Monthly Burn Rate Calculator

How to use it

1. Enter your cash on hand, your monthly revenue, and your monthly costs in five buckets: payroll, facilities, technology, marketing, and other. Sort honestly (contractors with payroll, software with technology, rent with facilities) because the category breakdown is what turns a single burn number into an actionable one. Include everything that leaves the account each month, since the most common mistake is forgetting annualised contracts, payroll taxes, or the tools nobody remembers subscribing to.
2. Read gross burn (total expenses), net burn (gross minus revenue), runway in months, annualised burn, and the per-category breakdown with each category's share of spend. Gross burn tells you the size of the machine; net burn tells you how fast cash actually drains. If revenue covers expenses, runway shows as effectively unlimited, which is the signal that you have crossed into self-sustaining territory.
3. Use the category breakdown to find where the money actually goes rather than where you assume it goes. If payroll is 70% of burn, no amount of cancelling small software subscriptions will move runway meaningfully, and the real lever is headcount or revenue. A category that has crept above its expected share is usually the first place to look before a broad cost-cutting exercise.
4. Translate net burn into decisions by testing what a 10% revenue increase does to runway versus a 10% expense cut. Often the expense cut is faster and more certain than the revenue bet, but this tool lets you compare them in months rather than arguing about them in the abstract. Watch the runway figure cross below six months, the point where most teams should already be raising or restructuring.
5. Re-run monthly from your actual close data and after any hire, contract, or pricing change. Track net burn and runway as a trend, because a single bad month can pull the cash-out date forward sharply. Pair this with the burn multiple tool to check whether the spend is buying efficient growth and the startup runway tool to model growth and burn-cut scenarios together.

Related calculators

• Startup Bootstrapped Runway Calculator

  Calculate personal runway and months to ramen/fully profitable from savings, side income, and MRR growth.

• Startup Solo Founder Unit Economics

  Calculate LTV, CAC, payback, and break-even customers calibrated for bootstrapped scale with organic CAC.

• Startup Break-Even Units Calculator

  Find break-even units, revenue, and target-profit volume fast.

• Startup Startup Runway Calculator

  Calculate months of runway from cash, burn rate, and revenue growth assumptions.

Articles

• 9 min read Best Free Runway & Burn-Rate Calculators 2026

  Best free runway and burn-rate calculators 2026: no-signup tools for bootstrapped runway, burn multiple, and monthly burn, vs the paid FP&A platforms.

• 8 min read How to Reduce Burn Rate Without Killing Growth

  Reduce burn through vendor consolidation, sales-efficiency discipline, and targeted hiring freezes, not flat across-the-board headcount cuts.

• 9 min read Burn Multiple of 1.67: What It Means for a Solo Founder

  A 1.67 burn multiple on $5k monthly burn and $3k monthly net new ARR is workable for solo founders only when personal runway covers the gap.

More in Bootstrapped growth

See when cash runs out, what you need to break even, and how to grow without funding.

• Startup Runway Calculator
• Break-Even Units Calculator
• Sales Forecast Calculator
• ROI + Payback Period Calculator

Use it from code

The same calculation as a JavaScript module you can import. It runs where you import it, with no request, key or rate limit.

import { compute } from "https://aibizhub.io/engines/monthly-burn-rate-calculator.js";

Input and output contract, TypeScript types and the guide for agents.