Soap pricing calculator
What a bar actually costs you, and what it has to sell for. Every oil at its own price, plus lye, fragrance, packaging and your time — costed against the bars the batch yields once it has cured, not the batter that went into the mould.
INPUTS
The batch
g
g
3.5 oz, after the cure.
Your oils, at what you pay for them
OilSharePrice
%
$
%
$
%
$
%
$
$5.68 of oil in the batch
Per kilo, opening on placeholders. A butter-heavy blend costs several times a tallow one.
The rest of the batch
%
$ /kg
$1.00 of lye — 143 g
% of oils
$ /kg
$1.14 of fragrance — 30 g
$
Clay, oats, colour, botanicals.
RESULTS
PER BAR
Costs you
$3.03
$1.14 materials $1.15 labour $0.75 overhead
Wholesale
$6.07
$3.03 to you
Retail
$13.35
$10.32 to you
What the batch makes
| Stage | Weight | Bars |
|---|---|---|
| Batter into the mould | 1463 g | 122 g each |
| After the cure | 1287 g | 12 × 100 g |
| Water lost drying | 176 g | 12% |
Retail margin
77%
Profit on the batch
$123.81
A bar is costed on the batter that made it, not on what it weighs at the market stall. Roughly 12% of the batch leaves as water over the cure, so a 100 g bar starts life as about 122 g in the mould — and you paid for all of it.
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How this is worked out
A price that pays you is built from the bottom, in this order: the batch cost, the bars it makes, then your time and overhead, and only then a margin. The batch cost is straightforward as long as each oil carries its own price. The yield is where soap differs from almost anything else you would price this way — the batter that goes into the mould weighs more than the bars that come out of it, because about 12% of it leaves as water over the cure. So the calculator works out the batter weight, takes the cure loss off, divides by your finished bar weight, and costs every material against that bar count. Labour and overhead are added per bar before any margin is applied, because a margin on an incomplete cost is just a smaller loss.
batter = oils + lye + water + fragrance
cured = batter × (1 − 12%)
bars = cured ÷ finished bar weight
bar cost = (batch materials ÷ bars) + packaging + labour + overhead
wholesale = bar cost ÷ (1 − wholesale margin)
retail = wholesale × retail multiplier
Questions makers ask
How do I work out what a bar of soap costs me?
Add up the batch — every oil at what you paid for it, plus lye, fragrance and additives — then divide by the bars the batch actually yields, and add packaging, your time and a share of your overhead per bar. The step most people skip is the yield: a 1 kg-of-oils batch makes 1463 g of batter, which dries to about 1287 g, which is 12 bars at 100 g rather than the 14 the wet weight suggests.
Why does the cure matter to pricing?
Because you pay for the batter, not the bar. Roughly 12% of a batch leaves as water over its 28-day cure, so a 100 g bar starts as about 122 g in the mould. Costing on the finished weight understates every material in the bar by around 22% — small on one bar, and not small across a year of them.
Why price each oil separately?
Because the spread is enormous. A blend leaning on tallow or palm costs a fraction of one leaning on shea, avocado and castor, and an average price papers straight over the decision you are actually making. Each row here carries its own price per kilo, so you can see what an oil is costing you before you commit to it.
Should I pay myself for the time?
Yes, before you work out any margin at all. Soap is not quick — weighing, mixing, moulding, cutting, turning bars through the cure, wrapping and labelling all land on the same batch. A bar that costs a pound in materials and forty minutes of your hands across the batch does not cost a pound. If the price that comes out looks impossible, that is the tool telling you something useful about your batch size.
What margin should I take on wholesale?
Around 50% is the usual expectation, meaning your cost is half the wholesale price rather than wholesale being cost plus half. The difference between margin and markup catches people out constantly, and this calculator uses margin because that is what a stockist means. Retail is then typically 2 to 2.5 times wholesale.
What am I forgetting in my costs?
Usually the compliance and the failures. In most markets a cosmetic safety assessment, product notification and insurance are legally required to sell soap, and those belong in the monthly overhead here. So does the batch you had to bin. Neither shows up on an invoice for oils, and both are real costs of the bar.
Does the lye and water cost anything worth counting?
Very little, but they change the yield, which changes everything else. The water is free and evaporates; the lye is cheap. What matters is that they are 30% of the batter weight going into the mould, so leaving them out of the yield calculation is what throws the cost per bar off.
Read before your next batch
- How to use a soap calculator What every field means, where the number comes from, and how to tell when a result is wrong before you have mixed anything.
- What is superfat in soap making? The oil left deliberately unsaponified in a bar — what it is for, what each setting changes, and why the number matters more as a safety margin than as a skin treatment.
- Cold process vs hot process soap Same oils, same lye, two very different afternoons — and one difference that decides it for most people.
- Water discounts explained Lye concentration, water-to-lye ratio and per cent of oils are three names for one decision — and the decision has nothing to do with how much lye you need.