A Betfair cash-out figure is just a full hedge at the current price. Lay stake = back stake × back odds ÷ current lay odds; guaranteed profit = lay stake − back stake (for a back you are closing). The cash-out button uses the same formula but shaves a small margin off the displayed price, so calculating it yourself shows when greening manually pays more.
This page contains affiliate links — if you open an account through them we may earn a commission at no cost to you. It never changes our verdict.
- What a Cash-Out Calculator Actually Does
- The Formula Behind the Number
- A Worked Calculation, Step by Step
- The Hidden Margin in the Button
- Cashing Out a Lay Bet
- From the Desk: Checking the Button Against the Maths
- Why the Number Moves In-Play
- Using the Site Calculator
- The Honest Verdict
- Why the Tick Ladder Changes the Maths
This page is a cluster sub of our complete Betfair cash out guide. The pillar walks through what cash out is and when to press it; this one is narrower and more useful day to day — it teaches you to calculate the figure yourself so the button never surprises you again. If you only ever read the number Betfair shows you, you are trading blind to whether it is fair.
What a Cash-Out Calculator Actually Does
A cash-out calculator answers one question: given what I backed (or laid), at what stake and odds, and where the market is now, how much profit or loss do I lock in if I close the whole position right now? That is the same calculation Betfair's own cash-out engine runs — it is not a different mechanism, just a hedge applied to your open bet at the live price.
The value of doing it yourself is twofold. First, it lets you sanity-check the button: the displayed cash-out value is built off the available lay (or back) price with a margin baked in, and on a thin market that margin can be larger than you would accept if you saw it written down. Second, it lets you cash out manually by placing your own offsetting bet at a price you choose, which on liquid markets routinely beats the button. The relationship between cashing out and greening up by hand is covered fully in our cash out vs green up explainer; the calculator is the tool that makes the manual route precise.
The Formula Behind the Number
For a back bet you want to close, the hedge is simple. You lay the same selection at the current lay price, with a lay stake sized so the profit is identical whether the selection wins or loses. The formula is: lay stake = (back stake × back odds) ÷ current lay odds. Your locked profit, before commission, is the lay stake minus your original back stake.
An example in the abstract: backed at 4.0 for £20, now layable at 2.0. Lay stake = (20 × 4.0) ÷ 2.0 = £40. If the selection wins you collect £60 on the back (£20 × 4.0) and pay the £40 lay liability, keeping your £40 lay stake back — net roughly £20 up. If it loses you keep the £40 lay stake and lose your £20 back — again roughly £20 up, before the 5% commission on the winning side. That is the entire engine. Everything the cash-out button does is this calculation, repeated continuously as the price ticks.
A Worked Calculation, Step by Step
Take a concrete in-play football case. You backed the home team in the Match Odds market at 3.40 for £50 before kickoff. They score, and the back price collapses — they are now layable at 1.90. To cash out fully you lay at 1.90 with a stake of (50 × 3.40) ÷ 1.90 = £89.47.
Your guaranteed position is £89.47 (lay stake) − £50 (back stake) = +£39.47 gross. After 5% commission on the net winnings that settles around +£37.50. Crucially, that figure is locked: whether the home side holds on or gets pegged back, you bank roughly the same. If you wanted only a partial close you would scale the lay stake down — the mechanics are in partial cash out — but the full-close number above is what an honest cash-out button should be offering you on that market.
The Hidden Margin in the Button
Here is the part most guides skip. Betfair's cash-out button does not give you the value at the best available lay price — it builds in a small buffer, effectively cashing you out at a slightly worse price than the top of the ladder. On a deep, liquid market the difference is pennies and not worth fussing over. On a thin in-play market with a wide spread, that buffer can quietly cost you a meaningful slice of the green.
This is exactly why knowing the formula matters. If the button offers £35 but your calculation off the visible best lay price says a manual hedge banks £39.47, you have just learned the button is taking £4-and-change for the convenience. On liquid markets you place the lay yourself at the real price and keep that difference. The principle is the same one we apply to liquidity generally — the thinner the market, the more the convenience features cost you, and the more it pays to do the maths by hand.
Cashing Out a Lay Bet
The calculation flips when you are closing a lay rather than a back. To cash out an open lay you back the selection at the current back price, with a back stake of (lay stake × lay odds) ÷ current back odds. If you laid at 2.0 for £30 (liability £30) and the selection has drifted to a back price of 3.0, you back £20 to close, locking the difference as profit because the selection moved your way.
The mental model is identical: you are placing the opposite bet, sized to flatten your exposure across both outcomes. The only thing that changes is which side of the bet you started on. Our how cash out works piece runs through both directions with the schematics, and the green-up strategy guide shows the same maths framed as locking profit across a position you actively opened to trade.
From the Desk: Checking the Button Against the Maths
The position: I backed an in-form home side at 3.20 for £40 in a midweek Championship game. Twenty minutes in they went 1-0 up and the back price dropped; the best available lay sat at 2.10.
What the button offered: Betfair's cash-out value showed £19.40 profit. Fine on the face of it — but I ran the formula before pressing anything.
The manual maths: lay stake = (40 × 3.20) ÷ 2.10 = £60.95. Locked profit = 60.95 − 40 = +£20.95 gross, about +£19.90 after commission. So the button was offering me roughly 50p less than a hand-placed lay at the visible best price — the engine's buffer.
What I did: Rather than tap cash out, I placed a lay of £60.95 at 2.10 myself. It matched in full because the market was liquid. I banked the £19.90 instead of the £19.40. Fifty pence is trivial on one trade — but across hundreds of greens a year, on thinner markets where the buffer is wider, the habit of checking the number is worth real money. The discipline is never pressing a button whose figure you cannot reproduce.
Cashing out locks a result but does not make a losing position profitable — if the market has moved against you, the calculator simply tells you how much you are crystallising as a loss. The maths assumes you actually get matched at the price you calculate; on thin markets you may not. Most Betfair traders lose money over time. Stake only what you can afford to lose. This is education, not financial advice.
Why the Number Moves In-Play
The cash-out figure is not a fixed amount you have earned — it is a live readout that changes every time the price ticks, because it is recalculated off the current lay (or back) price continuously. A goal, a red card, a break of serve: each one jolts the price, and your cash-out value jumps with it. This is why the figure feels alive in a way that confuses beginners, who treat it as “money I have made” rather than “what I would lock if I closed this exact second.”
Understanding that the number is just the formula applied to a moving price is what frees you from chasing it. You stop staring at the value hoping it climbs and start deciding, in advance, the price at which your hedge gives you a green you are happy with — then you execute at that price. That is the same pre-planned discipline our when to use cash out guide argues for: decide the exit before the emotion, and let the calculator confirm the figure.
Using the Site Calculator
You do not have to do this on paper. The site trading calculator takes your back stake, back odds and current lay price and returns the exact lay stake and locked profit instantly, and the hedging calculator walkthrough shows how to use it to green any position to an even profit across outcomes. Build the habit of punching your open position into it the moment you are thinking about closing — it takes five seconds and tells you immediately whether the cash-out button is fair.
For the wider toolkit, the hedging strategy guide covers when an even green is the right shape versus leaving some position running, and the green-up guide ties the calculation into the broader trading workflow. The calculator is the hub; the cash-out button is just one of the things it lets you check.
The Honest Verdict
A cash-out calculator is the single cheapest upgrade to your trading because it converts a blind button-press into an informed decision. The formula is trivial — back stake times back odds divided by current lay odds — and once it lives in your head you will never again accept a figure you cannot reproduce. On liquid markets, calculate the number and place the hedge yourself to beat the button's buffer; on thin markets, calculate it to know exactly how much that buffer is costing you so you can decide if the convenience is worth it.
My honest take after years of trading: the button is fine for fast in-play exits when you have no time, but it is a lazy default for anything you can plan. Learn the maths, lean on the calculator, and treat cash out as one tool among several — not the magic profit button beginners imagine it to be. The pillar, the complete cash out guide, puts this in the context of the whole feature.
Why the Tick Ladder Changes the Maths
One thing a clean formula hides is that Betfair prices do not move continuously — they jump in fixed increments called ticks, and the size of a tick changes across the price ladder. Below 2.0 the increment is 0.01, between 2.0 and 3.0 it is 0.02, between 3.0 and 4.0 it is 0.05, and it keeps widening as the price lengthens. That structure quietly affects every cash-out calculation, because the lay price you can actually get is whatever the next available tick is, not the theoretically perfect number your formula spits out.
In practice this means your real cash-out figure is almost always set by the nearest tradeable tick, and on a short-priced favourite where ticks are tiny that is barely noticeable, while on a longer price where ticks are coarse it can move your locked profit by a meaningful amount. If you backed at 6.0 and want to green when the price is around 3.0, the difference between laying at 3.0 and laying at 3.05 — one tick — is a real chunk of your profit on a decent stake. The calculator gives you the ideal number; the ladder gives you the nearest one you can actually trade at.
The practical habit that follows is to calculate your target lay stake at the tick you can realistically get, not the one you wish existed, and to place your green-up order at a specific price rather than relying on the cash-out button to find it for you. On thin markets you may have to accept being one tick worse than ideal to get matched at all, which is just the spread cost the liquidity guide describes showing up in your cash-out number. Understanding the tick structure also explains why scalpers think in ticks rather than pounds — the same ladder mechanics underpin the scalping strategy and every other form of exchange trading. Build the tick ladder into your mental model and the gap between your calculated figure and your filled figure stops being a mystery and becomes something you plan around.
There is a second, subtler reason to calculate rather than tap: the cash-out button rounds, and on a partial close the rounding compounds. If you ask the slider for “half” of a position, the engine picks a lay stake and price that are convenient for it, not optimal for you, and you have no visibility into the rounding it applied. Calculating the exact lay stake for the fraction you want — then placing that order yourself at a chosen tick — means you know precisely what you locked and what you left running. I keep a simple rule: any position large enough that a tick or a rounding nudge matters in pounds gets greened by hand off the calculator; only small, fast in-play exits where speed beats precision get the button. That single rule, applied consistently, has quietly recovered more from the spread over the years than any flashy entry signal, because it turns a dozen tiny leaks a week into pennies I keep. The maths is trivial; the discipline of always running it is where the edge actually lives.
FAQ
How is the Betfair cash-out figure calculated?
It is a full hedge at the current price. For a back bet you are closing, lay stake = back stake × back odds ÷ current lay odds, and your locked profit is the lay stake minus the original back stake, before 5% commission on net winnings. The button runs this same calculation but shaves a small margin off the displayed price.
Is it better to cash out or green up manually?
On liquid markets, greening up manually almost always beats the cash-out button, because the button builds in a buffer and gives you a slightly worse price than the best available. On very thin or fast-moving in-play markets the button's speed can be worth the small cost. Calculate the figure first so you know how much the convenience is costing.
Why does my cash-out value keep changing?
Because it is recalculated continuously off the live lay or back price. Every tick — a goal, a break of serve, a market move — changes the price your hedge would be placed at, so the cash-out figure moves with it. It is not money you have banked; it is what you would lock in if you closed the position that instant.
Can I cash out a lay bet?
Yes. To close an open lay you back the selection at the current back price, with a back stake of lay stake × lay odds ÷ current back odds. The logic is identical to closing a back — you place the opposite bet sized to flatten your exposure across both outcomes.
Related Reading
Stay in the cash-out cluster: complete cash out guide, how cash out works, when to use cash out, cash out vs green up, partial cash out. Tools: hedging calculator, trading calculator, green up.