Runway = Cash Balance / Burn Rate. Let’s look at an example: If your company has a cash balance of $1,000,000, and your monthly burn rate is $50,000, you have a runway of 20 months, so almost two years. The date when you will finally run out of money, is called the zero cash date. Burn rate is the rate at which a company is losing money. [citation needed] It is typically expressed in monthly terms. E.g., "the company's burn rate is currently $65,000 per month." In this sense, the word "burn" is a synonymous term for negative cash flow. It is also measure for how fast a company will use up its shareholder capital. Today we are going to talk about burn rate, or cash burn rate to be more specific. Your burn rate is the speed at which your cash balance is going down. If you had $1mm in cash on January 1st, and now it is October 1st and you have $250,000 left, your burn rate is $750,000/9, or $83,333/month.