Pricing CNC work: what to charge
Add up material, machine time at an hourly rate that covers wear and replacement, and your own time at a real rate for design, setup and finishing. Then add margin. Machine time is the part everyone counts and usually the smallest number on the list.
The four costs
| Cost | What it includes | Commonly missed |
|---|---|---|
| Material | The stock, including waste | The whole board you had to buy, not the square inches in the part |
| Machine time | Bits, power, dust collection, spoilboard, and setting aside money to replace the machine | Tool wear, which is real and invisible |
| Your time | Design, file preparation, setup, tool changes, sanding, finishing, packing | Almost all of it, on the first quote anyone writes |
| Overhead and margin | Shop costs, software, insurance, and profit | Profit, which is what pays for the jobs that go wrong |
Machine rate
An hourly number that covers what running the machine costs you: cutting tools, electricity, dust collection consumables, spoilboards, maintenance and a share of replacing the machine eventually. Small shops commonly use somewhere between 15 and 40 dollars an hour, and where you land depends on your machine, your tooling and how honestly you account for wear.
Your labour rate
The number people leave out, and the reason so much handmade work is sold at a loss. If you do not charge for design time, setup time and finishing time, you are not running a business, you are subsidising a hobby with your own labour. Decide what an hour of your time is worth and put it in the calculation.
Material, counted properly
Hardwood is sold by the board foot, which is a volume rather than an area: 144 cubic inches, or a piece 12 inches by 12 inches by 1 inch thick. Board feet are billed on rough dimensions, so you pay for the thickness before it was surfaced down.
Margin is not markup
Cost plus 35 percent is not a 35 percent margin. Cost plus 35 percent leaves you about 26 percent. This catches a lot of people.
Quoting custom work
- Quote the design time separately or fold it in explicitly, and say how many revisions are included. Unlimited revisions is where custom work goes wrong.
- Charge more for the first one. A repeat of the same design has no design time and much less setup, and the price should reflect a genuine second run.
- Price by value where you can, not only by cost. A piece that means something to the buyer is not priced by its board feet.
- Take a deposit on custom work. Personalised pieces cannot be resold.
- Build in a margin for failure. A percentage of jobs go wrong, and the successful ones have to cover them.
Where hobby pricing goes wrong
- Labour valued at zeroMost common
The single biggest error. Your time is the largest real input on most one-off jobs. - Machine time treated as freeCommon
Bits wear out, spoilboards get replaced, and the machine will need replacing one day. - Only the material in the finished part is countedCommon
You bought the whole board, including the part you cut away. - Competing with people who are not costing properlyCommon
There is always someone charging less because they have not done the maths. You cannot win that race and you should not enter it. - No margin at allCommon
Break even is not a business. Margin is what absorbs the failures. - Underestimating finishing timeCommon
Sanding and finishing routinely take longer than the machining did.