Candle Cost Calculator

A standard 200ml soy candle works out to roughly £2.80 to £3.40 in materials and 20 minutes of labour, putting your true cost around £4.80. The big variables are wax type and fragrance load. Soy at £8 per kg is the cheap workhorse; beeswax at £15 per kg roughly doubles the wax line.

The calculator assumes 0.9 grams of wax per ml of container space, which accounts for the air gap at the top and the volume the wick takes up. A 200ml jar therefore needs about 180g of wax, costing £1.44 in soy or £2.70 in beeswax. Fragrance is the second biggest cost: an 8% load on that same 200ml jar uses 16g of fragrance oil, which at the typical UK trade price of £4.50 per 100ml costs £0.72. Once you add a £0.50 wick, £1.20 container, £0.30 label and 20 minutes of labour at £12 per hour, you land at around £4.80 of true cost before any markup.

A 60% markup on a £4.80 cost candle gives a £7.68 selling price and a 37.5% gross margin. That sounds healthy until Etsy takes its cut. After the 6.5% transaction fee, £0.20 listing fee, payment processing and postage, you typically keep around £4.50 net on a £7.68 sale - basically your costs back, with no real labour pay.

This is why candle sellers who actually make money price at 2.5x to 4x their materials cost, not 1.5x. A £4.80 cost candle usually needs to retail at £14 to £18 to leave room for marketplace fees, returns, broken jars in transit and the dozens of little expenses that never make it into a calculator (printer ink, packing tape, the box you bought for shipping). The [Etsy fee calculator](/etsy-fee-calculator) shows exactly what each platform takes, and the [side hustle hourly rate](/side-hustle-hourly-rate) tool tells you whether your batch is paying you a real wage once everything is accounted for.

When you make a batch of 10 candles instead of one, the labour per candle drops because melting wax, weighing fragrance and washing pouring jugs is roughly the same effort whether you make 1 or 12. The calculator builds in a 15% labour efficiency gain on batches, which usually understates reality once you have a real production setup with multiple pouring stations.

A batch of 12 candles using the £4.80 unit cost above lands at roughly £53 in total cost (versus £57.60 if you priced each individually), revenue of £92.16 at the £7.68 retail, and £39 batch profit before fees. Realistic profit after Etsy fees and postage on 12 sales is closer to £18 to £22. That is two and a half hours of work for £20: better than nothing but it explains why successful candle businesses lean hard on direct sales (markets, Instagram, repeat customers) where the platform fee is zero.