What is break-even for a service business?

It is the point where the money left over from your jobs exactly covers the bills that arrive whether you worked or not. One job short and you funded the month yourself.

The formula is one line, and it does not care what trade you are in.

Run it longhand on the defaults in the calculator above. The overhead list adds to $2,970 a month: truck payment $650, fuel $520, general liability $145, commercial auto $210, tools $150, phone $95, software $130, rent $450, advertising $400, licenses $45, accountant $175.

Two numbers, and the gap between them is the whole argument. Eleven jobs keeps the truck on the road and the insurance paid. Twenty-nine is the month where you also get to eat. Anybody who quotes a break-even without their own pay in it is telling you the first number and living the second.

Round up, always. You cannot do 28.96 jobs. The fraction is the part where you are still short.

Why is "busy" not the same as "profitable"?

Two threads on r/smallbusiness say more about this than any accounting textbook. One asks: "be honest. how much money did you actually make last month after ALL expenses. not revenue. actual money in your pocket." It ran to 386 comments. The other, 234 comments long, contains this: "My dad's tile business is always slammed with high-end work but barely breaks even."

Slammed and breaking even at the same time is not a paradox. It is what happens when the average ticket is high, the margin on it is thin, and the overhead grew to match the busyness. High-end work carries expensive materials, longer jobs, more rework, and pickier customers. The invoices look enormous. The money left per job might not be any better than the guy doing $400 service calls out of a pickup.

Which is the reason this calculator asks for money left per job rather than revenue. Revenue is the number people quote at the bar. It is also the number that tells you nothing. Two shops at $250,000 a year, one keeping 45 cents of every dollar and one keeping 22, are not in the same business, and only one of them is going to be there in three years.

The uncomfortable version: getting busier is the most expensive way to fix a margin problem. Every extra job at a bad margin adds fuel, wear, risk and a callback you will service for free. If the money left per job is below your per-job overhead recovery figure, more work makes it worse, faster.

Which costs are fixed and which come out of the job?

Getting this wrong moves your break-even, so pick a rule and stick to it. The rule: if the cost only exists because a specific job happened, it belongs to the job. If it lands on the first of the month regardless, it is overhead.

One trap with crew wages. If you pay a helper $25 an hour, that helper does not cost $25 an hour. Payroll taxes, workers' comp, holiday and the hours nobody bills push the real number well above the wage. Underestimate it and your gross margin is fiction, and a fictional gross margin makes every job count on this page too small. Run the number through the employee cost calculator and bring the burdened figure back here.

The other trap is your own time. If you are on the tools, your hours are a real cost to the job even though no wage leaves the account. Most one-person shops get an artificially high gross margin by leaving themselves out of job cost, then wonder why the draw never materialises. The clean way: charge your hours to the job at what they cost, and treat the draw as the thing this calculator has to reach.

How many jobs is that a week, and can you actually fit them?

A monthly job count is easy to nod at and hard to feel. Divide it down.

Now the version that matters. You have 42 slots. Twenty-nine of them are spoken for by the truck, the insurance, the phone and your own mortgage. That leaves 13 slots, worth $292.50 each, so a perfect month with every slot filled makes $3,815. Not $18,822 — that is revenue. $3,815 is the profit, and only if nothing goes wrong.

This is where most shops find their actual constraint. It is rarely demand. It is that the number of jobs required to pay everybody sits at 70% or more of physical capacity, which leaves no room for a truck in the shop, a week of rain, a callback, or a customer who does not pay for 60 days. When capacity utilisation gets past about 80% the month has no slack at all, and every single thing that goes wrong comes straight out of the profit.

Be honest about jobs per day, too. Two a day sounds conservative until you count the drive, the supply house, the walk-around, the cleanup and the twenty minutes on the phone with a manufacturer. Someone tracking roughly 2,200 service businesses reported on r/smallbusiness that "labor estimating runs 12% over on average. if hours aren't tied daily to the job, your job costing is fake." If your hours run 12% long, so does your job-per-day number, and your real capacity is lower than the one you typed.

What does a slow month actually do?

Take a normal 34-job month and cut it to 60%, which is a realistic February for a lot of trades.

Look at the cushion figure, because it is the one that surprises people. Volume can fall 14.8% before your own draw starts getting cut. Not 40%. Fifteen. In a business that regularly swings 40% between its best and worst month, that is a thin margin of error, and it explains why so many shops that look fine in July are borrowing in February.

It also puts a price on the reserve. Three bad months at this shortfall is $7,509 that needs to be sitting somewhere, and that is separate from tax money and separate from the deposit on the next van. The research behind this tool found a blunt version of what happens when it is not there: one in three subcontractors pull from personal or retirement savings to bridge the gap. That is not a cash-flow event. That is a retirement being spent on a truck payment.

Why does a 10% price rise beat working more Saturdays?

Because your material cost does not move when your price does. Every dollar you add to the ticket is a dollar of contribution, not 45 cents of it.

A 10% price rise raised the money left per job by 22%, cut the jobs needed by five a month, and more than doubled the monthly profit. Sixty-three fewer jobs a year, or $26,520 more profit if you keep the volume. Compare that against the alternative, which is finding five more jobs a month, every month, at the old price — more fuel, more wear, more risk, more callbacks, more nights doing quotes.

The honest counterweight is that a price rise is not free. Some customers leave. The rule of thumb worth checking against your own numbers: with a 45% gross margin you can lose about 18% of your volume after a 10% rise and still be no worse off, because the jobs you keep each earn 22% more. Most trades lose nowhere near 18% on a 10% adjustment, especially on repeat and referral work. The ones you lose are usually the price shoppers who were eating your Saturday anyway.

There is a second lever, and this calculator makes it visible too. Cutting $500 a month out of overhead drops the jobs you need by 1.7 a month, roughly 20 a year. Not as powerful as the price rise, but a lot easier to do this week, and it works even if nothing about your sales changes. Software subscriptions and lead spend are usually the two lines with slack in them — check what a year of lead spend is actually buying you with the lead cost calculator before you renew.

What do the paid tools charge for this?

Break-even lives inside job costing, and job costing is one of the things software companies charge the most for. List prices as of August 2026.

Sources, compiled August 2026: QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Online Advanced published pricing, including the 1 August 2026 Simple Start increase · Jobber published plan pricing · Buildertrend and Procore figures published by a general contractor at roughly $4M revenue on r/Construction, who posted his real quotes because "everyone hides their pricing" · Gumroad small-business spreadsheet listings. Prices in this category move — check before you commit.

Here is the part worth being straight about. Every one of those products is better than this page at one specific thing: telling you what actually happened. This calculator works on numbers you type, so its answer is exactly as good as your estimate of your own overhead and margin. A bookkeeping system pulls those from your bank. If you have never actually added up your fixed costs, the $38-a-month one will earn its money in the first week just by showing you the subscriptions you forgot about.

What none of them do well is the question in the title. They report the past. They do not sit down with you and say "so that is 29 jobs, and you have 42 slots." Two contractors summed up the mismatch better than a comparison table can. From r/Construction: "It's wild how the industry hides pricing just to sell a bloated $1,000/month database that forces you to change how your whole business operates. For a lean team doing $4M, those massive setups are totally out of touch with reality." And from r/lawncare, on the mid-market option: "Jobber is great but the pricing is mental. It's not friendly to new businesses."

Where is this calculator enough, and where is it not?

It is enough if you are one to five people, your jobs are broadly similar in size, and nobody has ever told you what your monthly nut is. That describes most service businesses, and for them the numbers on this page are the difference between pricing on feel and pricing on arithmetic. It is enough to decide whether to take a job, whether to raise prices, whether you can afford a second van, and how big your reserve needs to be before the slow season.

It is enough to walk into an accountant's office with a starting position instead of a shrug.

It is not enough for five things, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

• Wildly different job sizes. If you run $300 service calls and $40,000 remodels out of the same truck, an average ticket is a fiction. Run the calculator twice, once for each type of work, and treat them as two businesses sharing a van.
• Cash flow. Break-even is a profit calculation. It says nothing about when the money lands, which for most trades is the thing that actually bites. More on that below.
• Taxes. Your draw is pre-tax money in this calculator. Set aside for tax separately and do not count it as profit.
• Seasonality across the year. This is a monthly model. A landscaper who makes a year's money in seven months needs to run it as an annual nut divided across the months that actually produce, not month by month.
• Knowing your real overhead. Everything here starts with the list in Step 1, and the list is only as good as your memory unless you pull it off a bank statement. Do that once. It takes twenty minutes and it is usually a shock.

Why breaking even on paper is not money in the bank

This is the failure mode that catches trades specifically, and it deserves its own section because the calculator above cannot see it.

Break-even is about profit. Profit is a timing-blind number: it counts an invoice the day you send it, not the day it clears. In construction the gap between those two dates is enormous. Days sales outstanding runs about 83 days against roughly 60 across all industries. 82% of contractors wait more than 30 days to get paid, up from 49% two years earlier. Only 5% of subcontractors get paid on time. Slow payment cost US construction an estimated $280 billion in 2024, and contractors inflate bids by an average of 8% just to hedge the delay.

Across all US small business the picture is not much prettier: 43% of B2B invoice value is overdue, about 5% eventually gets written off, and the average small business is carrying more than $17,000 in overdue invoices at any one time.

So you can hit 29 jobs in March, break even exactly as this page says, and still be unable to make the truck payment in April, because 12 of those invoices are sitting unpaid at day 45. The calculator is right and your bank account is empty. Both things at once.

The practical answers are boring and they work. Take a deposit. Bill progress on anything that runs more than a week instead of waiting for the end. Send the invoice the day the job finishes, not on the first of the month. Chase at 7, 14 and 30 days with something written, because a paper trail moves money that a phone call does not. Electricians on the Mike Holt forum have been saying the same thing for twenty years: "Once you leave without payment, your chances of getting paid go down to next to nothing."

If you are chasing money right now, the payment reminder generator writes the letters, and 1.5% a month is the standard defensible late fee in most US states, though caps vary and you should check yours.

How do you use it?

1. Pull up last month's bank statement and fill in Step 1 off the actual transactions. Not what you think you pay. What left the account. Nearly everyone finds two subscriptions they had forgotten.
2. Put your real draw in, not a modest one. The number you need to pay your own bills, before tax. Understating it here just moves the shortfall to your kitchen table.
3. Enter your average ticket, then check the margin. If you know your material cost per job better than your margin percent, type that in the dollar box instead and let the tool work the percentage out.
4. Read the two job counts. One keeps the doors open, the other pays you. Then look at the capacity meter and ask whether the month you just described is a month you could actually work.
5. Run the slow month. Whatever your worst month looks like, put that percentage in and write the shortfall on a sticky note. That is your reserve target, times however many bad months you get in a row.
6. Test the price rise before you test more hours. Ten percent is usually invisible to customers and enormous to you. If the number surprises you, that is the point.
7. Carry the per-job overhead recovery figure into your next bid and stop quoting anything that does not clear it.

Common questions

Payment and collections figures cited above come from the 2026 research compiled for these tools: construction days sales outstanding of 83 days against roughly 60 across all industries; 82% of contractors waiting over 30 days, up from 49% two years earlier; 5% of subcontractors paid on time; an estimated $280 billion cost to US construction in 2024; average 8% bid inflation to hedge payment delay; one in three subcontractors drawing on personal or retirement savings; 43% of US B2B invoice value overdue; US small businesses averaging over $17,000 in overdue invoices. Estimates for planning, not tax or legal advice.