Candle Making Calculator
Pick your jar, set your batch size, and get exact grams of wax, fragrance oil, and dye for every pour. Includes top-up pour allowance for wax shrinkage and cost per candle. Nothing uploaded.
Batch Recipe
Per-jar breakdown & cost
Per Jar Breakdown
| Ingredient | Per jar |
|---|---|
| Wax | — |
| Fragrance oil | — |
| Container volume used | — |
Cost Per Candle
Material cost only (wax + FO). Add labour and packaging for full COGS.
Learn more: wax weights, fragrance load, and batch cost
Fragrance load here is a share of the finished pour
The calculator works out a pour weight first, multiplying each jar's usable volume by the density of the wax you picked. It then takes your fragrance percentage out of that total, and whatever is left over is wax.
So an 8% setting means 8% of what sits in the finished jar is fragrance oil. Against the wax alone that ratio is 8.7 g of oil per 100 g of wax, which is worth knowing because many supplier recipes quote fragrance as a percentage of wax weight instead. Armatage Candle Company's candle math guide puts the usual span at "anywhere from 3% to 12% by weight", so both conventions sit inside the same range. Check which basis a recipe used before typing its percentage in here.
Every wax carries its own ceiling: 6% for beeswax, 9% for C3 soy, 10% for 464 soy, 11% for the coconut-soy blend, and 12% for coconut and paraffin. Type a higher figure and the tool shows a warning, then computes with the cap anyway, so the grams on screen are always a recipe the wax can hold.
Shrinkage sets the size of the top-up pour
Shrink rates here run from 3% for beeswax and 5% for coconut wax up to 8% for both soy waxes and 10% for paraffin. The top-up figure takes that percentage of each jar's usable volume, converts it to grams at the wax density, then adds fragrance oil on top at whatever percentage you set.
Twelve 8 oz jelly jars filled to 90% give 216 mL of usable volume each, which is 192 g of soy 464 per jar. The top-up line for that batch reads 199 g, near enough one extra jar's worth of material spread over twelve second pours.
What the cost per candle actually covers
Two inputs drive the cost figure: wax price per kilogram and fragrance oil price per 100 g. Each is multiplied by the weight already calculated, added together, then divided by the jar count.
That same twelve-jar soy batch at $5 per kg of wax and $2.50 per 100 g of oil comes to $10.61 of wax and $4.61 of fragrance, or $1.27 a candle. Dye is weighed but never priced, so the 10.6 g of chips that batch needs at the default 5 g per kilo of wax costs nothing on screen. The top-up pour, wicks, jars, labels, and your own time sit outside the number too.
FAQ
How much fragrance oil goes into a pound of soy wax?
A 454 g pour of soy 464 at its 10% cap holds 45 g of fragrance oil and 409 g of wax. The split comes out of the finished pour rather than the wax alone, so the 45 g of oil is part of that 454 g and not poured on top of it.
Why is a 4 oz tin not the same as a 4 oz jelly jar?
The tool stores a volume per container instead of reading the ounce label: 110 mL for a 4 oz tin against 120 mL for a 4 oz jelly jar, and 225 mL against 240 mL at the 8 oz size. Wall thickness and shape explain the gap. For anything else, switch to Custom and enter the diameter and height.
Does the top-up pour change the cost per candle?
No. Cost is built from the main pour only, so a paraffin batch needing a 10% top-up uses about a tenth more material than the price suggests. Add the top-up weight into your own costing if you pour it.