Replace Your Salary Revenue Calculator NZ 2026/27
This calculator answers the question that should be asked before anyone resigns: how much does the business actually have to sell for me to be no worse off? The answer is almost always a multiple of the salary being replaced, and the reason is that two separate multipliers stack on top of each other. First, the business has to cover its own overheads before it can pay you anything at all, so you are earning your income and the rent and the insurance and the vehicle. Second, only the gross margin slice of each sale is available to cover any of that, so at a 45% margin every dollar of revenue contributes 45 cents towards the target. Multiply those two effects together and a $95,000 salary turns into a revenue target north of $300,000. On top of that sit the costs an employer used to carry quietly on your behalf, being ACC levies and KiwiSaver contributions, which are now yours to fund out of the same money. The calculator shows the required revenue annually, monthly and weekly, and converts it into the number of jobs or clients you would need at your own average sale value, which is usually the version that makes the target feel real. Figures are indicative planning estimates and not tax or financial advice.
Formula: required revenue = (target income + ACC + KiwiSaver + fixed overheads) / gross margin %.
Income tax is deliberately excluded from the target. Your current salary is a gross figure with PAYE already deducted from it, so replacing the gross salary replaces the tax too. Adding tax again would double count it. Tax payable is shown separately as context, calculated on the 2026/27 brackets of 10.5% to $15,600, 17.5% to $53,500, 30% to $78,100, 33% to $180,000 and 39% above.
ACC earners levy 2026/27: 1.75% on liable income up to $156,641, giving a maximum of $2,741.22. The cap is applied. Self-employed people under ACC CoverPlus also pay a work levy that varies substantially by classification unit, so a separate editable field is provided; there is no single national work levy rate and we do not assert one. See our ACC levy classification calculator.
KiwiSaver: the default employee contribution rate rises to 3.5% from 1 April 2026. Self-employed contributions are voluntary and are not deducted through PAYE, so the field here represents what you intend to contribute rather than a legal obligation.
Last verified: July 2026, against Inland Revenue and ACC published rates.
Building the target
| Gross salary to replace | $95,000.00 |
| ACC earners levy (1.75%) | $1,662.50 |
| ACC work levy (0%) | $0.00 |
| KiwiSaver contribution (3.5%) | $3,325.00 |
| Total owner cost | $99,987.50 |
| Plus fixed business overheads | $38,000.00 |
| Gross profit the business must produce | $137,987.50 |
| Divided by gross margin (45%) | 45% |
| Required annual revenue | $306,638.89 |
Revenue is 3.23 times the salary being replaced. That multiple is the gross-up people underestimate.
Tax, shown separately so it is not double counted
| Income tax payable on the target income | $21,227.50 |
| Income after tax and ACC | $72,110.00 |
| Set aside per month for provisional tax | $1,768.96 |
You paid this tax as an employee too, through PAYE. What changes is that nobody deducts it for you, so it has to be put aside deliberately.
How sensitive the target is to your margin
| Gross margin | Revenue needed | Per month | Jobs a year |
|---|
All figures exclude GST. Gross margin is the single most powerful lever on this page: it changes the revenue target more than anything else you can adjust.
Revenue Is Not Income, And The Gap Is Where Plans Die
The most common mistake made by people leaving a job to work for themselves is treating turnover as though it were pay. It is an easy mistake, because as an employee the two really are the same thing: the number on your employment agreement is the number you are worth to yourself. In a business they are separated by two layers, and both of them are larger than they look.
The first layer is overheads. Before the business pays you anything, it pays the rent, the insurance, the vehicle, the accountant, the software and the phone. On the default figures that is $38,000 a year that has to be earned before you take a cent.
The second layer is gross margin, and this is the one that surprises people. Only the margin portion of each sale is available to cover anything. At a 45% margin, a $10,000 job contributes $4,500 towards your income and overheads, and the other $5,500 has already gone out the door on materials, subcontractors and the labour on the job. So covering $137,987.50 of combined owner cost and overheads does not require $137,987.50 of sales. It requires $306,638.89.
Worked Example: A $95,000 Salary Needs $306,638.89 Of Sales
Take the defaults. The income being replaced is a $95,000.00 gross salary. As an employee, ACC and KiwiSaver were handled quietly around that figure. Self-employed they are yours: the ACC earners levy at 1.75% is $1,662.50, and a 3.5% KiwiSaver contribution is $3,325.00. Total owner cost is therefore $99,987.50.
Add $38,000.00 of fixed overheads and the business must generate $137,987.50 of gross profit before you are level with your old job.
At a 45% gross margin, producing $137,987.50 of gross profit requires $137,987.50 divided by 0.45, which is $306,638.89 of revenue. That is $25,553.24 a month, $5,896.90 a week, and 3.23 times the salary being replaced.
Expressed as work rather than money it becomes concrete. At an average sale of $2,500.00 the target is 122.7 jobs a year, which over 48 working weeks is about 2.6 a week, every week, allowing four weeks off. Most people have a much better instinct for whether they can find two or three jobs a week than for whether $306,000 of revenue is plausible, which is exactly why the conversion is worth doing.
The Margin Assumption Is Where The Answer Really Lives
Every other input on this page moves the target by tens of thousands. The margin moves it by hundreds of thousands.
At 60% gross margin, the same $137,987.50 of required gross profit needs only $229,979.17 of revenue. At 30% it needs $459,958.33. That is a swing of roughly $230,000 in the sales target purely from an assumption about margin, with no change to the income you want or the overheads you carry.
This is why a consultant and a builder aiming at the same personal income face completely different businesses. A consultant selling their own time with almost no direct cost might run at 80% or more, and would need barely more than $170,000 of revenue. A trades business buying materials and paying staff to install them might run at 30%, and needs close to half a million. Neither is doing anything wrong. They are simply in different businesses, and copying the other's revenue target would be meaningless.
If you are not sure of your own margin, that is the first thing to establish, because nothing else on this page is reliable without it.
Why Income Tax Is Not Added To The Target
It is tempting to add income tax to the required revenue on the grounds that self-employed people have to pay it. That double counts, and it is worth being clear about why.
The salary you are replacing is a gross figure. When you earned $95,000 as an employee, PAYE of $21,227.50 was deducted and you lived on the remainder. If the business now produces $95,000 of income for you, the same tax is payable and you live on the same remainder. Nothing has changed except who does the paperwork.
What genuinely does change is timing and discipline. As an employee, tax left before you ever saw it. Self-employed, the full amount arrives in your account and you must set aside roughly $1,768.96 a month for a provisional tax bill that will land in instalments. Businesses fail on this regularly, not because the tax was unaffordable but because it was spent before it was due. Our provisional tax calculator works through the instalment dates and amounts.
What Matching Your Salary Still Does Not Buy You
Hitting this revenue target makes you level on cash. It does not make you level overall, and the honest version of this calculation should say so.
An employer contributed to your KiwiSaver, which this calculator lets you replace but only if you remember to fund it. An employer paid you during four weeks of annual leave, eleven public holidays and any sick days, none of which generate revenue when you work for yourself. An employer carried the risk of a quiet month. And an employer's pay arrived whether or not a client decided to settle on the 20th of the following month.
Against that, self-employment offers control, flexibility, and the possibility of earning considerably more than any salary would have paid. Many people quite reasonably accept a lower income for those things. The point of running the numbers first is that it becomes a decision you make deliberately, rather than a discovery you make eight months in.
Related NZ Business and Self-Employment Calculators
- Self-Employed Take-Home Calculator: the reverse view, starting from business earnings and ending at your pocket.
- ACC Levy Self-Employed Calculator: work out your actual ACC cost including the work levy for your classification unit.
- Business Budget Calculator: build the overhead figure this page asks you for, line by line.
- Break-Even Calculator: the same arithmetic expressed as the point where the business covers its costs.
- Personal Runway Calculator: how long your savings last while the business builds up to this target.