How to calculate the break-even point
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)How many units you must sell before profit turns positive.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel (desktop) | =A2/(B2-C2) | A2=fixed costs, B2=price per unit, C2=variable cost per unit. Wrap in ROUNDUP(...,0) — you can't sell part of a unit. |
| Google Sheets | =A2/(B2-C2) | Identical. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =A2/(B2-C2) | Identical. |
How it works
Each unit contributes price minus variable cost toward fixed costs ($25 − $15 = $10 here), so covering $10,000 of fixed costs takes 1,000 units. Break-even REVENUE is that times price ($25,000), and the same formula with a target profit added to fixed costs — (A2+target)/(B2-C2) — answers "units to earn $X". If the result is negative, price is below variable cost and no volume can save it.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =A2/(B2-C2) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 1000 — exactly the expected result. We then ran the same formulas in Google Sheets, executed 2026-08-30: a formula-only workbook goes into Google Drive, which converts it to a Sheet and recalculates every formula with Google’s own engine, and comes back out as .xlsx carrying the values Google computed. It returned 1000 for the worked example, the same value LibreOffice produced. Both engines’ numbers on this page are executed results. The Excel formula follows Microsoft’s official documented syntax — we do not run desktop Excel.