Have you noticed how much more it costs to run your business?
Business costs rarely have the decency to arrive all at once. They creep up individually. A little more for software. A change to National Insurance. Higher wages, insurance, energy, borrowing and compliance costs.
Each increase may be manageable on its own, but stack them together, and the cost of running the same business can look rather different.
The British Chambers of Commerce has created a UK Business Cost Stack Calculator to help businesses see that cumulative effect, and, as a Chamber member, I thought it was genuinely worth sharing.
You enter some current information about your workforce, turnover, energy use and borrowing. The calculator then illustrates how domestic policy-driven costs have changed between 2016, 2024 and 2026.
It includes areas such as wages, employer National Insurance, pension contributions, business rates, insurance, finance and some of the less visible per-person costs of running a business, including HR, legal, data, cyber and software.
It isn’t intended to calculate the exact costs of your particular business. There are assumptions and limitations, all of which the BCC explains alongside it. But it does provide an interesting view of how individual increases accumulate. And perhaps a useful prompt to look at your own numbers.
Have your prices and margins kept pace with the cost of running the business? Are you still paying for services or capacity you no longer use? Have several relatively small increases quietly become a fairly significant one?
You may already know that everything costs more. That part is unlikely to come as a dazzling revelation.
Seeing the increases together, however, can make the overall change much easier to understand.
The calculator also gives businesses the option to submit their figures anonymously, helping the British Chambers of Commerce build its evidence about the cost pressures facing UK businesses.
I thought it was useful. Hopefully, you will too.
