Free tool
Quit number calculator
The quit number calculator turns your household spending, health premium, tax rate and business costs into the monthly profit your sales must bring in, then converts it into sales, listings and listing hours a week. It runs in your browser, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Enter your numbers above.
What formula does the quit number calculator use?
The calculator's first formula is quit number = (monthly spending + health premium) ÷ (1 minus tax rate) + fixed business costs, and four more give sales, listings, listing hours and runway. All five run in this order on the numbers you enter:
- Quit number = (monthly spending + health premium) ÷ (1 minus tax rate) + fixed business costs
- Sales a month = quit number ÷ profit per sale
- Listings a month = sales a month ÷ share of listings that sell
- Listing hours a week = listings a month × minutes per listing ÷ 60 ÷ 4.33
- Runway in months = cash savings ÷ (monthly spending + health premium)
With the default example inputs it shows a quit number of $6,088, 305 sales and 381 listings a month, 8.8 listing hours a week, and 4.3 months of runway. How the quit number is built walks through each step.
How should you fill in each input?
Fill in each input from your own records: twelve months of bank outgoings and sales, the full premium you'd pay and your own timing, not a budget or a guess.
| Input | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|
| Monthly spending | Twelve months of bank and card outgoings divided by 12, annual renewals and irregular costs included. Not a budget. |
| Health premium | The full premium for the cover you'll buy. Ask HR for your plan's total first; COBRA can charge up to 102% of it. COBRA or Marketplace. |
| Tax rate | Self-employment tax is about 14.1% of profit (15.3% on 92.35%, IRS). Add your income tax rate from your own history. |
| Fixed business costs | Subscriptions, storage, insurance, accounting. Leave out inventory and per-sale costs; they're inside profit per sale. |
| Current profit from sales | Last twelve months of profit from sales divided by 12, before fixed costs. |
| Cash savings | Money you can spend. Not inventory, not credit, not retirement accounts, not tax you owe. |
| Profit per sale | Sale price minus item cost, marketplace fees, shipping and supplies, averaged over twelve months. |
| Share of listings that sell | Items sold divided by items listed over twelve months. |
| Minutes per listing | Your own timing, blank form to published. |
Where does minutes per listing come from?
Minutes per listing should come from a stopwatch, not a guess. Time ten listings in a row from blank form to published and divide by ten. For scale, FlowLister, which publishes this site, writes an eBay listing in about 30 seconds. If you use a listing tool, count your review time too. The full-time reselling math shows what each minute is worth.
What does the runway figure tell you?
The runway figure is your cash divided by household spending plus the premium: how long you could live with zero profit from sales. Business costs stay out of it, because they come from a separate reserve. Why the two reserves stay apart.
Is the quit number your income target?
The quit number is a floor, not a target. It gets you to break-even with your current life and holds nothing for a slow quarter, for growth, or for the fact that a week off is now a week without sales.
Clearing it once proves little. The evidence that counts is whether your worst months clear it: the income floor test.
How do I calculate my quit number?
How many sales do I need to quit my job and resell?
What tax rate should I use?
Is this financial advice?
Disclosure The Quit Number is published by the team behind FlowLister. FlowLister writes eBay listings from your photos, which matters here because listing is the part of a full-time week you can't skip. It's AI, so it misses things. We make it, so read this as a disclosure, not a recommendation. Nothing on this site is financial, tax or legal advice.