross profit, exactly 25 percent margin.
Yes, in most cases, because GC overhead and risk live on every line of the bid even when you are not self-performing. Some contracts limit GC fee on subs (commonly 10 to 15 percent in AIA forms) — check section 7.3 of the General Conditions.
Total markup (overhead recovery plus fee) typically lands between 15 and 25 percent for commercial GCs and 25 to 40 percent for residential remodelers, but the right number is whatever recovers your actual overhead and clears the net margin you need to grow. Anything else is leaving money on the table or starving the company.
Separate plan workflow
This calculator solves one bounded formula from the inputs shown. BuildVision AI supports reviewed plan takeoff, complete-document CSV, and editable quote lines; the estimator owns pricing and final bid approval.