Free candle making cost and pricing calculator. Enter wax, fragrance oil, wick, container, label, packaging, and labor costs; outputs cost per candle, batch total, and a suggested retail price using your markup multiplier.
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software
Use when setting a price for a new candle scent or size, or when wax/fragrance oil supplier costs change and you need to re-check your margin.
Many candle makers track costs in a spreadsheet; this gives the same per-unit breakdown instantly and recalculates suggested price the moment any input changes.
A batch of 24 candles costs $224.02 to make ($9.33/candle), suggesting a retail price of $25.67 each.
Wax cost per candle = (wax cost per lb ÷ 16) × wax weight in oz × (1 + pour waste %), and fragrance oil cost = wax weight × fragrance load % × FO cost per oz.
Unit cost sums wax, fragrance oil, wick, container, label, packaging, and labor cost (labor minutes ÷ 60 × hourly rate).
Suggested retail price = unit cost × markup multiplier; batch total cost = unit cost × batch size.
Maximum safe fragrance load varies by wax type and the fragrance oil's supplier-tested limit, but 6–10% is a common range for soy and coconut-soy blends. Exceeding the tested max can cause the candle to sweat oil, burn poorly, or fail flash-point safety margins.
Melted wax sticks to pouring pitchers, gets left in pour-spouts, and some batches are lost to testing and quality control. A 5% waste allowance keeps your cost estimate from underselling how much wax an actual batch consumes.
A 2.5–3× markup over unit cost is a common retail target for handmade candles, while wholesale pricing is often closer to 2× cost since retailers add their own margin on top. This calculator defaults to 2.75× but you should adjust it to match your market and competition.
Input
8 oz candle, $6/lb wax, 8% fragrance load, $0.60/oz FO, 5% waste, $0.15 wick, $1.50 jar, default labor and 2.75× markup.
Output
Unit cost ≈ $3.61 → suggested price ≈ $9.92.
Wax cost ($6/16 × 8oz × 1.05 ≈ $3.15) plus FO (0.64 oz × $0.60 ≈ $0.38); total unit cost sums wax, FO, wick, jar, label, packaging, and labor, then multiplies by the markup to get a suggested retail price.
The model starts from wax cost per pound and the pour weight, then adds fragrance oil as a percentage of wax — defaulting to 8%, in the normal 6–10% band for container candles. Fragrance oil is expensive per ounce relative to wax, so the load percentage moves unit cost more than its size suggests.
The 5% waste allowance covers what stays in the pouring pitcher and what is lost to trimming and failed pours. It is small, real, and consistently forgotten in hand-built costings.
Labour is entered as minutes per batch at an hourly rate and divided across the batch — 15 minutes across 24 candles at $15 an hour is about 16 cents each. Batch size matters as much as the rate: the same setup time spread over six candles instead of twenty-four quadruples the per-unit labour.
The markup defaults to 2.75×, which sits in the usual handmade range between keystone (2×) and the 3× many makers target to leave room for wholesale. If you intend to sell wholesale as well as direct, the retail price needs to support roughly half itself as a wholesale price, and setting markup too low forecloses that channel entirely.
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