How to Price Honey: Cost per Jar, Quart and Stick, Worked

October 27, 2026 · Selling products and running the numbers

To price honey, cost a pound as it comes off the hive, add extraction, then add the jar, lid, label and your bottling time for each jar size, and set the price at the margin you want: price = cost per jar / (1 - margin). In the illustrative example below, honey ready to bottle costs $7.6250 a pound, a filled 1 lb jar costs $9.29, and a 35% margin needs $14.29 for the 1 lb jar, $7.86 for an 8 oz jar and $39.71 for a quart.

None of these figures are what honey sells for, what a hive yields or what jars cost. They belong to one made-up beekeeper with 10 hives, and each is there to be replaced with your own weighed harvest, receipts and timings. Nothing here covers the rules for selling or labeling honey; they vary, so check your state’s rules.

The honey price formula

cost per hive       = supplies + equipment / years it lasts + feed
                      + replacement colony x share replaced + your hours
cost per lb in hive = cost per hive / pounds harvested per hive
ready to bottle     = cost per lb in hive + extraction per lb
cost per jar        = pounds in the jar x ready to bottle
                      + jar, lid and label + bottling minutes
price at a margin   = cost per jar / (1 - margin)

Step 1: what a pound costs in the hive

The beekeeper’s own 8 hours a hive at $20.00 an hour are the largest part, 58.0% of the hive’s cost. Leave them out and a pound looks cheap; a price built on that number pays for frames and feed but not for you. At 40 lb a hive, a pound costs $6.90 before it is extracted.

Step 2: cost per jar, by size

Extraction takes 12 hours for the whole 400 lb harvest, and the extractor, strainer and buckets cost $50.00 a year to keep. Spread over the harvest that is $0.7250 a pound, so honey ready to bottle costs $7.6250 a pound. Each jar then adds its own container and bottling time:

The quart is costed at 3 lb of honey. That weight is the example’s; weigh one of your own filled quarts, because the quart’s cost is built on it.

Step 3: how much to charge for a quart of honey, and the other sizes

Margin is profit as a share of the price, so the price at a margin is the cost divided by (1 - margin). A 35% margin is the same as a 53.8% markup on cost; the markup vs margin chart converts any pair.

The example’s $9.00 and $15.00 jars clear the 35% target. Its $38.00 quart does not: it still makes $12.19 on top of the beekeeper’s pay, but it needs $39.71 to hold the margin. A quart priced as a discount is the cheapest honey on the table at $12.67 a pound, against $15.00 in the 1 lb jar. If you sell quarts as the bargain size, price them from their own cost, not as a fixed number of 1 lb jars.

Step 4: market day vs a shop order

Selling costs are not in the jar cost. The example takes 30 jars to a market with a $25.00 stall fee, 6 hours from setup to packdown and a 30 mile round trip at its own $0.60 a mile. It also sells a shop 48 jars at $10.50, 30% off the market price, delivered in 1 hour over 20 miles round trip. Hours in both are costed at the same $20.00.

The shop pays 30% less per jar and still earns more per jar: $0.5433 against $0.2767. The market’s stall, hours and miles come to $5.43 a jar against $0.67 for the delivery, and that gap is larger than the $4.50 a jar the shop is given off. For setting the shop’s price itself, the wholesale price formula works from the same cost.

How much to charge for honey sticks

A stick holds a small share of a pound: the example fills 90 sticks from a pound, pays $0.05 a straw and spends 30 minutes on every hundred sticks. Each stick costs $0.0847 of honey, $0.05 of straw and $0.1000 of time, $0.2347 in all, and a 35% margin needs $0.3611 a stick.

At the example’s $0.50 a stick, one pound turned into 90 sticks takes in $45.00 and makes $23.8750 on top of the beekeeper’s pay, against $5.71 for the same pound sold in a 1 lb jar at $15.00. That is profit against profit, on the same pound, and both leave out selling costs. Selling 90 sticks is 90 sales against the jar’s one, and that selling time is not in either figure, so cost your own before you move honey from jars into straws.

Bulk pails

Selling a 60 lb pail at $9.00 a pound skips jars, labels and bottling. The pail costs $6.00, filling it takes 10 minutes and handing it over $5.00, so a pail makes $68.17, $1.1361 a pound. The market jar, once its stall, hours and miles are paid, makes $0.2767. Any bulk price above $8.1406 a pound earns more per pound than the market jar in this example.

The insight: a good margin can still leave a hive barely paying

The $15.00 jar clears a 35% margin, which looks comfortable. But the margin is measured before selling costs. Take the hive as the unit instead: every pound sold as a 1 lb jar at market leaves $15.00, less $2.39 of extraction, jar and bottling (the $9.29 jar cost without the $6.90 of hive cost it carries) and $5.43 of market selling cost, which is $7.1767 a pound to pay for the hive. At 40 lb a hive that covers the $276.00 hive cost with $11.07 left over.

The hive breaks even at 38.46 lb, only 1.54 lb under the harvest. A lighter year, or a few jars unsold, and the hive costs more than it brings in, even though every jar met its margin. For $50.00 a hive on top of the beekeeper’s pay, the 1 lb jar needs $15.9733. Check the per-jar margin, then check the hive.

The year: what kept honey costs

Honey kept for the house or given away was still produced, at $7.6250 a pound ready to bottle, and earns nothing. The example keeps 40 lb of its 400 and sells the rest: 120 lb in pails, 96 jars to shops in 2 orders and 144 jars over 5 market days, each order and market day carrying its own selling cost.

The sales make $195.73 on top of the beekeeper’s pay, less than the $305.00 the kept honey cost, so the year comes out $259.27 short. That is not money out of pocket: the beekeeper’s hours are already costed at $20.00 an hour, $1,600.00 for the bee yard alone, so the year pays $259.27 less than that rate. For a small apiary, a few dozen pounds kept or given away can be the difference between earning your rate and falling short of it, so cost them like any other pound.

How these were calculated

Cost per hive is supplies + equipment / years + feed + replacement colony cost x share replaced + hours x hourly pay; cost per pound is that over the pounds per hive. Extraction per pound is (extraction hours x hourly pay + extraction equipment per year) / total pounds. A jar is pounds in the jar x cost ready to bottle + jar, lid and label + bottling minutes / 60 x hourly pay, added unrounded and then rounded to the cent. Price at a margin is cost / (1 - margin). Channel profit is jars x (price - jar cost) less the stall or delivery, miles x cost per mile and hours x hourly pay. A stick is cost ready to bottle / sticks per pound + straw + minutes per 100 sticks / 60 x hourly pay / 100. Bulk profit per pound is the bulk price less cost ready to bottle less (pail + filling time + handover) / pounds per pail. The season charges kept honey at the cost ready to bottle and counts whole shop orders and whole market days. The hive break-even is hive cost / (jar price - (jar cost - hive cost per pound) - selling cost per jar). Figures are carried from step to step as the spreadsheet shows them, sub-cent costs to four places.

Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that costs the whole apiary before dividing, builds each channel a jar at a time, costs a pound of sticks and a whole pail at once and counts the break-even harvest a pound at a time, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not measured yields or market prices. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own hives, jars and markets, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from the cost of a pound in the hive to the harvest a hive needs to pay.