This microgreens profit calculator turns your seed variety, growing costs and selling price into one number: what you actually clear per tray.
Enter your own figures instead of borrowing someone else's spreadsheet and you'll see exactly where a tray's cost comes from.
It's built for anyone weighing a side hustle against a full grow room, from ten trays on a spare shelf to a commercial operation.
Type in a variety and the calculator fills in a seed cost and labor time pulled from sourced field data. From there it works forward to profit per tray, a full cost breakdown and monthly and annual totals.
Enter a startup budget too and you'll also get a break even tray count and a payback period.
Most guides answer the question of how much profit can you make growing microgreens with one number pulled from nowhere in particular.
This one sources its defaults instead. Seed costs by variety come from Utah State University Extension's current pricing table (USU Extension, 2026).
Yield ranges trace back to the Johnny's Selected Seeds 2017 trial and labor minutes per tray come from a Northeast SARE funded field study (Northeast SARE, 2023) that timed harvesting and packing by hand.
Every default stays editable, because your setup, seed lot and technique will move the real numbers. And because a profit figure is only as good as the cost figure behind it this doubles as a microgreens cost calculator first.
Get every line under costs per tray right and the profit number that follows actually means something. What it adds beyond a flat spreadsheet is the 75% gross margin line built into the results bar.
That target tells you at a glance whether you're in the healthy range or losing money to a cost you haven't noticed yet.
Start by picking a variety: sunflower, pea shoots, radish, broccoli, kale, arugula, basil or cilantro. Seed cost, labor minutes and the suggested yield range update immediately. Sunflower and pea shoots also unlock a full biomass harvest checkbox.
Tick it and the yield range jumps from a light, tender cut to a heavier, longer grown harvest since both crops support either approach and the two yields aren't close.
Yield per tray, in ounces, comes next and it's the one field worth checking yourself rather than trusting the default. Cut a tray, weigh the harvest on a kitchen scale before packaging and adjust the number. Every light setup and seed lot shifts it. Sometimes by a third.
Set trays per cycle and cycles per month after that.
The calculator suggests a cycle count based on your variety's grow time plus two days for cleaning and reseeding but edit it if you stagger plantings through the week instead of harvesting everything at once.
Under costs per tray, choose a growing medium and a packaging format, each with its own default cost and adjust the electricity estimate to your local rate if it looks off.
Then check the labor line. Fifteen minutes per tray is the field timed default for most varieties though pea shoots drop to five minutes because hand harvesting them moves faster.
Toggle pricing between retail, priced per ounce and wholesale, priced per whole tray to match your actual sales channel.
If you're testing a real startup budget, open the optional section for monthly overhead and a one time investment figure, where the calculator hands you a break even tray count and a payback period instead of stopping at a per tray number.
Profit per tray sits at the top: revenue per tray minus every cost you entered, labor and overhead included when it's turned on. Below it the margin line and bar show that profit as a share of revenue measured against a dashed marker at 75%.
That figure isn't arbitrary. Growers and consultants in the field routinely flag a gross margin under 60% as a real warning sign (HortiDaily, 2025) so a tool aiming you at 75% is asking you to clear the danger zone by a wide margin not just scrape past it.
Cost per tray and revenue per tray split the same math into its two halves, useful for spotting which side needs work.
Trays per month is simply trays per cycle multiplied by cycles per month and monthly and annual profit scale that per tray number up to what a real production run would actually pay you.
Enter a startup figure and break even tells you how many trays clear that investment while payback period converts the same math into months. Skip those fields and both stay hidden since not every grower is financing equipment.
The cost breakdown at the bottom rewards a second look on its own: for most varieties, labor and seed cost dominate the total not electricity or packaging and seeing that split is usually where growers find their first real cost to cut.
This fits three kinds of grower most cleanly. Someone testing the idea on a spare shelf, running ten trays a week trying to work out whether a few hundred dollars of gear pays for itself before committing to more space.
A side business grower already selling at a weekend market who needs to know whether raising the price by a dollar an ounce or switching from basil to sunflower, actually moves the needle.
And a grower scaling toward a dedicated facility who needs the overhead and payback fields not just a per tray number before signing a lease.
If you're still working out how much seed a given tray needs before you get this far that's worth calculating first since seeding rate is exactly what sets the seed cost this tool asks you to enter.
The overhead and startup fields borrow their logic from a real commercial financial model published by Alberta Agriculture and Forestry (Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, 2018) which priced out a 2,000 square foot facility producing 960 trays a month.
That's where the $6.25 per tray overhead default and the $109,284 startup figure both come from.
It's also where the basil warning comes from: even after raising the sale price from $25 to $30 a tray the model's basil line still lost money every year because basil's longer grow cycle and delicate handling roughly double its labor cost against every other variety in the study.
Most guides skip this kind of variety by variety failure case and just repeat that microgreens are high margin in general.
Scale changes the payback math more than most guides admit, too. A small setup with a few hundred dollars in gear can pay for itself in a matter of weeks once sales are steady.
The commercial model above, at nearly six figures of startup cost, penciled out to roughly three years to pay back the full investment even while running at a healthy 30% profit margin goal the whole way.
Neither number is wrong on its own. Whether growing microgreens is profitable for you depends on which bet you're actually making, not on a single average.
Say you're growing radish for a farmers market table: 10 trays a cycle, about 4 cycles a month, clamshells at $3 an ounce.
Enter radish's sourced 8 to 11.5 ounce yield range along with the default costs for medium, packaging and 15 minutes of labor at $15 an hour and the cost to grow microgreens per tray lands around $6 to $7.
That leaves roughly $2 to $3 of profit per tray or a few hundred dollars a month at this volume. A realistic small scale number not the inflated one off you sometimes see in forum threads.
Now say you're weighing whether to add broccoli at commercial scale: 80 trays a cycle, 12 cycles a month, wholesale at $30 a tray with $6,000 in monthly overhead spread across your full output.
Broccoli's seed cost runs close to $1.12 a tray by the sourced Extension pricing, higher than sunflower's or radish's though its labor time matches the standard 15 minute default.
Run the numbers and the fixed overhead allocation drags harder on broccoli's margin than on a cheaper seeded variety at the same volume since overhead gets spread per tray regardless of what that tray cost to seed.
Worth seeing before you commit shelf space broccoli might not repay as fast as sunflower or pea shoots would.
None of this replaces a season of your own sales data.
Every input here is a benchmark pulled from field trials and extension research not a guarantee for your specific climate, market or technique and a wholesale account you land might negotiate a very different price than the market rate this calculator assumes.
Treat the first output as a planning number, then swap in real costs as you collect them.
Run your own numbers through this microgreens profit calculator before you order seed for next week not after. A sourced yield range and a labor default only get you close.
The moment you swap in your real cost per tray, your real sale price and your real cycle count the number on screen stops being a guess and starts being the one you'll actually see in your account at the end of the month.
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