Word.ws English Dictionary

cost of doing business

cost of doing business noun: the total ordinary expenses, such as materials, labor, and taxes, necessarily incurred in operating a commercial enterprise.

Noun

cost of doing business

  1. (often literal) The total ordinary expenses, such as materials, labor, and taxes, necessarily incurred in operating a commercial enterprise.
    • Once you factor in rent, staff, and inventory, the cost of doing business around here eats up nearly half of gross revenue.
    Synonyms:
    price of doing business, comes with the territory, part of the package, the price you pay, occupational hazard
  2. (idiomatic) An unwelcome or regrettable but predictable and unavoidable risk, loss, or inconvenience accepted as an inherent part of pursuing a particular goal or aim, especially when the risk may be impractical or counterproductive to try to reduce or eliminate.
    • Civilian casualties are just the cost of doing business when conducting a military operation in a dense urban enviroment.
    • Sexual harassment settlements: ‘cost of doing business’2011, CNN, Sexual harassment settlements: ‘cost of doing business’ (article title)
    Synonyms:
    part of the deal

Synonyms of cost of doing business

Origin of cost of doing business

Originally a literal phrase, the cost of doing business, i.e. the ordinary expenses of running a commercial enterprise. The figurative sense, with the expanded meaning of any accepted negative consequence involved in pursuing a goal, became established in American English by the mid-to-late 20th century.

Questions about cost of doing business

What does cost of doing business mean?
Cost of doing business means the total ordinary expenses, such as materials, labor, and taxes, necessarily incurred in operating a commercial enterprise.
What part of speech is cost of doing business?
Cost of doing business is a noun.

Words near cost of doing business in the dictionary

  1. cost mark
  2. cost marks
  3. cost object
  4. cost objective
  5. cost objectives
  6. cost of doing business
  7. cost of goods sold
  8. cost of living
  9. cost of money
  10. cost oil
  11. cost out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cost of doing business (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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