Break-even ROAS calculator

The ROAS below which every extra dollar of spend loses money.

Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored. Updated 2026-09-05.

Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by your gross margin. At a 40% gross margin your break-even ROAS is 2.5× — below that, the gross profit on the sale no longer covers the ad spend that produced it.

It is the only ROAS number that is genuinely about your business rather than someone else's benchmark, and it is a threshold, not a score. Enter the margin you actually keep after cost of goods, shipping, payment fees and expected returns, and the calculator returns the ROAS you must clear, plus the highest cost per acquisition that margin can absorb at your average order value.

Use contribution margin, not the margin on your P&L

The single most common error here is entering the gross margin from the accounts. That figure usually excludes costs that a paid acquisition genuinely carries:

• Shipping and fulfilment on the order the ad produced.
• Payment processing — roughly 2–3% of order value on most gateways.
• Returns and refunds. A 12% return rate does not reduce margin by 12%; it removes the whole contribution of those orders while leaving the acquisition cost behind.
• Discount codes the campaign itself hands out.

Subtract all of it first. A margin overstated by ten points understates your break-even ROAS by roughly a third, which is the difference between scaling and quietly losing money.

Break-even ROAS is a floor, not a target

Clearing break-even means the campaign paid for itself and contributed nothing to fixed costs. Overheads, salaries and the rest of the business still have to come from somewhere.

Set an actual target above the floor — a target ROAS that leaves the net margin you want. The arithmetic for that is on the target ROAS calculator.

Where the number goes once you have it

Break-even ROAS has two practical homes. It is the stop-loss for manual bidding: campaigns sitting under it for a full attribution window are burning contribution. And it is the floor for a target ROAS bid strategy, which will happily optimise toward a value that loses you money if you tell it to.

The number moves whenever your costs move. Recompute it when input costs, shipping rates or return rates change — not once a year.

Computing this from your own accounts

Every calculator on this page takes numbers you typed. The version that keeps working is the one that reads them from the accounts themselves — which is what TableBI is: connect Google Ads, Meta Ads, GA4 or Search Console once, and roas() becomes a macro you can query from your terminal.

# connect once, then the metric is a standing query
tablebi connect google_ads
tablebi connect meta_ads   # beta: your own or test ad accounts

tablebi ask "WITH w AS (SELECT MAX(date) AS anchor FROM metrics)
   SELECT platform, roas(SUM(revenue), SUM(cost)) AS roas
   FROM metrics, w WHERE date > w.anchor - 30
   GROUP BY platform ORDER BY roas DESC"

# pin the answer to a URL that refreshes itself
tablebi pin --title "break-even ROAS calculator by channel"
→ https://you.tablebi.com/d/dsh_…

The pinned answer is a live URL that refreshes on its own — here is one running now. No hosted model does the reasoning; your own Claude Code or Codex drives the CLI, which is why there is no inference bill attached to it.

Questions people ask about break-even roas calculators

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