How to Calculate your Cost and Charge Rates for your Shop

It's tough to know how much to charge for your services. As a CNC Job Shop (and product manufacturer), we've been through that growing pain. To help out we made a quick way to figure this out for yourself.

Use our free Calculator below to find out your Cost and Charge Rates for your Shop.

Calculate Costs

The first step to finding out how much to charge is to calculate your fixed costs or overhead. This is crucial to understanding how much you need to charge to to be profitable.

We've made a free cost calculator below. Add everything you consider "fixed" or a repeating cost to the list and add the amounts

Edit any field in BLUE, and leave GREEN fields are calculations.

This will most likely be eye-opening. We recalculate our costs multiple times a year to make sure we are charging the right rates for our business needs.

Charge Rates

A common method for a starting point for profitable fees is to double your hourly cost rate. That's how we've preset the calculator but you can change the "Markup Factor" to your liking.

Once you've seen the calculated rates, you can set your own rate in "Your Rate" to see how that affects the calculations in comparison.

Employees

One method to account for employee hours/costs is to include their hours in Work Week HRS. If you had 5 employees working 8 hours a day per week, you'd enter 200 hrs.

To Use the Calculator:

• You'll want to Download in Excel or CSV format (File > Download) or
• When signed-in to your Google account: Make a Copy to your Google Drive under the File menu to use in Google Sheets.