T
The Daily Insight

What is variable cost and fixed cost?

Author

John Thompson

Published Feb 16, 2026

Variable costs and fixed costs, in economics, are the two main types of costs that a company incurs when producing goods and services. Variable costs vary with the amount of output produced, and fixed costs remain the same no matter how much a company produces.

What is unit variable cost?

Variable cost per unit refers to the costs of each unit of goods that a company produces, variable costs change as changes occur in the production level or activity level of the company. Unit Variable Cost is affected by changes in the business, extra cost is incurred when more units of goods are produced.

What is mixed cost per unit?

A mixed cost is a cost that contains both a fixed cost component and a variable cost component. It is important to understand the mix of these elements of a cost, so that one can predict how costs will change with different levels of activity.

Is unit cost fixed or variable?

Unit cost is determined by combining the variable costs and fixed costs and dividing by the total number of units produced. For example, assume total fixed costs are $40,000, variable costs are $20,000, and you produced 30,000 units.

What is the formula of variable cost per unit?

Variable cost per unit can be calculated using a simple procedure: Estimate your total variable costs for a certain period of time. Identify how many units of production were produced over a certain period; Divide total variable costs (1) by number of units (2). The resulting number will be your variable cost per unit.

What’s the difference between fixed cost and variable cost?

Unit Cost. Fixed cost changes in unit, i.e. as the units produced increases, fixed cost per unit decreases and vice versa, so the fixed cost per unit is inversely proportional to the number of output produced. Variable cost remains same, per unit. Behavior. It remains constant for a given period of time.

How is per unit fixed cost related to activity?

There is an inverse relationship between per unit fixed cost and activity. If production increases, per unit fixed cost decreases and if production decreases, per unit fixed cost increases. To understand this point, we can use the data from the above example of mobile manufacturing company.

How to calculate total variable cost per unit?

Calculation of Total Variable Expenses using below formula is as follows, Total Variable Expenses = Direct Material Cost + Direct Labor Cost + Packing Expenses + Other Direct Manufacturing Overhead Thus for September 2019, the variable cost per unit of the company comes to $162.

What’s the difference between fixed and variable mobile phones?

Notice that average fixed cost (computed in the last column) decreases as the production of mobile phones increases. It is an interesting property of fixed cost. A cost that has the characteristics of both variable and fixed cost is called mixed or semi-variable cost.