Free tool
Break-even ROAS calculator
Break-even ROAS is the return your ads need just to cover what each order costs you. Below it, every sale the ads bring in loses money. Put in what an average order really costs, including the parts most calculators skip, and you get two floors: one on the revenue your store keeps, and one on the number Ads Manager shows you.
With repeat orders
Break-even cost per new customer
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Break-even ROAS on the first order
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This only holds if those repeat orders really happen inside the window.
The working
- Net revenue per order$0.00
Order value × (1 − refund rate)
- Payment fee$0.00
Order value × (1 + tax rate) × fee % + fixed fee
- Contribution per order$0.00
Net revenue − product − shipping − payment fee − return handling − other costs
- Contribution margin0%
Contribution ÷ order value
The hidden costs
The costs most calculators leave out
A break-even built on product cost alone looks comfortable and is usually wrong. The usual gaps:
- Shipping you absorb. Free shipping is not free. Put in what the carrier charges you, not what the customer pays.
- Payment fees. A few percent of every order, plus a fixed fee that hurts most on small baskets.
- Refunds and returns. Revenue you book and later give back, plus the cost of handling the return.
- Tax inside the purchase value. If your pixel sends the order total including sales tax or VAT, the platform counts money that was never yours.
Two floors
Break-even on your store's numbers, or on Ads Manager's?
Meta and Google each credit sales to their own ads by their own rules. On Loose Leaf Tea Market, Meta reported 2.23 times the revenue the store's own records credited it with. Neither number was a mistake; they measure different things.
Example
Say your break-even on store revenue is 2.0, and Meta reports half as much revenue again as your store records for the same spend. The ROAS you need to see in Ads Manager is then 2.0 × 1.5, which is 3.0. An account showing 2.5 in Ads Manager looks safely above break-even and is below it.
If you have not measured that gap, leave it at 1 and treat the Ads Manager result as optimistic. Our attribution work is how we measure it for clients.
At the margin
Break-even is a floor, not a budget
The calculator gives you an average. Budgets are decided at the edge: each extra dollar of spend tends to bring back less than the one before, so an account can average well above break-even while its last few hundred dollars a day lose money. The useful number is the return on the next dollar, measured by moving budget and watching store revenue. Judge that next dollar against the break-even on store revenue, since it adds orders but no new overheads, and the month's blended results against the all-in break-even, which appears once you add overheads under More accurate.
On CHUUG we set every budget from that marginal return instead of platform ROAS, and the largest scale test came back at a measured marginal ROAS of 3.00x. Our framework starts from the same place: find the business's real numbers before deciding spend.
By market
One break-even per market
Shipping and returns cost different amounts in each country, so the floor moves with them. When we re-derived CHUUG's break-even on carrier actuals it came out at 1.48x for the UK, 1.64x for Canada, 1.71x for Australia and 2.04x for the US (case). One blended number treats them all the same. If you sell in several countries, run the calculator once per market.
Typical questions
Questions
How do I calculate break-even ROAS?
Divide 1 by your contribution margin: what is left of an average order after product, shipping, payment fees, refunds and other per-order costs, as a share of the order value. A 40% contribution margin gives a break-even ROAS of 2.5.
What is a good ROAS?
One comfortably above your break-even, measured on your store's revenue rather than the platform's claim. There is no universal number: the same 3.0 is excellent for a high-margin brand and a loss for a thin-margin one. Run the calculator, then add the profit you want with the target-profit field.
Should break-even ROAS include fixed costs like salaries and software?
Not in the per-order floor. One more order adds no salaries or software, so the floor for the next dollar of spend leaves them out. Put them in the overheads field under More accurate to see the all-in break-even, which is the bar for your blended results across the month. On Natural Earth Paint, the model we built with the client put break-even at 1.2 on product cost alone and 1.8 with operating costs in at the spend rate of the time, while Meta reported 1.6 in August 2024.
What is the difference between break-even ROAS and break-even CPA?
They are the same floor seen two ways. Break-even CPA is the most you can pay for one purchase, which equals the contribution from that order. Break-even ROAS is order value divided by that amount.
Why is my break-even different in each market?
Because shipping, returns and sometimes product cost differ by country. See the CHUUG figures above.