By Heidi Macomber · July 28, 2026 (updated July 31, 2026)

A burger is the most common item on independent menus and the one most owners cost wrong. Here's how to calculate the real cost of a burger, ingredient by ingredient, without getting burned by shrinkage, garnishes, or the bun you forgot to include.

Why Burgers Leak Money

Burgers feel cheap to make. Ground beef, a bun, some cheese. What's there to calculate?

Plenty. A burger has six to ten ingredients, two of them (beef and bacon) lose serious weight in cooking. The cheese gets portioned by hand. The sauce is a recipe inside a recipe. And because burgers sell in high volume, a 40-cent costing error on one burger becomes real money by the end of the week.

If you serve 150 burgers a day and your portion cost is off by $0.40 each, you're losing $60 a day. That's $21,900 a year walking out the door on a single menu item.

The good news is that burger cost calculation isn't complicated. It's just easy to skip steps. This guide walks through every one.

The Burger Cost Formula

The core formula is the same one that applies to any menu item:

Burger cost = (Cost of all ingredients for the batch) ÷ (Number of burgers the batch yields)

That's it. Add up everything that goes into the batch, divide by how many burgers you get out of it, and you have your cost per burger.

The formula is five seconds of math. The work is in getting the ingredient costs right, which is where most operators cut corners.

Step 1: Cost the Beef Correctly

This is where burger cost calculation goes off the rails for almost everyone.

You buy ground beef by the pound, raw. Your recipe card says "6 oz beef per burger." So you take your invoice price per pound, divide by 16, multiply by 6, and call it done.

That number is wrong. Here's why.

Ground beef loses 25 to 30 percent of its weight when you cook it. A 6-ounce raw patty becomes roughly a 4.5-ounce cooked patty. If your recipe says you serve 6 ounces of beef but you actually serve 4.5, your customers aren't getting what the card promises. More importantly for costing, if you're calculating based on raw weight but portioning cooked weight (or vice versa), your numbers don't reflect reality.

There are two ways to handle this. Pick one and be consistent.

Method A: Cost by raw weight, portion by raw weight. Weigh the patty before it goes on the grill. Cost the recipe using raw weight and your raw invoice price. Simple and accurate as long as your portioning happens before cooking.

Method B: Cost by cooked yield. If you portion after cooking, or if your recipe specifies a cooked weight on the plate, you need to account for shrinkage. To get 6 ounces of cooked beef, you need about 8 ounces raw. Cost the burger using the raw amount required to produce your target cooked portion.

Let's say you buy 80/20 ground beef at $3.40 per pound.

• Raw cost per ounce: $3.40 ÷ 16 = $0.21/oz
• For a 6-ounce raw patty: 6 × $0.21 = $1.26
• For a 6-ounce cooked portion (requires ~8 oz raw): 8 × $0.21 = $1.68

That's a 42-cent difference per burger. Multiply by 150 burgers a day and you're looking at $63 a day, just from getting the beef math wrong.

Pick the method that matches how you actually portion. Don't mix them.

Step 2: Cost the Bun

This one is straightforward but people still skip it.

Buns are bought by the dozen or case. Divide the case cost by the number of buns. That's your per-bun cost.

A case of 72 brioche buns costs $23.04. Per bun: $0.32.

Don't forget to account for stale or broken buns. If you throw out 4 buns per case of 72, your real cost per usable bun is $23.04 ÷ 68 = $0.34, not $0.32. Small adjustment. It adds up.

Step 3: Cost the Cheese

Cheese is portioned by the slice or by weight, and the method depends on what you use.

For sliced cheese (American, cheddar, provolone), the math is simple. A 5-pound block of cheddar costs $22.00. You slice it into 20 slices per pound, so 100 slices total. Cost per slice: $0.22.

For shredded cheese, weigh the portion. If you top a burger with 0.8 ounces of shredded cheddar and your cheddar costs $4.40 per pound ($0.275 per ounce), your cheese cost is 0.8 × $0.275 = $0.22.

If a burger gets two slices instead of one, double it. This sounds obvious but I've seen recipe cards that list "cheese" as one line item without specifying the count, and the line cook is putting two slices on while the costing assumes one.

Step 4: Cost the Bacon (If Applicable)

Bacon has the same shrinkage problem as beef, but worse. Raw bacon loses about 60 percent of its weight during cooking. A slice that weighs 1 ounce raw becomes roughly 0.4 ounces cooked.

For costing, the cleanest approach is to price by the strip, not by weight, because that's how you portion it.

You buy bacon at $4.80 per pound. Each raw slice averages 1 ounce. That's $0.30 per raw strip. After cooking, you lose more than half the weight to rendered fat and moisture. But since you portion by strip count (one or two slices per burger), the raw-strip cost is what matters for your formula.

Two strips per burger: $0.60.

If you crumble bacon as a topping rather than laying strips on whole, switch to cooked-weight costing. Weigh the crumbles you actually use and divide by the yield from a known raw amount.

Step 5: Don't Forget the Produce

Lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles. These feel like afterthoughts but they're real money, especially at volume.

Each one needs to be costed by the usable yield, not the as-purchased weight. If you're new to AP (As Purchased) and EP (Edible Portion) costing, our complete AP vs. EP cost guide explains how yield percentages work and why they change your recipe math.

A burger with all four toppings adds $0.36 in produce cost. Skip this line in your calculation and you're understating cost by 36 cents on every burger.

Step 6: Cost the Sauce and Seasoning

House sauce, ketchup, mustard, mayo. These are recipes within the recipe.

If you make a special burger sauce, cost it out separately first. Say your sauce recipe (mayo, ketchup, pickles, spices) costs $2.80 for a quart (32 ounces). Per ounce: $0.0875. If you use 0.5 ounce per burger, that's $0.04.

For condiments from a bottle, divide the bottle cost by the number of servings. A 20-ounce bottle of ketchup costs $2.40. At 0.3 ounce per squeeze, that's roughly 66 servings. Cost per burger: $0.04.

Seasoning matters too. A pinch of salt and pepper is small but not zero. If you use a pre-mixed seasoning blend, cost it by weight applied. Call it $0.01 per burger. It feels silly to track but across hundreds of burgers, it's real money.

Cooking oil or grill spray: if you brush buns with butter before toasting, that's $0.02 to $0.04 per burger depending on how generous you are. Add it.

The Full Burger Cost Calculation

Let's put it all together for a bacon cheeseburger with all the toppings.

That's the real cost. Not $1.50 (which is what you get if you only count beef, bun, and cheese). Not $2.00 (which is what you get if you forget the bacon cook yield and the produce). $2.83.

Turning Cost Into Price

Once you know your burger costs $2.83 to make, you can price it.

If your target food cost percentage is 28 percent:

$2.83 ÷ 0.28 = $10.11

So you'd need to charge at least $10.11 to hit a 28 percent food cost on this burger. In practice you'd round to $10.99 or $11.50 depending on your market and what the competition charges.

If you're currently selling this burger at $9.00 because you thought it cost $1.80, your food cost percentage is 31.4 percent. Not catastrophic on its own, but if the rest of your menu has the same costing errors, your overall food cost is running way higher than you think.

Common Burger Costing Mistakes

Costing raw beef as if it were cooked. The single most expensive mistake. A 6-ounce raw patty is not the same cost as 6 ounces of cooked beef. Know which one your recipe means.

Leaving out the toppings. Lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles. Each one is cheap. All of them together are 36 cents. On a $9 burger, that's 4 percent of your revenue you didn't account for.

Forgetting the sauce. House sauce, ketchup, mayo. Portion by weight or count the servings per bottle. Don't treat condiments as free.

Ignoring bacon shrinkage. If you cost bacon by raw weight but portion by strip count, your numbers will be close. If you cost by raw weight and then portion by cooked weight, you'll be off by more than half.

Not recalculating when beef prices spike. Ground beef is one of the most volatile proteins on the market. If your distributor price jumps 15 percent and you don't update your recipe cost, every burger you sell is priced against a number that no longer exists. Check beef prices monthly, minimum.

Portion drift on the line. Your recipe says 6 ounces of beef. Your cook is using 7 because the scoop is slightly oversized or they're hand-forming without a scale. That extra ounce is 21 cents per burger. Weigh portions periodically. The formula only works if the portion matches the card.

How Percy Plate Handles This

You can do all of this in a spreadsheet. Plenty of operators do. It works until a supplier changes a price and you have to recalculate every recipe that uses ground beef by hand.

Percy Plate handles the parts that make burger costing painful to maintain:

• Ingredient costs with automatic unit conversions, so you buy by the pound and portion by the ounce without manual math
• Yield adjustments for shrinkage, so your cooked beef cost reflects what actually hits the plate
• Recipe costing that updates across your entire menu when one ingredient price changes
• Portion cost shown against your menu price, so you see immediately when a burger drifts out of your target food cost range

The point is not to have tidier spreadsheets. It's to know what every burger costs you, today, with the prices you're paying this week.

Start With Your Best-Selling Burger

You don't have to cost every burger on your menu today. Start with the one that sells the most.

Pull the recipe card. Write down every ingredient, the portion size, and what you pay per unit. Account for shrinkage on the beef and bacon. Include the toppings, the sauce, the bun, the butter.

Add it up. Compare it to what you charge.

If the number is higher than you expected, you're in good company. Most operators find their real burger cost is 30 to 50 percent higher than what they had in their head. That's the whole point of running the calculation. Once you know the real number, pricing gets simpler and the guessing stops.

Related Guides

• As Purchased vs. Edible Portion: The Hidden Cost Every Food Business Gets Wrong — Why the price on the invoice is not your true ingredient cost, and how to calculate yield
• How to Calculate Food Cost Percentage: A Complete Guide — The foundational formula every food business needs
• Recipe Costing 101 — How to cost out any recipe, step by step
• Food Truck Food Cost Percentage Benchmark — What your food cost should be if you run a truck

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