Runway & Hiring Plan Calculator
How long the money lasts, and what each new hire costs you in weeks of runway.
Replaces: Paid CFO tooling and $99 founder spreadsheet templates
How to use it
Enter what you hold, what you earn, and who you plan to hire. The model walks forward 24 months, adding hires to payroll as they land, and reports the month the cash runs out — or the month gross profit covers costs, whichever comes first.
Where the number comes from
- Revenue compounds at the monthly growth rate you set, so month 12 is the starting figure multiplied by (1 + growth) to the eleventh power.
- Only gross profit — revenue times gross margin — is available to pay costs. Using revenue instead is what makes most runway estimates too optimistic.
- Payroll starts at today's figure and rises as hires accumulate, stopping at the month you set. Fractional hiring rates only add whole people.
- Net burn is total costs minus gross profit. Where gross profit exceeds costs, burn is negative and cash grows.
- Runway is the first month the closing cash balance goes below zero.
What goes wrong
The part most calculators leave out.
- Sustained monthly growth is the assumption that breaks. A rate held flat for 24 months implies a company that never has a bad quarter, never loses a large customer and never faces a slow enterprise sales cycle.
- New hires are modelled as productive from day one. In reality most cost full salary for three to six months before contributing, which pulls the cash-out month earlier than shown.
- Runway is not the date to start fundraising. Raising typically takes three to six months of full attention, and doing it with under six months of cash weakens your position badly.
- Gross margin is assumed constant. If you are growing by discounting, or your hosting and support costs scale with usage, real margin falls as revenue rises.
- Payroll here should be fully loaded. Base salary alone understates the true cost by a quarter or more — see the true cost of an employee calculator.
The hire that costs four months of runway
A company holds 2.4m and burns 180,000 a month — a little over 13 months of runway. It plans to add one person a month at 11,000 fully loaded. By month six, payroll has risen by 66,000 and burn has risen with it, even after allowing for revenue growth. The runway that looked like 13 months at the start is nearer nine by the time the sixth hire signs. Nothing went wrong; the plan simply spent the runway it was measured against.
Questions
- Should runway use revenue or gross profit?
- Gross profit. If it costs you 22 cents to deliver a dollar of revenue, only 78 cents is available to pay the team. Runway models built on gross revenue routinely overstate by several months.
- When should I start raising?
- Conventionally, when six to nine months of runway remain, because a raise commonly takes three to six months from first meeting to money in the bank. Running a process below six months means negotiating from a position everyone can see.
- Why does the model stop at 24 months?
- Because monthly growth assumptions stop being meaningful much beyond that. A forecast that shows five years of compounding growth is describing a spreadsheet, not a business.
- Does anything I type get sent anywhere?
- No. The whole calculation runs in your browser. Nothing is transmitted, stored, or logged, and there is no account to create.
Last updated .
Put this calculator on your site
Free to embed, on any site, commercial or not. No sign-up and no tracking script — the calculator runs in your reader’s browser exactly as it does here. All we ask is that you keep the credit line.
The small script resizes the frame as the reader changes inputs. Drop it if your CMS strips scripts — the calculator still works, it will just stay at a fixed height.