Scrap Rate Cost Calculator

About this calculator

The scrap rate in manufacturing is the share of units produced that fail quality inspection and get rejected — calculated as rejected units ÷ total units produced — and it's a core metric in Lean and Six Sigma quality programs because it directly measures how much of a production run is wasted material and labor. Multiplying rejected units by the unit cost gives the raw scrap cost, but the more revealing figure is the effective cost per good unit, which spreads that waste across only the units that actually passed inspection.

This calculator takes units produced, units rejected, and unit cost, then returns the scrap rate, total scrap cost, and the effective cost per good unit — the number that shows how much scrap is really inflating your per-unit economics. Manufacturing engineers, plant quality managers, and cost accountants use it to track process yield over time and to justify investment in defect reduction by putting a dollar figure on the current scrap rate.