ToolNestFree Startup Runway Calculator
Last updated: October 21, 2026
Quick answer: Runway is the single most important number in a startup: how many months you can keep operating before the money runs out. This free startup runway calculator goes beyond cash ÷ burn — enter your cash, monthly expenses, and revenue, add optional growth rates, and get your net burn rate, exact runway in months, projected cash-out date, a month-by-month cash projection, and what-if scenarios showing exactly how cuts or growth extend your life. Everything runs in your browser; your financials never leave your device.
🔒 100% Private: Data never leaves your device.
Month-by-month cash projection
Estimates only, not financial advice. Real runway also depends on payment timing, taxes, and one-off costs — keep a buffer.
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How to Use the Startup Runway Calculator
- Enter your current cash balance — the actual money in the bank, not committed or contracted revenue.
- Enter your monthly expenses (gross burn): payroll, rent, software, marketing — everything going out.
- Enter your monthly revenue. Net burn = expenses − revenue, and that's the number that sets your runway.
- Optional: open 'Growth scenarios' and add monthly expense/revenue growth rates to model hiring plans or compounding growth.
- Click Calculate Runway: you get net burn, runway in months, your cash-out date, a month-by-month projection, and what-if scenarios.
Why Use Our Startup Runway Calculator?
- Beyond cash ÷ burn — growth-aware projection, not the naive static formula most blog calculators use.
- Cash-out date — your runway translated into an actual calendar month, so the deadline feels real.
- What-if scenarios — see exactly how many months a 10%, 20%, or 30% expense cut buys you, or how much cash you need for 18 months.
- Month-by-month table — watch cash decline (or recover) period by period with growth applied.
- 100% private — runs entirely in your browser; financial numbers never leave your device.
Common Use Cases
- Timing your fundraise: Start raising with 12+ months of runway left — fundraising takes 3–6 months, and negotiating with 4 months left destroys leverage.
- Board and investor updates: Bring one defensible number to the meeting instead of a spreadsheet tab nobody opens. Net burn and runway are what the board actually asks about.
- Hiring decisions: Model a new hire as expense growth: see instantly whether that engineer costs you 2 months of runway or 6.
- Pricing and growth experiments: Test 'what if revenue grows 10%/mo instead of 5%' — compounding revenue is the fastest runway extender there is.
- Indie and bootstrapped founders: No investors, no safety net: knowing your exact cash-out date is the difference between a planned pivot and a panic.
- Sizing a bridge round: A bridge should fund a milestone, not a mood: multiply the months to the next proof point by net burn, add a 2-month buffer, and that's the raise. The projection table shows whether the bridge actually reaches the milestone or strands you halfway.
- Cost-cut scenario planning: Before announcing layoffs or killing a product line, model the cut: a 30% expense reduction on $80,000 gross burn saves $24,000 a month, and the what-if table converts that into exact months gained — the number that tells you whether the cut is enough or just painful.
- Milestone-based budgeting: Budget to a milestone (ship v2, hit $50k MRR), not to a date: check that runway covers the milestone month plus buffer. If it doesn't, the milestone — not the burn rate — is what needs renegotiating.
Startup Runway Calculator vs Alternatives
- Spreadsheet models: Flexible and free — but you build the formulas, maintain them, and explain them to every cofounder. This gives the same answers in one click.
- VC blog calculators: Most compute cash ÷ burn and stop. They ignore growth, give no cash-out date, and offer no what-if scenarios — the parts that actually drive decisions.
- Finance platforms (Pilot, Carta, etc.): Excellent for funded companies with a finance function — and priced like it, with onboarding. Overkill for a quick runway check.
- Asking your accountant: Accurate, but slow and expensive for a number you should be checking monthly, not quarterly.
- Bank and fintech dashboards (Mercury, Brex): If your cash lives there, their runway views are accurate and automatic — but they show your accounts only, with no what-if modeling for a company that hasn't moved its banking, and no growth scenarios for the board deck.
- Asking an AI chatbot: Fast, conversational — and quietly unreliable on arithmetic: a chatbot can divide cash by burn and still slip a digit, and it gives you no month-by-month table to audit. Use it to brainstorm levers; verify the number here, where the math is shown.
If you have a finance team, use their model — it's built on your real books. For everyone else — founders, operators, indie hackers — this page gives the decision-grade runway number, the cash-out date, and the what-if math in seconds, free.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you calculate startup runway?
Runway (months) = cash in the bank ÷ net monthly burn, where net burn = monthly expenses − monthly revenue. Example: $500,000 cash, $80,000 monthly expenses, $20,000 monthly revenue → net burn $60,000 → runway ≈ 8.3 months. The calculator above applies the same formula month-by-month, with optional growth rates, and converts the result into a cash-out date.
What is the difference between gross burn and net burn?
Gross burn is everything going out the door each month — payroll, rent, tools, ads. Net burn subtracts revenue: it's the amount your cash balance actually shrinks by. Investors and boards focus on net burn, because a startup spending $100k/mo while earning $90k/mo is in a completely different position than one earning nothing. If revenue exceeds expenses, net burn is negative — you're profitable and runway is effectively infinite.
How much runway should a startup have?
The standard investor guidance is 12–18 months at all times. The logic is practical: fundraising takes 3–6 months from first meeting to money in the bank, so starting a raise with under 6 months left means negotiating from desperation. Below 6 months is the danger zone — cut costs or raise immediately. Above 18 months gives you room to experiment without panic.
What is burn multiple and what is a good one?
Burn multiple (Bessemer Venture Partners' metric) = net burn ÷ net new ARR. It measures how efficiently growth is bought: a burn multiple under 1 is excellent (each dollar of burn creates more than a dollar of new ARR), under 2 is good, and above 3 suggests spending is outpacing traction. Runway tells you how long you survive; burn multiple tells you whether the spending is working.
We're profitable — do we still need a runway calculator?
Your runway is effectively infinite, which is the best possible answer. But the tool is still useful in reverse: model a hiring spree or a downturn as expense/revenue growth scenarios and see at what point the cash-out date reappears. Profitable companies die from over-hiring into a slowdown — the projection table shows that cliff before you walk off it.
How can I extend my runway without raising money?
Four levers, in order of speed: 1. cut non-essential spend (the what-if table shows a 20% cut's exact month gain), 2. accelerate revenue — even small compounding growth extends runway disproportionately, 3. stretch payables and shorten receivables to fix cash timing, 4. pause hiring and renegotiate big contracts. What doesn't work: hoping growth arrives before the cash-out date — put the date on the wall and work backward from it.
What counts as cash when calculating runway?
Only money you can actually spend: the bank balance today, minus payroll and taxes already owed. What does not count: undrawn credit lines (the bank can pull them), committed-but-uncalled investor capital (not in the account yet), signed contracts not yet paid, and accounts receivable that may arrive late. Founders who count all four routinely discover their '12 months' is really 8 — run the calculator on bank cash only, then treat everything else as upside.
How do I calculate runway when burn is uneven or seasonal?
Don't use last month alone — one big annual payment or one slow month will lie to you. Use a trailing 3-month average net burn (add the last three months' net burn and divide by three), or better, enter a forward budget: the calculator's growth-rate fields let you model rising expenses or seasonal revenue instead of assuming flat burn. If your business is strongly seasonal (holiday peak, summer trough), run the projection on the worst quarter's burn — runway planned on a good quarter is how seasonal startups die in February.
When should I actually start fundraising?
Work backward from the cash-out date, not forward from today. Fundraising takes 3–6 months from first meeting to money in the bank, so the deadline to start is your cash-out date minus six months. With 12 months of runway you can negotiate from strength; with 6 months you're racing; below 6 months investors can smell the desperation and terms get worse — or the round doesn't happen. The practical rule: when runway drops to 12 months, the fundraise is already your most important project.
What does default alive vs default dead mean?
Paul Graham's test: at your current growth rate and current expenses, will you reach profitability before the cash runs out? If yes, you're default alive — you can choose whether to raise. If no, you're default dead — you must raise, cut costs, or grow faster before the money ends. To check, project revenue growth against flat expenses in the calculator's growth scenarios: if the month-by-month table's cash line turns upward before it hits zero, you're default alive; if it hits zero first, you're not, and the gap tells you how much must change.
How does a bridge round change my runway?
A bridge simply adds cash to the numerator: new runway = (old cash + bridge amount) ÷ net burn. A $300,000 bridge on a $60,000 net burn buys 5 months — enough to reach a milestone, not a full 18-month runway. That's the point of bridges: they fund a specific next proof point (a launch, a revenue target) that makes the next priced round possible. Price the bridge by the milestone, not by the calendar — 'we need 8 months to ship v2' is a fundable story; 'we need 8 months' is not. Note the cost: bridges usually convert at a discount or cap, so they dilute more per dollar than a priced round.
How does runway relate to break-even?
Break-even is a sales level (revenue covering costs, profit = 0); runway is a time limit (months until cash hits zero). The two meet in the only question that matters: will you reach break-even before the cash-out date? If your break-even needs 1,000 units a month and you're selling 400 with 8 months of cash, the gap is the plan — raise the price, cut costs, or raise money. Our break-even calculator finds the sales level; this calculator finds the deadline. Use them together.
Part of our free business tools collection.