True profit per car calculator
Sale price minus purchase price isn’t your profit. Enter what one car really cost you, from the auction fee to the days it sat on the lot, and see its true profit next to the sticker math.
It starts with the worked example from how to know your true profit per vehicle: a sedan bought at $9,900 and sold at $13,200 that looks like $3,300 and really made $770. Change any figure to run your own car. Nothing you type leaves this page: the calculator runs in your browser and saves nothing.
GARAGEBIRDS keeps these numbers on every car as you spend them, on the Free plan. Track this automatically for every car, free forever →
What belongs in each line
If you spent it because of this car, it belongs to this car. Buying covers what it took to make the car yours. Reconditioning is everything you spent to make it sellable. Holding is what the car cost you while it waited for a buyer, which is why a car that sits a month longer can lose much of its margin. Selling is what you paid to close the sale and didn’t pass on to the buyer. The full rules, and how to log costs as you spend, are in how to know your true profit per vehicle.
Profit per day on the lot divides the true profit by the days the car sat. Two cars with the same profit aren’t equal if one took twice as long to sell. Pricing the next car? Start with how to price your first car without losing money.
Questions
How do you calculate the true profit on a used car?
Take the sale price and subtract every cost the car picked up: the purchase price, auction or buyer fee, transport, reconditioning, the holding cost for the days it sat on the lot, and what it cost to sell it. What’s left is the true profit, also called front-end gross.
Why is the sticker math so far off?
Sale price minus purchase price ignores everything that happened in between. Fees, transport, recon and days on the lot each look small, but together they can take half the profit or more, as in the worked example, where $3,300 on paper was $770 in reality.
What counts as holding cost?
Floor-plan interest and insurance for the days the car sits on your lot. Rent, utilities and your own pay are overhead you’d have with or without this car; track those for the business as a whole.
Does the calculator save what I enter?
No. It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere, and reloading the page brings back the example.
See the true profit on every car
GARAGEBIRDS logs each cost on the car as you spend it. Free forever, no credit card.