Vending Machine Calculator

Enter your machine cost, your vend price, and the sales a day you expect. You get the full waterfall from gross sales down to monthly net profit, the months until the machine pays for itself, and what the same machine does in a slower doorway.

Buying new Buying used or refurbished Financing it

Number of machines (the whole route. Costs that belong to the drive are shared across it)

Machine cost each ($) (new $3,000 to $8,000; a warrantied refurb $1,800 to $3,000; a private-sale used machine can be $300 to $1,600)

Vend price ($ per item) (the average US vending sale was $2.11 in 2024, measured across 625,000 card readers)

Sales per machine per day (the number nobody can promise you. It belongs to the location, not the machine. The table prices a quarter of it and double it)

Cost of goods (% of vend price) (what the snack costs you. Industry guidance is 40 to 60 percent; blank uses 50)

Location commission (% of gross) (5 to 20 percent is the ordinary reported band, 20 to 30 in prime spots, and 0 is genuinely common in small offices)

Restocking trips per month (for the whole route, not per machine)

Miles per trip (round trip, including the wholesale club run)

Card processing (% of cashless sales) (published rates run 3 to 6 percent; blank uses 5.95, the rate a major processor charges on a vend of $5 or less)

Service reserve per machine ($ per month, optional) (repairs plus the card reader's data plan. Blank uses our editorial $15)

Hours per restocking trip (optional) (shopping, hauling, filling, counting. Enter it to see what your own time earns)

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Data reviewed: August 2026. Figures here come from published sources and change over time. How we verify

How the vending machine calculator works

A vending machine is not a side gig. It is a small capital business, and that difference is the whole point of this page. With a rideshare shift or a dog-sitting booking you sell hours. Here you buy a box, put it somewhere, and it sells while you sleep. That is genuinely appealing, and it is also why the arithmetic is unforgiving: you spend the money first and find out afterwards whether the doorway you chose was any good.

Three things decide almost everything, and this page prices all three. First, what the machine cost you and whether you paid cash or took a note. Second, the location commission, the cut the property takes off the top, which most beginners have never heard of until they are negotiating one. Third, the sales a day, which is the number nobody can promise you and the number that moves the answer more than the other two combined. So the results always show your estimate flanked by a slow doorway and a busy one, because the honest version of this calculation is a range with your assumption visible inside it.

The formula

gross = vend price × sales per day × 30.42 days × machines
stock = gross × cost of goods percent
commission = gross × location commission percent (a share of GROSS, not of profit)
processing = gross × 75.5% cashless share of dollars × processing percent
driving = trips × miles × 24.04 cents per mile
net = gross − stock − commission − processing − driving − service reserve − any finance payment
payback months = machine cost ÷ net per machine per month
break-even sales a day = (driving + service + payment) ÷ (contribution per sale × 30.42)

The month is 30.42 days because a year has 365 of them, and using 30 quietly undercounts you. The cashless share of dollars is derived, not guessed: Cantaloupe's data from more than 625,000 vending card readers puts 71 percent of vending transactions on a card, and because a card sale averages $2.24 against $1.78 for cash, cards carry about 75.5 percent of the dollars. That is the share a processor actually takes a percentage of. The 24.04 cents a mile is AAA's fuel plus maintenance, repair, and tires, the same figures our robotaxi cost calculator uses, because a snack run wears your car exactly as much as any other mile.

Worked example

One used combo machine at $2,500, selling at $2.00 an item, doing 12 sales a day, with the location taking 15 percent of gross, cost of goods at 50 percent, card processing at 5.95 percent, four restocking trips a month of 20 miles each, and our editorial $15 service reserve.

Gross: 12 × 30.42 × $2.00 = $730.00 a month. Stock at 50 percent: $365.00. The location's 15 percent of gross: $109.50. Card processing: $730 × 75.5 percent × 5.95 percent = $32.79. Driving: 4 trips × 20 miles = 80 miles at 24.04 cents = $19.23. Service reserve: $15.00. What is left is $188.48 a month, which is 25.8 percent of everything the machine rang up, and $2,261.72 a year.

Payback: $2,500 ÷ $188.48 = about 13.3 months. After that it is a machine you own outright that keeps sending money.

And the line that matters more than any of the above. The same machine, the same price, the same snacks, in a doorway doing 3 sales a day instead of 12, clears $21.45 a month and takes 116.6 months to pay for itself, which is most of its working life. At 24 sales a day it clears $411.18 and pays back in 6.1 months. Nothing about the machine changed. The location changed.

The location is the business

Here is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of vending: you are not really buying a machine, you are buying access to a doorway, and the machine is just the fee you pay to stand in it. The same combo unit in a hospital break room and in a quiet office park are two different businesses with two different valuations, and the only thing separating them is how many people walk past it hungry.

This is why every honest vending number is a range. The most useful published spread we could find comes from a survey of 23 operators: their machines averaged $309 a month in gross sales, with individual machines running from $75 to $650. That is an eight-fold spread across real machines owned by real people, and it is the reason this page shows you a slow row and a busy row rather than a single confident figure. It is also why the widely repeated claim that the average machine serves about 14 customers a day deserves a raised eyebrow. At the measured $2.11 average ticket, 14 sales a day is roughly $886 a month, nearly three times that survey average. Both numbers get quoted as typical. They cannot both be.

The practical version: before you buy anything, stand in the location at the busiest hour and count. Count for twenty minutes, three times, on different days. Then be pessimistic about what you counted, because a person walking past is not a sale. The counting is boring and it is worth more than any spreadsheet on this page.

The commission nobody warns you about

Most people planning their first machine budget for the machine, the stock, and the gas. They do not budget for the landlord, and then a property manager asks what their cut is. The location commission is a percentage of gross sales, which is the important word: it comes off the top, before your stock costs, before your driving, before anything. The location gets paid whether you make money or not.

The reported bands, and they are practitioner guidance rather than survey data, so treat them as a negotiating map and not as law: roughly 5 to 20 percent in ordinary placements, with 20 to 30 percent reserved for genuinely prime traffic like malls, airports, and large campuses, and about 8 to 12 percent quoted as the middle for a mid-size commercial account. Small offices, laundromats, churches, civic buildings, and storage facilities frequently take nothing at all, because to them the machine is a convenience for their people rather than a revenue line.

Two things worth knowing before that conversation. A commission is worth paying when it buys traffic you cannot get elsewhere, and in the worked example above each point of commission costs $7.30 a month, so the difference between 10 and 20 percent is $876 over a year: real money, and also a price worth paying for a doorway that doubles your sales. And whatever you agree, put it in writing with a term, a notice period, and who is responsible if the machine is damaged. A handshake deal ends the day the property changes hands.

Cashless is not optional any more

If you are pricing a machine without a card reader because the reader costs money, run the numbers again. Cantaloupe's 2024 data, drawn from more than 625,000 vending card readers, shows 71 percent of vending transactions were already cashless, and the average card sale was $2.24 against $1.78 for cash. A cash-only machine is not merely missing some sales. It is missing the larger ones, and it is invisible to anyone under thirty who has not carried a dollar bill in years.

What it costs: hardware runs about $200 to $600 per machine, installation $50 to $100, a data plan $7.95 to $12.95 a month, and the processing fee itself is where the real money goes. The published rate a major processor charges on a vend of $5 or less is 5.95 percent, which covers essentially every snack and drink sale; above $5 the rate drops to 2.5 percent plus 10 cents. That tiering is unkind to vending specifically, because vending lives entirely below the line where the cheaper rate kicks in. This page defaults to 5.95 percent for that reason, and applies it only to the cashless share of your dollars, not to the whole gross, because cash sales cost you nothing to process.

Before you buy a route or a placement package

This industry has an ecosystem around it: placement services that find locations for a fee, turnkey packages that sell you machines with locations already arranged, and route brokers selling an operating business. Some of those are good deals bought by happy people. This page takes no position on any particular seller, and it is not an accusation to point out that the arithmetic is checkable.

Every offer of this kind reduces to four numbers: what each machine costs, what the location commission is, what the vend price will be, and how many sales a day the location actually does. Ask for all four in writing. Run them through this page. Then look hard at the fourth one, because the first three are contractual facts and the fourth is a forecast, and a forecast is exactly where an optimistic number can hide without anybody technically saying something untrue. If a seller quotes monthly revenue rather than sales a day, divide it by the vend price and by 30.42 and see what daily traffic that implies, then ask whether you would bet the purchase price on it. And if the projection is built on a location the seller has not yet secured, you are being sold a machine and a hope.

The part of this you drive to

Vending gets sold as passive income, and the machine genuinely is passive. The route is not. Somebody buys the stock, loads it into a car, drives it over, opens the machine, faces the product, clears the jam, empties the coin box, and notices that the row of pretzels has not moved in three weeks. That somebody is you. Enter your hours per trip in the optional field and this page will divide the net by them, which is a number worth seeing once even though it is not really the point.

Three costs that live in the same neighbourhood and deserve naming. Spoilage: anything with a date on it is a bet, and a slow location makes that bet a losing one, which is why slow machines should carry chips and not sandwiches. Shrink: some product leaves without paying, whether through a jam that a customer decides to solve with vigour, or a stocking miscount, or a hand where a hand should not be. Vandalism: a machine standing unattended overnight in an unsupervised spot is a machine somebody may try to open, and the repair is usually larger than whatever was inside. None of the three is in this page's arithmetic, because a credible number for them depends entirely on the site, and inventing one would be worse than naming the risk plainly. Watch your first three months of counts against your first three months of purchases, and you will have your own figure, which will beat any average.

Taxes: named, not computed

Two tax stories run alongside a vending business and this page deliberately computes neither. The first is your own: vending profit is business income, so income tax applies and, if you run it as a sole proprietor, so does self-employment tax at 15.3 percent on the net profit. Nothing is withheld, so quarterly estimated payments are usually due; our quarterly tax calculator handles that. The good news on this side is the deductions: the machines depreciate, and every restocking mile is worth 76 cents of deduction at the current IRS rate, which in the worked example is more than the drive actually costs you. Keep a mileage log from day one.

The second is sales tax, and it is genuinely messy. States differ on whether vended food is taxed the same as shelf food, some apply a special vending rate, and in many states the tax is treated as included in the posted price rather than added at the machine, which quietly reduces the gross you thought you were keeping. Your machine cannot ask a customer for the extra eight cents, so this is a question to settle with your state's revenue department before you set your prices, not after. It is the single most common thing new operators get wrong, and it is also the easiest to fix with one phone call.

Sources

Where the numbers on this page come from. We go to the body that publishes the figure, not to another calculator. Figures on this page were checked against these sources in August 2026. See how we verify.

2025 Micropayment Trends Report, Cantaloupe, Inc.. MEASURED, and the strongest data on this page. Built on more than 625,000 card readers on vending machines plus 17,000 micro market kiosks, covering 2024. The figures this calculator uses: 71 percent of vending transactions were cashless, the average cashless vending ticket was $2.24 against $1.78 for cash, and the average vending ticket across both was $2.11. Those three numbers are internally consistent, and this page's test suite checks that the published mix reproduces the published overall ticket.
The economics of vending machines, The Hustle. MEASURED but small and self-selected: a survey of 23 vending operators. Machines averaged $309 a month in gross sales, with individual machines reported from $75 to $650. It is the only published spread of real single-machine results we could find, and this page's low and high sales rates (a quarter and double your entry) are derived from it. The same piece reports cost of goods at about 50 percent of revenue, location commissions of 10 to 25 percent, machine repairs of $50 to $250 a year, and used machines bought for $300 to $1,600.
Vending Machine Commission Rates: How Much to Pay, VendBuddy. REPORTED, and openly practitioner guidance rather than survey data, which is how this page labels it. Commission by location type: 0 to 5 percent for small offices and laundromats, 5 to 10 for mid-size offices, 8 to 15 for large offices and schools, 10 to 18 for gyms, 12 to 20 for hospitals and hotels, with a stated national average of roughly 8 to 12 percent for mid-size commercial accounts. It also names the placements where zero commission is normal: small offices, churches and civic buildings, storage facilities, and underserved rural spots.
Vending Machine Commission Rates and Splits, DFY Vending. REPORTED, the second commission source. Puts gross-sales commissions at 10 to 30 percent depending on the site, with 20 to 30 percent reserved for high-traffic premium locations like shopping malls, airports, and large office buildings, and 5 to 15 percent typical for ordinary offices. The overlap between this and the source above is what gives the page its 5 to 20 percent ordinary band and its 20 to 30 percent prime band.
Vending Machine Cost in 2026, VendSoft. REPORTED machine price bands, checked against the purchases in the operator survey above. New combo machines $3,000 to $5,500, high-selection commercial units $7,000 to $9,000, warrantied refurbished units from a reseller $1,800 to $3,000. Private-sale used machines sit well below that, which is the $300 to $1,600 the operator survey reported people actually paying.
Vending Machine Card Reader Payment System, Nayax. REPORTED card reader costs, from the vendor's own page: $200 to $600 per machine for hardware, $50 to $100 to install, and transaction fees of 3 to 5 percent. Nayax's published rate card, quoted by its resellers, is more specific and is what this page defaults to: 5.95 percent on a vend of $5 or less, or 2.5 percent plus 10 cents above $5, which means essentially every snack and drink sale falls in the 5.95 percent tier.
Best Vending Machine Card Readers 2026, VendBuddy. REPORTED, the second card reader source and the one that gives the monthly band this page quotes. Cantaloupe hardware $249 to $399 up front or $0 on a multi-year contract, monthly data plans of $7.95 to $12.95 across the major providers, and Nayax at $7.95 for cashless only or $9.99 with remote inventory tracking. The monthly plan is a per-machine cost that belongs in this page's service reserve field, not in the percentage.
What Is the Lifespan of a Vending Machine?, Vending.com. REPORTED. Modern vending machines are generally reckoned to last 10 to 15 years with maintenance, and longer if the refrigeration unit is replaced. This page uses the LOW end, 10 years, as the yardstick for its never-pays-back warning, so the warning fires conservatively rather than flattering a slow location.
Your Driving Costs 2025 brochure, AAA. The restocking line: fuel at 13.00 cents a mile plus maintenance, repair, and tires at 11.04 cents = 24.04 cents, the honest marginal charge for driving a car you already own on a snack run. Pinned in lockstep with our robotaxi cost calculator, and a test evaluates that page's own file to prove the two have not drifted apart.
Standard mileage rates, Internal Revenue Service. 76 cents per business mile for July to December 2026, raised mid-year by Announcement 2026-11. Used only to show what your restocking miles are worth as a deduction, in lockstep with our mileage reimbursement calculator. A vending route generates a lot of small drives, and the deduction is usually larger than the out-of-pocket cost of making them.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a vending machine make a month?

The only published spread we could find is a survey of 23 operators whose machines averaged $309 a month in gross sales, with individual machines running from $75 to $650. Gross is not profit: about half goes on stock, the location may take 5 to 20 percent of gross, and card processing takes roughly 6 percent of the cashless share. A decent single placement doing 12 sales a day at $2.00 grosses about $730 a month and nets somewhere near $190 of that. A slow one does a quarter of it.

Do you have to pay the location to put a vending machine there?

Often, and this is the single biggest surprise for beginners. Many locations take a commission, which is a percentage of gross sales, not of your profit, so they get paid whether the machine earns you anything or not. Reported bands run 5 to 20 percent in ordinary placements and 20 to 30 percent in prime spots like malls, airports, and large campuses, with roughly 8 to 12 percent quoted as the middle for a mid-size commercial account. Plenty of small offices, laundromats, churches, and storage facilities take nothing at all, because the machine is a convenience for their people rather than a revenue line.

Is vending a good passive income?

It is capital income rather than passive income, and the distinction matters. You buy a machine and it sells while you sleep, which is genuinely different from a gig where you are paid for hours. But you still shop for the stock, drive it there, fill the machine, clear jams, and chase the location for the coin box. Enter your restocking hours in the optional field and this page will show you what those hours pay. The honest summary: the machine works passively, the route does not.

How long does it take for a vending machine to pay for itself?

Divide what the machine cost by what it clears each month. A $2,500 refurbished combo machine clearing $188 a month pays back in about 13 months. The same machine in a slow doorway clearing $21 a month takes about 117 months, which is most of a vending machine's 10 to 15 year working life. That is the whole business in one comparison: the machine did not change, the location did.

How much does a vending machine cost to buy?

New snack, drink, and combo machines run about $3,000 to $8,000, with high-selection commercial units at the top of that. A refurbished machine from a reseller, with a limited warranty and modern payment hardware, runs $1,800 to $3,000. Private-sale used machines go far cheaper, and real operators report paying $300 to $1,600, but you are buying the compressor and the bill validator sight unseen. Budget separately for a card reader at $200 to $600 plus a monthly data plan.

Do vending machines need a card reader now?

Effectively yes. Cantaloupe's data from more than 625,000 vending card readers shows 71 percent of vending transactions were already cashless in 2024, and the average card sale is $2.24 against $1.78 for cash. A cash-only machine is not just missing sales, it is missing the bigger sales. Budget $200 to $600 for the reader, $7.95 to $12.95 a month for the data plan, and about 6 percent of each cashless sale in processing fees.

What percentage of vending machine sales is profit?

Cost of goods usually eats 40 to 60 percent of the vend price, so gross margin is the other 40 to 60. What survives after the location commission, card processing, driving, and a repair reserve is typically 20 to 30 percent of gross as net profit, and this page shows you your own figure rather than the industry's. If your cost of goods, commission, and processing add up past 100 percent, no amount of foot traffic saves the machine, and the calculator says so.

Are the vending route packages that promise passive income worth it?

This page has no opinion on any particular seller, and it is not an accusation to say the arithmetic is checkable. Placement services, turnkey routes, and machine-plus-location packages are a real part of this industry, and some of them are good deals. Every one of them can be reduced to four numbers: what the machine cost, what the location commission is, what the vend price will be, and how many sales a day the location actually does. Ask for all four in writing, run them through this page, and pay particular attention to the sales-a-day figure, because it is the one nobody can guarantee and the one that decides everything.