Cafe Margin Calculator
Put in what a drink costs you to make and what you charge for it. Get back the margin on every item, the weighted margin across the menu, and the line that is quietly losing you money. Free, nothing to install, nothing saved anywhere. The numbers stay in your browser.
Your input costs
Set these once. Every drink below is costed from them. Use your own invoice prices if you have them; the defaults are national grocery averages, which run high for a cafe buying wholesale.
Your menu
Edit the rows, delete what you do not sell, add what you do. Weekly count is how many of that drink you sell in an average week; it is only used to weight the menu totals.
| Drink | Price | Coffee g | Milk oz | Pumps | Other $ | Iced | Per week |
|---|
Take the numbers with you
Plain text you can select and paste into an email, a doc, or a spreadsheet.
How to read the answer
Gross margin is what is left of the menu price after the things you physically put in the cup: coffee, milk, syrup, the cup itself, and anything you add in the Other column. Cafe espresso drinks usually sit high here, in the seventies and eighties, which is exactly why the number feels good and exactly why it is not the whole story. Rent, wages outside the bar, card fees, waste, and the hours when nobody walks in all come out of that same gross profit.
Turn on the labor line and the picture changes. A latte at $5.25 with under a dollar of coffee, milk, and cup in it looks untouchable until you allocate a barista's time to it. The drinks that get thin fastest are the slow ones: multi step builds, hand poured, heavy on syrup, sold at the same price as a drip coffee that takes eight seconds.
Where the default input costs come from
The defaults are national grocery averages published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in its Average Price Data series, latest month July 2026: ground roast coffee $9.317 per pound (series APU0000717311) and whole milk $4.313 per gallon (series APU0000709112). The default bar wage of $15.00 an hour is the national median hourly wage for Fast Food and Counter Workers, occupation code 35-3023, in the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for May 2025.
Those are retail shelf prices and a national wage median. A cafe buying wholesale usually pays less per pound for beans and more per hour for a trained barista. Replace both with your own invoice and payroll numbers the moment you have them; the calculator is only as honest as what you type into it. Cup, lid, and syrup defaults are placeholders, not published figures, so they are yours to set.
The three moves this usually surfaces
Dose drift. A grinder that creeps two grams heavy on every double costs real money at volume. Put your actual dose in the coffee column, not your recipe card dose, and see the gap.
Milk waste. Steaming for a 12 ounce drink and pouring 9 ounces means the rest goes down the drain. The milk column here is what ends up in the cup; if your pitcher habit is heavier, cost the pitcher, not the cup.
The flat price ladder. When a drip coffee and a hand built specialty drink are priced within a dollar of each other, the specialty drink is subsidised by the simple one. That shows up in the After labor column and almost nowhere else.
Keep going
The Cafe Health Check covers the parts of the business this calculator ignores. The Coffee Cost Calculator does the same math from the customer's side of the counter. The Barista Wage Index has the wage figure for your state, which is the number to put in the wage box if you would rather not use the national median.