Unit Price: What It Is and How to Calculate It (With Examples)

Unit price is the total cost to produce one unit of a product — including materials, labor, packaging, and overhead. If you’re running a small manufacturing or handmade business, knowing your unit price is essential: it tells you the minimum you can charge before making a loss, and it’s the foundation of every pricing strategy that actually works.

If this is your first time calculating your product’s unit price, it might seem like a daunting task. But we’re here to walk you through the process step by step — with real examples and formulas you can use right away.

What is a unit price?

Your unit price (also called your cost price, base production cost, or base manufacturing cost) includes everything that goes into making a single unit: raw materials, components, packaging, labor, and overheads. The first step in calculating it is to add up all of these individual costs.

Knowing exactly how much it cost you to make your items puts you in a much better business position — you’ll know the minimum possible price you can charge a customer before you make a loss on your product.

To get an accurate picture of your total costs, it’s important to track expenses over a period of time. This will give you a more accurate average than if you just looked at the cost of one batch of products.

Unit price vs unit cost — what’s the difference?

You’ll often see “unit price” and “unit cost” used interchangeably, but they can mean different things depending on context:

In manufacturing and accounting, “unit cost” typically refers to your production cost, while “unit price” can refer to either the cost or the selling price depending on who’s talking. For the purposes of this guide, we’re focused on calculating your unit production cost — the total cost to make one item — so you can price your products profitably.

How to calculate your product’s unit cost

Once you have all the necessary information, you can start to calculate your product’s unit cost using this simple formula:

Unit Cost = Total Costs / Number of Units Produced

For example, let’s say it cost you $100 to make 50 units of your product. Your unit cost would be $100/50, or $0.20 per unit.

How to figure out your total cost

To calculate your Total Costs you’ll need to list out each and every material you use to make a single quantity of the product.

This is otherwise known as a Bill of Materials (or BoM for short). For each material, you’ll need to know how many units your product uses and how much it costs per unit.

Check out our free BOM template for Excel and Numbers here →

An example

The best way to illustrate how to calculate your unit price is with an example.

Let’s say you make and sell wooden desk lamps. To create my Wooden Desk Lamp I need several materials as below:

Product: Wooden Desk Lamp

• wooden base: $0.50 per unit
• light bulb: $0.75 per unit
• lamp shade: $0.25 per unit
• light bulb socket: $0.15 per unit
• switch: $0.05 per unit
• power cord: $0.20 per unit
• paint: $0.01 per oz
• packaging: $0.30 per unit

Your cost per unit is ideally calculated from your complete purchase history of the material, rather than the latest cost. This is because your purchase costs may fluctuate during the year and you want to create a total cost that represents your average production.

Keep in mind that the items above should be “consumable materials” only - these are materials that are completely used up during the creation of your product.

Step 1: Figure out your usage amounts

The first step is to fill in how many units of each material you need to make your product. This should be measured in the same unit of measure that you make in.

If you purchased your material in a different unit size (i.e. you purchased in jars and you measure your materials in ounces) then you’ll want to make sure that you do this conversion first before continuing.

In the example above, we know we need 1 wooden base, 1 light bulb, 1 lamp shade, and so on. For paint, let’s say we use about 3 oz per lamp.

For materials like glue or paint you might find this more challenging as they can be difficult to measure. In some of these cases, you might find it impossible to measure so you might be best factoring the cost into your overhead calculation instead.

Step 2: Calculate your cost per unit

Now that you know how many units of each material you need for your product, you can multiply this number by the cost per unit to find out how much each component costs.

Continuing with our desk lamp example:

Once you’ve calculated the cost of each individual component, you can add these all up to find the total cost of materials (otherwise known as your direct costs) needed to make your product.

Step 3: Calculate your total cost of production

Now, for the last step - you’ll want to add up each of your total material costs and you’ll have your Base Manufacturing Cost.

As another example, for a soap maker they may have created a bill of materials like this one:

From here, you now know that it costs you $7.13 to make your soap. You can now use this amount in your pricing formula along with your desired markup to find a price to sell your product for that makes sure you make some decent profits

Using software to calculate your product’s unit cost

If all of this sounds like a bit too much work for you, or if you want to make sure that your calculations are 100% accurate, then you’ll want to use product cost calculator software. This can automate all of the steps involved in calculating how much it costs you to produce each unit of your product.

Craftybase is one such product cost calculator - it’s designed specifically for small business makers and takes into account all of the factors we’ve discussed in this post. You can start your free 14 day trial to see how it works for yourself!

Conclusion

Understanding how much it costs you to produce each of your products is vital for making sure that you’re pricing them correctly and making a profit. We hope that this guide has helped you to understand how to calculate your product’s unit cost with accuracy.

Frequently asked questions about unit price