How I calculate craft show profit

May 10, 2026

After spending an entire weekend on my feet at a craft fair — hauling inventory, setting up my booth before sunrise, smiling through hours of foot traffic — there's nothing quite like tallying up my sales and feeling that rush of excitement. But here's the thing: that top-line number? It's not the whole truth.

I've been running a handmade product business for years, and I'll be the first to admit that I used to walk away from markets thinking I'd had a great day, only to realize later that the profit wasn't nearly as high as I'd thought once I factored in all my actual costs. So I did what any left-brained creative would do — I built a system for figuring out what my market profit actually is.

Here's exactly how I calculate my real profit from a craft fair, broken down into five key metrics.

The 5 Metrics That Actually Matter

1. Booth Fee (All In)

This one sounds simple, but it's easy to undercount. My booth fee isn't just the base registration cost — it's every dollar I paid to secure that spot. That means I include:

Transaction or processing fees charged at checkout
Electrical upgrade fees
"Choose your own spot" premium fees
Any other add-ons I selected when I registered

Every one of those line items needs to go into my tally.

2. Travel Costs

I use an app called Stride to track my mileage. I turn it on when I leave my house and off when I arrive at the venue, and Stride converts that distance into a dollar value based on the IRS standard mileage reimbursement rate. It gives me a real, tangible cost for the drive — not just a vague sense that "gas cost something."

A couple of habits I've built around this:

I log the trip to and from the event separately, with a note for each entry so I can trace it back later.
I always remind myself to turn Stride back on for the drive home. After a long market day, it's so easy to forget to do!

3. On-Site Expenses

These are the day-of costs that quietly eat into my margin: coffee, lunch, snacks, parking — anything I spend money on because I'm physically at that event. They feel small in the moment, but they add up fast.

One thing I don't include here: display fixtures or booth decor, even if I bought them specifically for a show. Those are long-term investments I'll use at multiple events, so they don't belong in any single event's expense column.

4. Average Cost of Goods Sold

This is where things get a little more nuanced. It's hard to use the exact production cost of every item I sold at the event, since they vary from product-to-product, so instead I use my average cost of goods sold — the percentage of my selling price that went into making the product.

For most of my products, I aim for a 4x markup, which means my cost of goods is roughly 25% of my selling price. That's the number I use in my calculations.

This is a little controversial, but I'll be honest — I don't always include my time in that figure. My thinking is that if I have a healthy enough margin (25% COGS or less), the profit naturally covers the time I put into making, packaging, and prepping the product. But if I were only operating at a 10% markup? That would be a completely different conversation.

5. Net Sales (Not Gross)

This is a metric people get wrong sometimes. My net sales figure is not the total on my square reader at the end of the day. It's what I actually take home after subtracting:

Sales tax collected (that money goes to the government, not to me)
Transaction fees from my payment processor
Discounts I offered (like a "2 for $40" deal on prints that normally retail for $22 each)

That $44 sale that became $40 because of a bundle deal, so we need to count it as $40. The sales tax tacked on at checkout? It goes straight to the government, so it has no business being part of the profit calculation. Net sales only.

The Actual Math

Once I have all five numbers, here's how I put them together:

Step 1: Start with net sales. This this example, lets assume a $1,000 net sales day.

Step 2: Subtract my cost of goods sold. With a 25% COGS, I multiply my net sales by 0.75 (the inverse of .25). $1,000 × 0.75 = $750 gross profit from products

Step 3: Subtract the booth fee. $750 − $200 booth fee = $550

Step 4: Subtract travel costs. $550 − $25 in mileage both ways = $500

Step 5: Subtract on-site expenses. $500 − $10 for coffee and a cookie = $490

That's my real profit for the day: $490.

Is that still a good day? Maybe! But it's a very different story from the $1,000 I started with. And without this breakdown, I would have walked away thinking I made more than twice as much as I actually did!

The Bonus Metric: Profit Per Hour

Once I have my actual profit number, I take it one step further (because I'm a nerd); I divide it by the number of selling hours I was at the event. Not setup hours, not teardown hours — just the hours when I was actively selling.

Why? Because in running a design studio in addition to this business, and I'm always comparing how my market income stacks up against what I could have billed in that same window of time. (In case you forgot, time IS your most valuable resource.) Knowing my profit per hour gives me an honest, apples-to-apples comparison of how I'm profiting on my time.

It can be humbling. But it's also incredibly useful. If I spent 4 hours setting up and only walked away with $250 at the end of the day, that's information I need to be able to decide whether I want to apply to that market again next year.

Why I Track This for Every Single Event

I log all of this in a spreadsheet — every event, every year. That running record lets me:

Compare markets against each other to spot which ones are most worth my time.
Track year-over-year performance at the same markets.
Identify outliers I might have misjudged. This might be events I thought were weak sellers that are actually quite strong at a per-hour rate, and events I assumed were great that don't hold up when I do the math.

The goal isn't to feel bad about any given market. The goal is to have real, transparent data so I can make smarter decisions about where I spend my time.

Want to Skip the Setup? I've Got a Spreadsheet for That

If all of this sounds like a lot to build from scratch, I've got you covered. A couple of years ago, I put together a spreadsheet that runs these calculations automatically. You plug in your numbers and it spits out your profit by day (handy for multi-day events) and your profit per hour — no formula-wrangling required.

As of right now, it's only $15. Honestly, unless you bill yourself out at $2 or $3 an hour, it's probably worth more than the time it would take you to build it yourself — it took me several hours to get it right when I first made it. You can grab it right here if you're interested.

The Bottom Line

It's incredibly easy to trick yourself into thinking a craft fair was more profitable than it was — especially when you're exhausted at the end of the day and the booth fee feels like ancient history. But taking the time to track these five numbers — booth fee, travel, on-site expenses, cost of goods, and net sales — gives me a clear picture of what I actually earned.

And once I have that clarity? I can make better decisions: which markets to return to, which ones to drop, and whether I need to adjust my product mix or pricing to improve my margins.

That $1,000 sales day might really be a $490 day. And knowing the difference is everything.

Do you track your craft fair profitability, or have you been going off that top-line number? Drop a comment below and let me know.