How to price embroidery jobs, line by line

What does an embroidery price have to cover?

Before you can quote, you need every cost on one list, split into the ones you pay for each piece and the ones you pay once for the whole job.

Margin goes on last, after every line above. Finishing steps belong on the list too: folding and bagging, individual names, relabeling, box packing and freight. If the job needs them, they are costs, not favors.

How do you work out your machine hour rate?

The machine hour rate is the number that turns minutes into money, and it is the one figure nobody can give you. Build it from your own accounts:

1. Add up a year of costs the shop carries whether or not a machine is running: operator wages and payroll costs, rent, power, insurance, machine finance or depreciation, service contracts, software, needles and parts.
2. Count the hours you can realistically sell. Take the staffed hours, then cut them for setup, maintenance, sampling, training and the gaps between jobs. The hours left carry every cost above.
3. Divide. Annual cost divided by productive machine hours gives your cost per machine hour. That is a cost, not a price: margin comes later.

Do this per machine group. A six-head and a single-head neither cost the same per hour nor produce the same number of pieces per hour, so quoting both at one rate hides where you make money. See how long embroidery takes for the head-count math.

How much machine time does a design take?

Stitching time is the stitch count divided by the machine speed, and then everything else that happens around it. Our run time calculator uses this formula, which is worth knowing by hand:

• Per piece = (stitches divided by speed, plus trims times seconds per trim, plus color changes times seconds per change) divided by your efficiency allowance
• Per cycle = per piece, plus handling time for hooping, loading and unloading
• Order time = cycles (quantity divided by total heads, rounded up) times the cycle time

The efficiency allowance covers thread breaks and the slack in a real day. Machine speed is a published spec you can check: Barudan gives up to 1,300 stitches per minute on flats and 1,000 on caps for its single-head machines, Ricoma gives 1,200 spm for the 15-needle Marquee, and Melco gives 1,500 spm for the EMT16X pantograph. Your own average will be lower, because caps, dense fills and delicate fabrics all run slower. If the design does not exist yet, the stitch count estimator gives a planning count from the finished size.

What do thread, stabilizer and digitizing add?

Thread is small per piece and real across a run. Madeira puts consumption at about 5 m of top thread and 3 to 3.5 m of bobbin thread per 1,000 standard-length stitches, and about 200,000 stitches from a 1,000 m cone of 40 weight thread at a 4 mm stitch length. A 10,000-stitch logo is therefore about 50 m of top thread and 30 m of bobbin per piece. Multiply by your own cone and bobbin prices, and add waste. The thread consumption calculator does this for a whole order.

Stabilizer is priced by the sheet you cut, not the roll: measure the piece your operators cut for that hoop, work out how many come off a roll, and divide. Toppings for terry and fleece are an extra sheet, so towel work carries a higher consumable cost than a polo.

Digitizing is paid once for the design, however many pieces you sew. That makes it the single line that genuinely falls per piece as the quantity rises. Our digitizing is a flat price per design, set by complexity and never per stitch, from $10, with all machine formats and a stitch simulation preview included. For what drives that price, see how much embroidery digitizing costs and the digitizing price list.

File quality is a cost too: a design with hundreds of unnecessary trims, or one dense enough to break thread, costs machine time on every piece and every head for the life of the program. See embroidery stitch count pricing for why a padded file is no bargain.

What does the build-up look like on an example order?

Here is the whole method on one job. Every input marked as an example is a placeholder: use your own. The only real figure is our published flat digitizing price.

The job: 24 polo shirts, one left chest logo of 10,000 stitches in 4 colors with 8 trims, sewn on a six-head machine. Example inputs: machine speed 800 spm, efficiency allowance 85%, 0.5 seconds per trim, 2 seconds per color change, 1.5 minutes handling per cycle, blank garment $8.00, machine hour rate $30.00, top thread $12.00 per 5,000 m cone, bobbin thread $0.005 per meter, stabilizer $0.12 per garment, target gross margin 40%. Digitizing is one Simple design at the published $10.00.

At those settings each piece takes about 14.9 minutes of machine time, so a cycle of six is about 16.4 minutes and the 24 pieces need 4 cycles, about 1 hour 6 minutes in total. That is about 2.73 minutes of machine time per piece.

That is $407.28 for the order. Run the same numbers, and your own, through the embroidery pricing calculator, which also handles multiple locations, minimums and a flat stitching price instead of a per-stitch one.

How should quantity breaks work?

A quantity break should reflect a cost that actually falls, and on an embroidery job only the one-off costs do. The garment, the thread, the stabilizer and the machine time per piece are the same on piece 500 as on piece 5. Using the same example inputs, only the digitizing share moves:

The whole break between 24 and 144 pieces is 59 cents. If your price list drops several dollars a piece over that range, the extra discount comes out of your margin, not out of a falling cost. Genuine reasons to give more are fewer setups across a program, a full machine instead of a part-loaded one, and garments bought better by the case.

A reusable file helps here: the same design sewn again next season costs nothing more to digitize. Ours come with unlimited revisions and no time limit, hand digitized and checked by a second digitizer. See embroidery digitizing, or the embroidery business pricing hub for the rest of the model, including contract embroidery pricing.

Sources

• Madeira: FAQ (thread use per 1,000 stitches, stitches per cone)
• Barudan America: single-head machines (1,300 spm on flats, 1,000 spm on caps)
• Ricoma: Marquee 15-needle commercial machine (1,200 spm)
• Melco: EMT16X commercial embroidery machine (1,500 spm pantograph)

Sources checked 20 September 2026.