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Free tool, benchmarked by trade

Profit Margin Calculator for Home Service Trades

Enter your revenue and cost. See your margin percentage instantly, then see it against a benchmark for your trade instead of a bare number sitting alone. No signup required.

Updated August 2026

How the margin diagnostic works

Three inputs, one instant result. No account, no card, nothing locked before you see your number.

Pick your trade

HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, landscaping, and the other trades AutoRev works with. Your trade is what sets the benchmark you get compared against, since a healthy margin looks different in every one of them.

Enter revenue and cost

Two numbers, a month or a single job: total revenue and total cost. No spreadsheet import, no chart of accounts to map, no login.

See your number and where it stands

Your margin percentage shows instantly, plus one plain sentence on how it compares to shops your size in your trade. Nothing sits behind an email first.

The profit margin formula, worked through by hand

The formula behind the calculator above is: Margin % = (Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold) / Revenue x 100. Revenue is what the customer paid. Cost of goods sold, COGS for short, is what it took to deliver that specific job: materials, equipment, subcontracted labor, and the technician hours tied to it.

Here is that formula run against a real job. An HVAC install brings in $8,000 in revenue. The equipment, install materials, and labor tied directly to that job add up to $3,200 in cost of goods sold.

  1. Revenue: $8,000
  2. Cost of goods sold: $3,200
  3. Gross profit: $8,000 - $3,200 = $4,800
  4. Gross margin: $4,800 / $8,000 x 100 = 60 percent

That 60 percent is the number the calculator above would return for those two inputs. It is a real result, and it is only half the picture, since it does not yet account for what the business spends to keep the truck on the road and the phones answered.

Gross margin and net margin are different numbers

The calculator above asks for two numbers, revenue and cost of goods, and returns gross margin. Gross margin is what a job made before the business's overhead comes out of it: rent, office staff, vehicle costs, insurance, software, the expenses that run whether or not that particular job happened. Net margin is what is left after overhead comes out too, and it is the number that tells you what landed in the bank.

Continue the HVAC example above. That job's $4,800 gross profit still has to absorb its share of overhead, dispatch time, a portion of the office, insurance, tool depreciation, call it $2,000 for this job. Net profit comes out to $4,800 - $2,000, or $2,800. Net margin is $2,800 / $8,000 x 100, which is 35 percent. Both numbers came from the same job. Gross margin said 60 percent. Net margin says 35 percent.

A contractor who only tracks gross margin can run a business that looks healthy on every invoice and still come up short at the end of the month. If a number from this tool looks strong, it is worth running that second step, subtracting overhead, before deciding the job earned what the top-line percentage suggests.

Margin and markup are not the same number

Margin is your profit measured against what you charged. Markup is the same dollar profit measured against what the job cost you. Take a job that costs $700 and sells for $1,000: the profit is $300 either way, but that works out to a 30 percent margin and a 43 percent markup, because markup divides by the smaller number.

Markup has its own formula: Markup % = (Revenue - COGS) / COGS x 100. On that same $700 job, the math is $300 / $700 x 100, which lands at roughly 43 percent. The two formulas divide by different numbers, cost for markup, revenue for margin, and that is the entire source of the gap between them.

There is a direct way to move between them: Margin = Markup / (1 + Markup), and Markup = Margin / (1 - Margin). Plug the 43 percent markup into the first formula and you get 0.43 / 1.43, which rounds to 30 percent margin, the same number the job produced. A business owner sets a markup target, hits it on paper, and still ends up with a thinner margin than expected once the job is done. Knowing your actual margin is the number that tells you what you kept.

Why a healthy margin looks different by trade

Recurring service work, a repair call, a maintenance visit, a small install, carries less risk and more pricing control than a large build. That is a big part of why service-heavy trades like HVAC, plumbing, and electrical tend to run higher margins than general contracting, where material swings and project scope changes eat into the number long before the job wraps.

A few factors set the gap between trades. Materials-to-labor split matters: a labor-heavy service call has fewer moving parts to price wrong than a job with a truckload of materials on it. Timing matters too, since how far in advance the price gets locked in changes how much cost risk a contractor absorbs. A same-day plumbing repair carries almost no material-price risk, while a roofing job quoted weeks before materials get ordered can see costs move before the crew shows up. Warranty and callback exposure after the job is done adds another layer, and that exposure sits heavier on some trades than others.

A 22 percent margin might be a serious problem for a plumbing service business and a strong result for a general contractor on a new build. Treat any specific percentage you read online as a typical range rather than a fixed target, since the range moves with company size, region, and how much of the work is recurring versus one-time. The trade you pick in the diagnostic sets the reference range your number gets compared against, so the read you get back means something instead of guessing at what counts as healthy.

A number on its own does not tell you much

The math behind a margin percentage is simple. What is harder to know on your own is whether the number you land on is healthy for your trade, since a plumbing service call, an HVAC install, and a landscaping contract all carry different normal ranges.

A contractor checking their margin already knows the math. What they need is a reference point and a next step, which is why this tool ends by turning the number into an estimate instead of leaving you with a percentage and a closed tab.

Turn this into an estimate

Where a thin margin comes from

A thin margin rarely comes from one big mistake. It usually comes from a handful of small ones that compound over a month of jobs: truck time and drive time that never gets billed, callbacks that eat a second visit’s worth of labor, material waste that never makes it into the price, and quotes that undercharge because they were built off memory instead of a structured line-item breakdown.

None of those show up in the revenue and cost numbers you enter above until the month is already over. Fixing them starts earlier, at the quote itself, with a structured estimate that accounts for labor, materials, and the job type instead of a number pulled from habit.

Where margin discipline actually breaks down

A margin target only holds if every quote gets priced the same way, and most shops lose that consistency the moment a tech is standing in a driveway guessing at a number. AutoRev answers the call, prices the job from your own rate book on the spot, and logs the quote with the job it belongs to. The number a customer hears is the same number that shows up in your reporting afterward.

AutoRev is an AI coworker you direct, not a single feature bolted onto your phone line. Hand it a task, calls, estimates, follow-up texts, scheduling, whatever you need run, and it runs it. It plugs into the FSM or CRM you already use, so pricing rules and job data stay in one place instead of living in a separate app you have to check.

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Priced from your own book, sent while they're still deciding.

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Every outcome, tied back to revenue and the call that started it.

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Scores and coaches every call, so pricing stays consistent tech to tech.

Automations

Connects all of it, no-code, to the FSM or CRM you already run.

Inbound

AI answers every call, 24/7, with real pricing instead of a guess.

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FAQ

Profit margin questions

How to calculate it, what counts as healthy for your trade, and what margin and markup mean.

It depends on the trade and the kind of work. Recurring service and repair calls, the bread and butter of HVAC, plumbing, and electrical businesses, tend to carry higher margins than new-build general contracting, where material costs and project risk eat into the number over a longer job. There is no single figure that applies to every trade. A flat rule of thumb is less useful than a benchmark built for your specific business.

Subtract your total cost from your total revenue, divide that by revenue, then multiply by 100. If a job brings in $1,000 and costs $700 to deliver, your margin is ($1,000 - $700) / $1,000 x 100, or 30 percent. This calculator runs that math the moment you enter the two numbers.

Margin is profit measured as a percentage of what you charged. Markup is profit measured as a percentage of what the job cost you. On a job that costs $700 and sells for $1,000, the profit is $300 either way, but that is a 30 percent margin and a 43 percent markup, since markup divides by the smaller cost number instead of the larger revenue number.

Markup divides your profit by cost. Margin divides the same profit by revenue, and revenue is always the bigger number. The dollar amount you keep stays fixed, but the percentage shrinks once it is measured against revenue instead of cost. This mix-up sits behind a lot of pricing mistakes in contracting, since an owner can hit a markup target on paper and still land a thinner margin than the number they had in mind.

Margin = Markup / (1 + Markup), and Markup = Margin / (1 - Margin). A 43 percent markup converts to Margin = 0.43 / 1.43, which rounds to 30 percent margin, matching the $700-cost, $1,000-sale example above. Run the second formula backward and a 30 percent margin target converts to roughly a 43 percent markup, which is the number to type into a quote if margin is the figure that matters most.

Gross margin is revenue minus the direct cost of the job (materials, equipment, and job-tied labor), divided by revenue. Net margin goes a step further and also subtracts overhead: rent, office staff, vehicles, insurance, software, all the costs that keep the business running whether or not that specific job happened. A job can carry a strong gross margin and a thin net margin once overhead is factored in. Both numbers matter, and each one measures something different.

Gross margin. The diagnostic asks for revenue and cost of goods, the two inputs a gross margin calculation needs, and returns that percentage against a benchmark for your trade. To get to net margin, take the dollar profit this tool shows you and subtract your share of overhead for that job or period, then divide by revenue again. The step-by-step walkthrough on this page shows that full calculation with a worked example.

For many service trades, a margin in that range is a reasonable target, and some well-run shops run higher. For general contracting or new construction, 30 percent would be strong; published industry figures tend to put average net margins there in the single digits to low teens. The honest answer depends on your trade, which is exactly what the benchmark in this tool is built to account for.

Three things drive the gap: how much of the job is materials versus labor, how far in advance the price gets locked in, and how much warranty or callback risk sits on the work after it is done. A plumbing repair quoted and finished the same day carries little material-price risk and a labor-heavy cost structure, which supports a higher margin. A roofing job quoted weeks before materials get ordered carries more exposure to price swings and a bigger material share of the cost, which tends to compress the number.

Quoting from memory instead of a structured line-item breakdown, leaving drive time and truck costs out of the job cost, treating markup as if it equals margin, and skipping callback or warranty labor when the price gets set. Each one is small on a single job and adds up fast across a month of work. None of them appears as a missing line on an invoice. They show up later, as a smaller number than expected.

Yes. The trade picklist in the diagnostic sets the benchmark band your result gets compared against, so an HVAC business and a landscaping business see different reference ranges for the same margin percentage. That is the whole point of building this for contractors instead of using a generic finance calculator.

Yes, with no signup and no card. Enter your numbers and see your result immediately. Nothing is held back behind an email address on this tool.

If the number looks thin, the fix usually starts with how jobs get priced and quoted. Turn the job into an estimate with the free invoice generator below, so pricing starts from a structured line-item breakdown instead of a guess.

Turn your margin into an estimate.

See your number here, then price the next job with a structured estimate instead of a guess.

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