TikTok Shop Break-Even Calculator
Most sellers price backwards — they pick a number that “feels right,” then find out later it never covered the fees. Enter your costs below to get the lowest price that doesn’t lose money, and the price you actually need for the margin you want.
Rates current as of July 2026; confirm your category in TikTok Seller Center. This estimator uses your inputs — it does not read your account.
Your costs
US default 6% — confirm your category in Seller Center.
Only the rate you pay on creator-driven sales.
Share of revenue refunded.
Total ad spend ÷ units sold. Leave at 0 for organic-only.
The margin you actually want to keep after everything.
Price needed for 20.0% net margin
$20.27
That is 1.35× your product cost.
Break-even
- Fixed cost per unit (COGS + fulfillment + ads)
- $15.00
- Percentage costs (referral + affiliate + returns)
- 6.0% of revenue
- Markup just to break even
- 1.06×
How to calculate break-even price on TikTok Shop
The trick is that your costs are not all the same kind. Some scale with the price you charge, and some don’t — and mixing them is why so many break-even estimates come out wrong.
- Percentage costs — the referral fee, affiliate commission, and revenue lost to returns. Raise your price and these go up in lockstep. They never get “covered” by charging more.
- Fixed costs per unit — your product cost, fulfillment, and ad spend per unit. These stay flat no matter what you charge, so a higher price really does absorb them.
Which gives the formula the calculator uses:
break-even price = fixed cost per unit ÷ (1 − referral rate − affiliate rate − return rate)
A worked example: $15 product cost, the standard US 6% referral fee, no affiliate and no returns. The denominator is 0.94, so break-even is $15 ÷ 0.94 = $15.96. Not $15.90 — the fee applies to the higher price too, which is exactly the circularity the division resolves.
Why raising your price sometimes doesn’t help
Add a 25% affiliate commission and a 5% return rate to that same product and the denominator drops to 0.64. Break-even jumps from $15.96 to $23.44 — a 47% price increase caused entirely by costs that had nothing to do with your product.
Push the percentage costs far enough and the denominator reaches zero. At that point there is no break-even price at all: every dollar you add to the price is consumed by the fees that scale with it. The calculator flags this case explicitly, because the fix is never “charge more” — it is cutting the affiliate rate, attacking the return rate, or walking away from the product.
Pricing for a target margin, not just break-even
Break-even is the floor, not the goal. To price for a margin you actually want to keep, the same logic applies with the target margin subtracted from the denominator:
target price = fixed cost per unit ÷ (1 − referral rate − affiliate rate − return rate − target margin)
This is also why a “3× your cost” rule of thumb is unreliable on TikTok Shop. The multiple you need is a consequence of your percentage costs, not a constant. The calculator shows your actual multiple so you can sanity-check it against what the market will bear.
Should ad spend go in your break-even price?
If you want a price that pays for its own customer acquisition, yes — divide total ad spend by units sold and enter it as a fixed per-unit cost. If your price is already fixed by the market and the real question is how efficient your ads must be, solve it from the other direction with the break-even ROAS calculator.
Once you are selling, estimates stop being the point. MarginReady connects to your TikTok Shop account and shows true profit per SKU from your actual settled payouts — the real fees TikTok charged, not modeled ones. See also the TikTok Shop fee calculator for profit at a price you have already set.