How Much to Charge for Handmade Jewelry: A Pricing Calculator, Worked

October 23, 2026 · Selling products and running the numbers

To work out how much to charge for handmade jewelry, add the materials in the piece to your bench minutes priced at an hourly floor your year needs. That is your cost. Multiply it by a wholesale multiplier you choose, then by a retail multiplier. In the illustrative pendant below, materials are $26.77 and bench time is $90.86, so the piece costs $117.63, wholesales at $152.92 and retails at $305.84. The same floor then prices permanent jewelry per inch and quotes a repair.

Every figure here belongs to one made-up maker. None of it is a metal price, a fee rate or what anyone else charges. Swap in your own numbers.

The jewelry pricing formula

hourly floor  = (income / (1 - tax set-aside) + business costs)
                / paid bench hours a year
materials     = metal bought x your price per gram
                + stones + findings + packaging
time cost     = bench minutes / 60 x hourly floor
cost          = materials + time cost
wholesale     = cost x wholesale multiplier
retail        = wholesale x retail multiplier

Step 1: your hourly floor

The example maker wants $40,000 a year kept after a 25% tax set-aside and carries $8,000 of business costs: tools, torch gas, website, photography gear. That is $61,333.33 of revenue a year. They work 25 bench hours a week for 48 weeks, but 10% of those hours go to remakes and samples that never sell, leaving 1,080 paid bench hours. The floor is $56.79 for each paid bench hour.

Ignore the lost hours and the floor would look like $51.11, and every piece priced from it would come up short. Admin is the other hidden cost: 12 unpaid hours a week of photos, listings and packing. Those are paid for through the floor on bench hours, so they are never charged again on a piece. Spread over every hour worked, the maker keeps $22.52 an hour. The freelance hourly rate calculator works through the same split for any trade.

Step 2: materials per piece

Weigh a finished piece, then price the metal you had to buy, not the metal that ended up in it. The pendant holds 6.5 grams, and with 10% of what is bought lost as scrap and filings, the maker buys 7.222 grams at their own supplier price of $1.20 a gram.

Step 3: bench time per piece

Time a few pieces of the same design and use your own minutes.

At the $56.79 floor, 1.60 hours is $90.86 of the maker’s time in every pendant.

Step 4: wholesale and retail price

Wholesale at 1.30 times cost leaves $35.29 of profit per piece on top of the floor. Retail doubles the wholesale price, a keystone-style step, and comes to $305.84, or $306 rounded up to a whole dollar. Both multipliers are the example’s choice, not a claim about what shops or makers charge.

The insight: pricing from materials leaves you out

One shortcut multiplies materials by a fixed number. Here, materials times 4 gives $107.08, which is $10.55 short of the cost of the piece itself, before any wholesale or retail step. The reason is in the table: the maker’s time is more than three times the materials, 77% of the cost. A pendant that takes a long time and uses little metal is exactly the piece a materials multiplier underprices.

Batching helps the time side. Make 12 of the same design, with 72 minutes of setup shared across the batch and 45 minutes of bench time each, and each piece costs $75.04, which is $42.59 less than one made on its own.

What you keep from an online sale

In the example every fee share applies to the whole order. On a $305.84 piece with $6.00 shipping charged, an order of $311.84, the example’s fee shares, copied from its own channel and processor, come to:

That is 13.7% of the order. After $5.40 of postage the maker keeps $263.64, which still covers the $117.63 cost but is $42.20 under the retail price. To keep the full $305.84 after fees and postage, the listing price would be $354.62. The Etsy fee calculator works through one channel’s fee stack line by line.

How much to charge for permanent jewelry

Permanent jewelry is priced per inch, so the question is whether a price per inch pays for the chain, the booth, the drive and every hour of the event. The example charges $9.00 an inch. A 7 inch bracelet is $63.00, against $13.66 of chain and connector: chain at $1.80 an inch with 5% lost to offcuts, plus a $0.40 jump ring.

At the event the maker welds 18 pieces over 6 selling hours, plus 1.5 hours of setup and teardown. Sales are $1,134.00. After chain, a $75.00 booth fee and $18.00 of driving (30 miles at the maker’s own $0.60 a mile), $795.06 is left, or $106.01 an hour across all 7.5 hours. That clears the $56.79 floor.

Two figures tell you more than the total. The event needed 11 pieces at $9.00 an inch just to pay the floor on those hours, booth and drive. And with 18 pieces sold, the lowest price per inch that pays the floor is $6.07. The maker’s own welding time allows up to 36 pieces in the selling hours; a day that sells fewer than 11 would not pay the floor at this price.

How much to charge for jewelry repair

A repair is priced on time and parts, with a minimum. The example repair takes 35 bench minutes plus 12 minutes to look at it, quote it and log it: 47 minutes at the floor is $44.49. Parts and solder cost $6.50, and a 50% markup makes them $9.75. The quote is $54.24, or $55 rounded up.

The maker’s $25.00 minimum would pay for 26.41 bench minutes, fewer than this repair takes, so here time and parts set the price, not the minimum. A minimum earns its keep on quick jobs; check what it buys at your own floor before trusting it.

How these were calculated

The floor is income divided by (1 minus the tax set-aside), plus business costs, over bench hours x (1 minus the lost share) x weeks. Metal bought is grams in the piece over (1 minus the scrap share). Time cost is bench minutes over 60 times the floor. Wholesale and retail apply the two multipliers to cost. Every fee share applies to the whole order, shipping included; the listing price that keeps the retail price is (retail + flat fees + postage) / (1 minus the fee shares) less shipping charged. Permanent jewelry pieces needed is (floor x event hours + booth + driving) over (price per piece minus materials per piece), rounded up. Figures carried from one step to the next are carried as a spreadsheet shows them, to the cent. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that counts hours week by week, prices metal as the piece plus its scrap, takes fees one at a time and walks the event piece by piece, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not metal prices, fee rates or market prices. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own metal price, minutes and fees, the pack below has eight calculators, from the hourly floor to a repair quote.