How Much Should I Charge for Embroidery?
It's the question every embroiderer asks, usually while staring at a quote they don't trust. Here's the honest answer: there is no magic number, but there is a method. Learn the method once and you'll never guess at a price again.
The short answer
Your price has to cover your true cost — every material, every minute of labor, overhead — plus a margin that makes the job worth doing, grossed up for any platform fees. That's the whole game:
If that formula looks like work, that's because it is — the first few times. After that it's arithmetic, and the free calculator does it for you. The rest of this guide is about getting the inputs right, because a formula fed with guesses still gives you a guess.
The 6 costs beginners forget
Almost every underpriced quote traces back to one of these. Beginners count the blank and the thread and stop. Working shops count all six:
- Thread. Roughly $0.25–$0.35 per 1,000 stitches depending on your brand. An 8,000-stitch logo is about $2.40 in thread — not nothing, and it adds up across a run of 50.
- Stabilizer and consumables. Cutaway, tearaway, water-soluble topper, needles, bobbins. Budget $0.40–$0.75 per item. Nobody remembers the stabilizer until they've done 200 pieces without charging for it.
- Machine time. Your machine has a finite life measured in stitches. Every job should pay a little toward its eventual replacement. If you run at roughly 600 stitches per minute, an 8,000-stitch design is ~13 minutes of runtime — price it.
- Your labor beyond the run. Hooping, trimming, quality checks, packing, answering the customer's emails. The machine running isn't the job; the job is everything around it. Most beginners price the runtime and donate the rest.
- Digitizing. Either you paid a digitizer or you spent your own evening doing it. Both are costs. Charge it on the first order, spread across the quantity.
- Overhead. Rent, electricity, software, the Etsy fees, the fraction of that ruined blank. Add 10% on top of your subtotal as a standing line. It won't cover everything, but it stops the slow bleed.
The test: if you can't point to each of these six in your quote and say what number you used, you're guessing. Guessing is how shops end up busy, exhausted, and somehow still broke.
Three ways shops actually price (pick one)
1. Cost-plus (recommended for most shops)
Add up the six costs above, add your margin, gross up for fees. It's the most work per quote and the most accurate. This is the method the rest of this guide uses, and it's what the free calculator automates.
2. Per-1,000-stitches rate
Set a flat rate per thousand stitches, then add the blank, digitizing, and extras. Fast to quote, easy to explain to customers. The catch: your rate has to actually cover your labor and machine time, or you're just guessing with extra steps. Back into it from the cost-plus method once — total one real job's true cost, divide by its stitch count — then use your own rate with confidence. (The per-stitch rate card we use in our shop lives in the paid system; yours should come from your numbers, not ours.)
3. Flat per-item pricing
One set price per item type, plus the garment. Works great when you do the same few jobs over and over — team uniforms, company polos. The danger is using flat rates for jobs that aren't flat: a 25,000-stitch jacket back is not a left chest logo. Use flat rates for your bread and butter, cost-plus for everything else.
Run your own numbers
Worked examples with someone else's costs teach you someone else's prices. Run one of your recent jobs through this fill-in instead — it takes five minutes and it is the single most useful exercise in this guide:
| Thread (stitch count × your cost per 1k) | $ ____ |
| Stabilizer and consumables | $ ____ |
| Labor (run minutes + handling minutes, at your hourly rate) | $ ____ |
| Blank / garment | $ ____ |
| Digitizing share (full fee ÷ quantity) | $ ____ |
| Overhead (10% of the subtotal above) | $ ____ |
| True cost | $ ____ |
| Sell price = true cost ÷ (1 − margin), then ÷ (1 − fee %) | $ ____ |
Now compare that sell price with what you actually charged. The gap — in either direction — tells you exactly which input to fix. If you want to see this same exercise worked end-to-end with real shop numbers, the paid Embroidery Pricing System includes seven fully-costed pricing scenarios and the rate card behind them. This guide teaches the method; the system hands you the answers to check yours against.
Stop doing this math by hand
Enter stitch count, blank cost, and your labor rate. Get your true cost, your margin, and a fee-proof sell price instantly — free, no signup.
The extras that should never be free
These are profit, not favors. Every one of them should be a line item on the quote:
- Digitizing. Charged once, on the first order, as its own line item. Never absorbed, never "included." What you paid — or what your own digitizing time is worth — is the floor.
- Order minimums. A 6-piece minimum (or a small-order fee under it) is how you stop spending 45 minutes on a $12 job. The fee should make small orders worth your setup time.
- Rush turnaround. A tight deadline displaces other work. Price the displacement, not just the stitches — set a surcharge that reflects what rescheduling actually costs you, and apply it every time.
- Personalization. Individual names, numbers, or monograms mean re-hooping and re-threading every piece. That is extra labor on every single item — charge it per item.
- Specialty threads and placements. Metallic thread breaks more and runs slower. Sleeves, caps, and bags hoop harder than flat chest placements. If it costs you more time, it costs the customer more money.
Four traps that keep shops undercharging
1. Pricing off someone else's Etsy listing
The cheapest listing you can find is usually someone who forgot the six costs above. Matching their price just imports their mistake into your shop. Price from your costs, then compete on quality, turnaround, and service — the things a race to the bottom can't touch.
2. Free digitizing "to win the job"
You didn't win a job; you bought one, at the cost of an evening. Charge digitizing every time. Customers who balk at paying for digitizing were never going to be profitable customers.
3. Forgetting the platform takes its cut last
Etsy doesn't take 10% of your profit — it takes ~10% of the price. On a $26 shirt that's $2.60 out of your margin, not out of thin air. Gross every platform price up with the formula at the top of this guide.
4. Charging for materials but not for yourself
"I just do it in the evenings" still has a labor rate. If you wouldn't hoop 50 shirts for someone else for free, don't do it for your business for free. Pick a real hourly rate for yourself and put it in every quote.
The undercharging spiral: low prices → more orders → more hours → burnout → raising prices feels impossible because your whole customer base was bought with the low price. Set sustainable prices while you're small. It's ten times harder to fix later.
How to quote with confidence
The math is half the battle. The other half is saying the number out loud without apologizing for it. A few things that help:
- Quote fast. A quote that takes three days to arrive reads as uncertain. A quote in an hour reads as professional. (This is the real reason to use a calculator instead of a spreadsheet you dread opening.)
- Itemize. Embroidery, digitizing (one-time), and garment as separate lines gets fewer arguments than one total. People argue with totals; they accept line items.
- Put it in writing. A simple printed or PDF quote with the design, quantity, price, and turnaround beats a text message thread every time. It also ends the "but I thought it was..." conversations.
- Don't negotiate the method, negotiate the scope. "I can't do that price, but I can get closer if we drop the individual names" keeps your rate intact and gives the customer a choice that isn't "cheaper."
If you want the quoting, order tracking, and inventory handled in the same place as your pricing, that's what the Embroidery Pricing System is for — the calculator plus a quote builder, profit tracker, and pricing guide in one file. But start with the free calculator and the method above. The tool just makes the method faster.
Want the short version as a one-page reference you can keep by the machine? That's the free pricing cheat sheet — join the email list and I'll send it over.
Straight answers
Price your next job in 60 seconds
The free embroidery pricing calculator runs the whole method in this guide — true cost, margin check, platform fee gross-up — while you type. No signup, no install.