How to Price Screen Printing (Without Guessing)

I have never met a shop that went under because the prints were bad. I have met plenty that went under because the prints were cheap.

Pricing is the thing nobody teaches, partly because it is boring next to a video of a squeegee pull, and partly because the honest answer is “it depends on your numbers, not mine.” So people copy a price they saw in a Facebook group, win the job, and find out three hours later that they bought themselves a shift at below minimum wage.

This is the method I use. It will not give you a magic number, because a magic number does not exist. It will give you a price you can say out loud without flinching, and the ability to tell when a job is not worth taking.

Start with the only question that matters

What does this job cost me before I make a cent?

Until you can answer that, everything else is decoration. Most printers can tell you what a blank costs and stop there. That is the small half.

Your cost on a job has four parts:

• Garments. What you pay the distributor, plus freight, plus the pieces you will lose to spoilage.
• Consumables. Ink, emulsion, tape, film, cleaner, screens amortized over their life.
• Your time. Art prep, screen making, setup, printing, cleanup, packing, and the emails.
• Overhead. Rent or the part of your house the shop occupies, electricity, insurance, software, the equipment fund.

Three of those four are invisible on the invoice, which is precisely why they get left out.

Time is the cost people refuse to count

Here is the exercise that changes people’s pricing more than any spreadsheet: time one whole job, end to end, with a timer running.

Not just the printing. Start the timer when you open the customer’s first email and stop it when the box is sealed. Count the art fix. Count burning screens. Count the setup, the test prints, the wash-out, the reclaim.

Almost everybody who does this discovers the same thing: printing is a minority of the time. The 45 minutes on press was surrounded by two hours of everything else, and they only priced the 45 minutes.

Once you know real hours, pick an hourly rate you actually want to earn — including the fact that you do not bill 40 hours a week, because some of the week is quoting, ordering and cleaning. Then a job’s labor cost is real hours × that rate.

Why you need a minimum, and how to pick one

My screen printing minimum is 20 pieces per design. That is not a rule I inherited; it is the point where setup stops eating the whole job.

Yours might be different, and you can calculate it rather than guess. Work out your setup cost for a typical one-color job — screens, film, press setup, test prints, cleanup. Then ask how many pieces it takes before that setup is a tolerable fraction of the total. When setup is 60% of the job, you are being paid to set up a press, not to print.

The other half of a minimum is having somewhere to send the people it turns away. For me that is DTF, which has no screens and therefore no setup, so it has no minimum at all. If someone needs 8 shirts, that is a real order — just not a screen printing one.

The four things that actually move the price

When you quote, only four variables matter much:

1. Quantity of the same print. More pieces spread the setup. This is the biggest lever by far.
2. Number of print locations. A front and a back is two setups, not one job with a bonus.
3. Number of ink colors per location. Each color is another screen, another setup, another registration problem.
4. The garment. A cheap tee and a premium triblend are not the same order, and the customer’s budget usually decides this before you do.

Everything else — rush fees, custom art, oversized prints, poly bagging, folding, shipping — is an add-on with its own cost. Add-ons should be priced separately, not absorbed into your per-piece number out of politeness.

Charge for art. Actually charge for it.

Art is the single most commonly donated service in this industry. Someone sends a screenshot of a logo pulled off a website, and two hours later you have rebuilt it in vector for free because it felt awkward to bring up money.

Bill it. Separate it on the quote so the customer can see what they are buying. If they already own good vector art, they pay nothing and they feel good about it — which is a much better outcome than you quietly absorbing the cost on every job.

Build the quote in this order

1. Garments, plus freight, plus spoilage.
2. Consumables for the number of screens the job needs.
3. Real labor hours × your rate.
4. Overhead allocation.
5. Add-ons — art, rush, bagging, shipping.
6. Margin on top of all of it.

Margin is not the same thing as your wage. Your time is already a cost in step 3. Margin is what the business earns above covering itself — it is what buys the next dryer, absorbs the ruined run, and survives the slow month. A shop that pays its owner but never builds margin is a job that owns you.

Sanity-check every quote two ways

Before it goes out:

• Divide by hours. What am I earning per hour on this job? If the answer is embarrassing, the price is wrong or the job is wrong.
• Compare against the reorder. Screens are on file for a repeat run, so a reorder costs you less and should be easier to say yes to. If your first-run price is only viable assuming a reorder that may never come, the first run is underpriced.

When to walk away

Some jobs should not be taken at any price you could realistically charge. Eight pieces on a premium garment with a four-color front and a hard deadline is not a bargain waiting to be found — it is a loss with a nice logo on it.

Saying no is a pricing skill. So is the better version: offering the customer a different route. Fewer colors. A different garment. DTF instead of screens. A realistic date. Most customers would rather be told the truth than be quietly overcharged for the wrong process.

The uncomfortable part

If you price this way, you will be more expensive than the person in your town who has never done the math. You will lose some jobs to them.

You will also still be printing in three years, and they will not be. Underpricing does not lose you money slowly and gently — it loses you the business, usually right at the point where volume increases and the losses scale with it.

The shops that last are not the cheapest. They are the ones that know their numbers well enough to be confident, and confident enough to say a price without apologizing for it.

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Next step: time one complete job this week, start to finish, with a timer. Not an estimate — a timer. Then re-run your last quote using the real number. If that reveals what it reveals for most people, the Print for Profit Challenge is three sessions on exactly this problem for $10, and the full course covers pricing alongside the rest of the business for $29.