Free tool
Social Media ROI Calculator
Work out what social media actually costs you every month, hours included, and what it returns against the revenue you can credibly attribute to it. The return on your total cost is free on this page. The full breakdown, including the hours a scheduling workflow gives back, comes by email.
Last updated: 2026-08-06
Ask most teams what social media costs and the answer is a subscription line: a scheduler, maybe a design tool, forty or eighty dollars a month. That figure is almost never the cost. The cost is the hours, and the hours stay invisible because nobody invoices for them. The afternoon spent writing five captions, the twenty minutes lost re-uploading the same video to a third network, the Sunday evening spent catching up because Thursday got away from someone. Price those hours properly and the monthly total usually moves by an order of magnitude, which is the entire reason this calculator exists.
The arithmetic is the one a finance team would use. Weekly hours become monthly hours by multiplying by 4.345, the average number of weeks in a month rather than the four everyone reaches for, and those monthly hours are valued at whatever an hour of that person is worth: a loaded salary divided by 2,080, a contractor rate, or the rate you would bill a client for the same work. Tools go on top. What comes out is the fully loaded monthly cost of the channel, and every other number on this page is measured against it.
The revenue side is where a return calculation usually goes wrong, so treat it strictly. Attributed revenue is what you can credibly credit to social: orders that arrived on a tracked link, sign ups that came through the profile link, deals where the buyer told you where they found you. It is not the revenue of the whole business in a month during which social media happened to exist. Anything you cannot trace counts as zero here, which makes the first result feel harsh and makes it honest. When that number comes out uncomfortably low, the fix is almost always tracking rather than effort.
Notice what is deliberately absent: impressions, followers and reach appear nowhere in the calculation. A month of excellent reach that produced no traceable revenue is a cost with no return, and treating reach as the outcome is the most common way a social budget survives three years without anyone asking what it earned. The last two lines of the result take the other route out of a bad number. Roughly 30 percent of hands-on posting time is repetition rather than creative work, so the calculator prices what batching and scheduling would hand back. That share is an editorial estimate covering repetition only: filming, writing and editing take exactly as long either way.
Your monthly numbers
Four figures, all yours. The first two price the time, which is almost always the largest cost, and the last one is the only place revenue enters the calculation.
Everyone who touches the channel, added together: planning, writing, filming, editing, publishing and answering comments.
A loaded salary divided by 2,080 hours, a contractor rate, or what you would bill a client for the same work.
Scheduler, design tools, stock media, analytics. Leave it empty if you pay for nothing and it counts as zero.
Only what you can trace: tracked links, profile link sign ups, deals where the buyer said where they found you.
cost = hours x 4.345 x rate + tools, ROI = (revenue - cost) / cost x 100
Enter your hours, your hourly rate and the revenue you attribute to social.
A fully worked example on real numbers is printed further down this page, so you can read exactly how the calculation runs without entering anything at all.
What goes in each field
Four inputs, all yours, none of them a benchmark. Each one is clamped to the range below before the arithmetic runs, on this page and in the emailed breakdown alike, so an accidental keystroke produces a sensible answer rather than a rejected form. The hours ceiling is two full working weeks rather than a whole week of clock time, because past that point the question has stopped being a marketing one.
| Field | Accepted range | What counts |
|---|---|---|
| Hours a week on social media | 0 to 80 | Planning, writing, filming, editing, designing, publishing, replying to comments and messages, and reporting on any of it. Add up everyone who touches the channel rather than only the person whose job title says social media. |
| What an hour is worth | $1 to $500 | A loaded salary divided by 2,080 working hours, an invoiced contractor or agency rate, or what you would have to pay somebody to replace the hours you personally spend. Loaded means salary plus payroll taxes, benefits and overhead, which is usually 25 to 30 percent on top. |
| Tools and subscriptions a month | $0 to $5,000 | Scheduling, design, stock media, analytics, link pages, anything the channel would stop needing tomorrow if you stopped posting. Not ad spend: paid media is a separate question, and the ROAS calculator answers it properly. |
| Revenue you attribute to social | $0 to $10,000,000 | Only what you can trace: orders on a tracked link, sign ups through the profile link, deals where the buyer named social as the source. Not total monthly revenue, and not anything justified by follower growth. |
How the math works
Five steps, each one built from the step above it. The example runs on one person spending 10 hours a week on social media at $50 an hour, $49 of tools a month, and $6,000 a month of revenue they can trace back to the channel.
- 1labour cost = hours a week x 4.345 x hourly rate
10 x 4.345 x $50 = $2,173 a month
The constant is weeks in an average month, not four. Four undercounts the year by three whole weeks and quietly understates this line by about eight percent, which on these inputs is $173 a month of cost nobody sees.
- 2total cost = labour cost + tools
$2,173 + $49 = $2,222 a month
Note the proportions. The subscription everybody thinks of as the cost of social media is about two percent of the real total here, and the hours are the other ninety eight.
- 3profit = attributed revenue - total cost
$6,000 - $2,222 = $3,778 a month
Attributed revenue is the only input you cannot improve by thinking harder about it. It moves when the tracking improves or the work does, and nothing else.
- 4ROI = profit / total cost x 100
$3,778 / $2,222 x 100 = 170%
A return of 100 percent means the channel gave back twice what it consumed. Zero is break even. Below zero the channel costs more than it can currently prove it returns, which is a tracking problem at least as often as a marketing one.
- 5hours saved = hours a week x 4.345 x 0.3
10 x 4.345 x 0.3 = 13 hours a month, worth $650
The 30 percent is an editorial estimate of the share of hands-on posting time that is pure repetition: opening each app in turn, re-uploading the same asset, waiting for the right hour. It claims nothing on the creative work, which takes exactly as long either way.
A worked example, line by line
One person, 10 hours a week, $50 an hour, $49 of tools and $6,000 of attributed revenue a month. This is exactly the breakdown the calculator produces and exactly the one the email carries, computed by the same function rather than typed out here.
| Line | Per month | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Cost of your time | $2,173 | 10 hours a week x 4.345 weeks x $50 an hour. |
| Tools and subscriptions | $49 | One scheduler subscription. The line most people mean when they say what social media costs them. |
| Total monthly cost | $2,222 | Time plus tools, and the figure the return is measured against. |
| Revenue attributed to social | $6,000 | Traceable revenue only. Everything else is counted as zero. |
| Monthly profit | $3,778 | What the channel puts back after paying for itself. |
| Return on total cost | 170% | Profit divided by total cost. Every dollar the channel consumed came back with a bit more than another one behind it. |
| Hours a month batching gives back | 13 hours | 30 percent of the hands-on time, as an editorial estimate of the repetition in it. |
| What those hours are worth | $650 | Those hours at the same $50 rate. Cost you stop paying rather than revenue you start earning. |
Read the first two rows together, because that comparison is the reason this page exists. The subscription is $49 and the time is $2,173, which means a team arguing about whether to keep a $49 tool is arguing about roughly one hour of the 13 hours that tool exists to give back. On these numbers the returned hours alone are worth $650 a month, which is more than thirteen times the subscription, and none of that depends on the channel earning a single extra dollar.
Where these numbers come from
The calculation uses your own numbers plus two documented constants: 4.345 weeks per month, and an editorial estimate that batching and scheduling returns 30 percent of hands-on posting time. That share covers repetition, not creative work: filming, writing and editing take just as long either way. Attributed revenue is whatever you credit to social, so the result is only as good as your tracking.
Nothing here is measured from your accounts or from any private dataset. Three of the four inputs and the whole revenue side are yours, and the only two figures we supply are the 4.345 weeks in an average month, which is arithmetic, and the 30 percent share of hands-on time that batching returns, which is an editorial estimate and not a promise. The emailed breakdown runs the same formula over the same four numbers, so the version in your inbox can never disagree with the one on your screen.
Getting a number you can take into a budget meeting
- Count the hours before you try to cut them. An hour nobody has written down is an hour nobody can save, and in most teams the honest weekly figure is two to three times the one people quote from memory.
- Use a loaded hourly rate rather than a bare salary divide. Salary divided by 2,080 working hours is the floor; adding 25 to 30 percent for payroll taxes, benefits and overhead gets you to what the hour genuinely costs the business.
- Count everyone who touches the channel, not only the person who publishes. The designer who cuts the vertical version, the founder who approves captions on a Friday and the intern who answers comments are all real cost sitting outside the marketing headcount.
- Put tracked links on every profile, bio and campaign destination before you trust the revenue field. Attribution is the input with the widest error bars, and it is also the only one you can fix in an afternoon rather than a quarter.
- Run the calculation twice: once for the way the month actually went, and once with your hours reduced by the batching estimate. The gap between the two results is the value of changing how you work rather than how much you work.
- Recalculate every quarter and keep the old results. A single ROI figure is an argument; four of them in a row is a trend, and a trend is what gets a channel defended in a budget meeting.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate social media ROI?
Profit divided by total cost, expressed as a percent. The part people skip is the cost side. Total cost here is the money you spend on tools plus the money your time is worth, which is weekly hours multiplied by 4.345 weeks and then by an hourly rate. Profit is the revenue you attribute to social minus that total. A 100 percent return means the channel gave back twice what it consumed; zero means it broke even; a negative number means it cost more than it returned, which is common early and is not automatically a reason to stop.
What hourly rate should I use?
The rate that reflects what the hour costs the business, not the one that flatters the result. For an employee, start with the annual salary divided by 2,080 working hours, then add roughly 25 to 30 percent for payroll taxes, benefits and overhead. For a freelancer or an agency, use the invoiced rate. For a founder doing the work personally, use the rate you would have to pay someone to replace you, which is usually far higher than the number a founder instinctively picks and is the whole point of pricing it at all.
What counts as attributed revenue?
Revenue you could defend in a meeting. Orders placed through a tracked link, sign ups that came in on the profile link, deals where the buyer named social media as the source, revenue from a campaign that ran nowhere else. What does not count is total business revenue for the month, revenue you assume social influenced, or anything justified by a rise in followers. Under-counting is the safer error: an ROI built on generous assumptions is a number nobody can act on, and one built on tracked revenue tells you exactly which activity to do more of.
Why 4.345 weeks in a month rather than four?
Because four undercounts the year by three whole weeks. A year is 52.18 weeks across 12 months, which is 4.345 weeks per month, so pricing labour at four weeks quietly understates it by about eight percent. On ten hours a week at fifty dollars an hour that gap is roughly 173 dollars a month, or two thousand a year, sitting outside the number you would take into a budget conversation. The constant is fixed at three decimals and used identically on this page and in the emailed breakdown so the two can never disagree.
Is a negative social media ROI normal?
Early on, yes, and it usually means one of two things rather than failure. Either the channel is genuinely young, in which case the compounding has not started and the honest read is that you are still paying for an audience you have not finished building, or the attribution is missing, in which case real revenue is being counted as zero because nothing traced it. Check the tracking first. It is far more often a measurement problem than a marketing one, and it is much cheaper to fix.
Do I get the full breakdown by email?
Yes. The return on your total monthly cost and the total itself are free on this page with no address at all, and the full worked example below runs the same arithmetic on real numbers so you can read the method without entering anything. The complete line by line breakdown, labour cost, tool cost, total, attributed revenue, profit, hours returned by batching and what those hours are worth, unlocks when you ask us to send it, and it is built from exactly the same formula and the same constants you can read on this page.
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