COST CALCULATOR
What a company makes per second
Enter a public company's annual revenue, profit, and employee count to see what it earns per second, per hour, and per employee hour.
Revenue per second
$3.17 a second
A $100,000,000 company takes in $3.17 every second and $11,416 an hour, and keeps $0.2537 a second of it as profit.
Revenue spread over all 31,536,000 seconds in a calendar year, across 400 people on payroll.
Check your numbers.
Total revenue or net sales, from the most recent annual report.
Net income from the same report, the last line rather than operating income.
Total headcount, or a public estimate of it.
WORKED EXAMPLES
Every row runs the same formula the calculator does; Try it loads one into the fields above.
| Scenario | Revenue per second | Revenue per hour | Load it |
|---|---|---|---|
| A $100 million company | $3.17 | $11,416 | |
| A $2 million firm | $0.0634 | $228.31 | |
| A $10 billion company | $317.10 | $1,141,553 | |
| A $650 billion retailer | $20,611 | $74,200,913 |
A company with $100 million in annual revenue takes in about $3.17 every second, whether or not anyone is watching the number. That works out to about $11,400 an hour, and it runs at the same pace at three in the morning as it does at three in the afternoon, because a sale does not know what time zone it landed in. Give that same company $8 million in annual profit and 400 people on payroll, and the clock also shows about a quarter of a dollar of profit kept every second, and roughly $28.54 of revenue tied to each employee for every hour on the calendar. Enter a different company's numbers and every figure below moves with them.
The clock that never stops
The math behind the top figure is plain division. Take the annual revenue and spread it across every second in a calendar year, 31,536,000 of them, which is 365 days times 24 hours times 3,600 seconds, rather than the 2,080 working hours the labor calculators on this site use for a salary. A paycheck only counts hours someone is at a desk. Revenue does not work that way. A retailer's website takes orders overnight, a subscription renews on a schedule that has nothing to do with anyone's shift, and a factory in one time zone ships to a customer in another while the first plant is dark. Spreading revenue over the full calendar year is what makes the per second figure honest about how a company actually earns.
Worked through at the default: $100,000,000 divided by 31,536,000 seconds is $3.170979 a second, shown as $3.17. Multiply by 3,600 and the hour is $11,415.52, which the tile above prints as $11,416, because every figure on this site drops the cents once it reaches five digits. The profit line runs the identical division on $8,000,000 and lands at $0.2537 a second.
A leap year adds a 366th day to the same annual total, which nudges the per second number down by about a quarter of a percent for that one year. It is small enough to ignore for almost any use, but worth knowing if a figure looks slightly off against a number from a different year.
Revenue is not profit
Revenue and profit answer two different questions, and this page keeps them apart on purpose. Revenue is everything that came in the door before a single bill got paid: payroll, rent, materials, interest, taxes. Profit, specifically net income, is what is left after every one of those bills is paid. A company can grow its revenue every year and still lose money on the bottom line, and a company with flat revenue can become far more profitable by cutting costs. The per second profit figure on this page is almost always the smaller of the two numbers, sometimes by a wide margin, and a business with a profit figure near zero is telling you something the revenue number alone hides completely.
What the per-employee figure is and is not
The revenue per employee hour figure divides the company's hourly revenue by its headcount. It is a scale ratio, not a claim about how hard any one person works. It says nothing about margins, nothing about how many of those employees touch a sale directly versus keeping the lights on in finance or legal, and nothing about hours actually worked versus hours on payroll. A capital-intensive company with a small headcount and expensive equipment will show a very high number here for reasons that have nothing to do with effort, and a company that just made a large acquisition will show a number reflecting two payrolls merging before the revenue from both sides has fully combined. Treat it as a size comparison between companies, not a productivity score for any person in the building.
Reading the figures at four scales
The four worked examples below span five orders of magnitude on purpose. A $2 million firm earns about six cents a second. A $100 million company earns $3.17. A $10 billion company earns $317. A $650 billion retailer earns about $20,611 every second, which is more than most of its own staff earn in a quarter. The revenue per employee hour figure, meanwhile, stays inside a narrow band across all four: $19.03, $28.54, $45.66, $35.33. Revenue scales with size. Revenue per person does not, and that contrast is the most useful thing on this page.
Finding the numbers, and where people go wrong
Both money inputs come from the same place: a public company's income statement, filed as part of its annual report, the Form 10-K, and searchable for free on the SEC's EDGAR system. Revenue usually appears near the top as total revenue or net sales. Profit is net income, the very last line, not operating income and not EBITDA, which both leave real costs out. Mixing up the two is the single most common way this page gets fed a misleading number.
The other common mistake is annualizing a single quarter by multiplying it by four. That works reasonably well for a company whose business is steady across the year, and works badly for one that is not: a retailer can book a third or more of its yearly revenue in the final quarter alone, so a fourth quarter times four overstates the year and a first quarter times four understates it. When a quarterly figure is all that is available, say so to yourself and treat the per second number as a rough one.
This page prices a whole company against the calendar. For the same division run at the scale of one team, over the minutes of a single afternoon, the live meter on the home page counts a meeting upward while it happens.
The constants
| Constant | Value | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Seconds in a calendar year | 31,536,000 | arithmetic |
| Seconds in an hour | 3,600 | arithmetic |
Sources
Questions
Is this page showing revenue or profit?
Both, and the page keeps them separate on purpose. Revenue is the top line figure, everything a company took in before any bill was paid. Profit is net income, what is left after every cost, including taxes, has come out. The per second profit figure is almost always the smaller number, sometimes only a fraction of the revenue figure, and a company with revenue growing while profit shrinks is a real pattern this page is built to show rather than hide behind a single combined number.
Why does this page use 365 days a year instead of the 2,080 hours the other calculators use?
Because revenue does not clock in and out the way a paycheck does. A salary only counts hours someone is actually working, so the labor calculators on this site spread a salary over a work year. Revenue keeps arriving on nights, weekends, and holidays, from online orders, automatic renewals, and operations running in other time zones. Spreading it over the full 31,536,000 seconds in a calendar year is the only version of the math that matches how a company actually earns.
I only have one quarter's revenue and profit. How do I turn that into a yearly figure?
Multiply both numbers by four for a rough annual estimate, and treat the result as approximate rather than exact. That shortcut works fine for a business whose revenue is steady month to month. It works poorly for a seasonal one: a retailer that books a third of its year in the last quarter will show an inflated annual figure if that quarter is the one you multiplied, and a deflated one if you used the slowest quarter instead. Use a full trailing twelve months when one is available.
Does a high revenue per employee hour mean the average worker is more productive?
No. The figure only divides a company's hourly revenue by its headcount, and says nothing about margins, costs, or how many of those employees actually touch a sale. A company with expensive machinery and a small staff will show a high number for reasons that have nothing to do with individual effort, and a company that just completed a merger can show a distorted number while two payrolls and one revenue line settle into place. Use it to compare scale between companies, not to judge people.
Why is the per employee figure a clock hour rather than a working hour?
Because the revenue it divides is a clock-hour figure. Revenue per hour on this page comes from a calendar year of 8,760 hours, so dividing it by headcount gives revenue per person per hour of the calendar, not per hour anyone was at work. It is a scale ratio between companies. If you want revenue against hours actually worked, divide the annual revenue by headcount and then by a work year instead.