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Break-Even After Fees Calculator

The break-even after fees calculator folds your buy-side and sell-side costs into one number: the exit price where proceeds finally cover everything you paid to get in and out. Runs in your browser; nothing is stored.

The break-even price after fees is the entry price plus enough gain to cover round-trip costs: a trade is only truly flat once it recovers both the entry and exit fees (and any spread), so the higher your fee rate, the further price must move just to reach zero.

Trade & fees

Entry price

Quantity (optional)

Buy fee (%)

Sell fee (%)

break_even = entry·(1 + buy%) / (1 − sell%)

To get back to flat

Break-even exit price—

Gain needed vs entry—

Even small fees on both sides mean the exit price has to clear your entry before you are truly flat.

How it works

What this calculator does

Commissions and spreads are charged on both sides of a trade, so the price that truly breaks you even is higher than your entry. This tool folds the buy-side and sell-side costs into one figure: the exit price at which proceeds exactly cover everything you paid.

The formula

break-even = entry × (1 + buy%) / (1 − sell%)

The (1 + buy%) term grosses up your cost to include the entry fee; dividing by (1 − sell%) ensures the exit fee is paid out of the sale proceeds.

Worked example

You buy at $100 with a 0.1% buy fee and a 0.1% sell fee. Break-even is 100 × (1 + 0.001) / (1 − 0.001) = 100.1 / 0.999 ≈ $100.20. The price has to rise about 0.2% — roughly twice the one-way fee — before you're flat. At higher fees the gap widens fast.

What it deliberately does not do

It models percentage-based fees on both legs; it does not include flat per-order commissions, financing, taxes, or slippage, which you'd add separately. The smaller the move you're aiming for, the larger a share these round-trip costs take, so they matter most to short-term traders. The output is an estimate for planning, not investment advice.

Frequently asked questions

How do I calculate break-even price including fees?

Gross up your entry for the buy fee and divide by one minus the sell fee: entry × (1 + buy%) / (1 − sell%). The result is the exit price where you've recovered the trade plus both commissions.

Why do I need to gain more than the fee to break even?

Because you pay a fee both when buying and when selling. A 0.1% fee each way means roughly a 0.2% move is needed just to cover costs before any profit.

Do trading fees really matter that much?

On small moves and frequent trading, yes. Round-trip costs can eat a large share of thin profits, which is why active traders watch the break-even-after-fees level closely.

Does this include the bid-ask spread?

If you treat the spread as a percentage cost, you can fold it into the buy or sell fee. The formula handles any percentage-based cost on each side.

Is this the same as the loss-recovery calculator?

No. Loss recovery answers how far you must rebound from a loss; this answers how far above entry you must sell to cover round-trip fees. Both are estimates for education, not advice.

Related calculators

Funded-account checks

Use these three pages as a simple path: understand the rules, stress a scenario, then track consistency before a payout.

1Understand the ruleCompare challenge types, drawdown floors and payout logic.2Run a breach scenarioModel intraday vs end-of-day trailing drawdown before sizing a trade.3Track consistencyCheck whether one big day is blocking payout eligibility.

Information tool only. Every result is deterministic arithmetic (for the simulator, a probability estimate) from the numbers you enter. The calculators run in your browser with no account connection and nothing stored; the pairs scanner uses delayed, cached market data (daily figures, refreshed once a day), not a live feed. This is not investment, trading, tax, or financial advice — verify against your own broker or prop firm before acting.

Disclosure. Some outbound links may be affiliate or partner links; they never change how a tool computes.