How Much to Charge for Wedding Invitations: Design Fee and Per Suite

October 27, 2026 · Pricing a service business

To work out how much to charge for wedding invitations, quote two things separately: a design fee for your design hours, charged once, and a price per suite that covers materials, your assembly time, the print setup and your margin. Then add extra proofs, any rush, postage and addressing, and gross the total up for the card fee. In the illustrative order below, the design fee is $440.00, a printed suite is $12.45 at 100 suites, and the full quote for 100 guests, mailed, is $2,621.65.

None of these figures are market prices. Every paper price, print cost, minute count and postage figure belongs to one made-up stationery designer and is there to be replaced with your own supplier’s prices, your own timings and your own weighed postage. Nothing here is a postal rate. The same steps price any custom wedding stationery: save the dates, menus and place cards are a design fee plus a price per piece.

The wedding invitation price formula

design fee      = (consultation + pieces x hours each
                   + included proofs + file prep) x your rate
materials       = card + printing + inserts + envelopes
                  + embellishments, plus spoilage
full cost       = materials + assembly minutes / 60 x your rate
price per suite = (full cost + setup / suites) / (1 - margin),
                  rounded up to the cent
quote           = (design fee + suites x price + extra proofs)
                  x (1 + rush) + faster shipping
                  + postage + addressing
full quote      = quote / (1 - card fee share), rounded up

Step 1: the design fee

The example designer pays themselves $40.00 an hour. A custom suite of 3 pieces at 2.5 hours each, a 1 hour consultation, 2 included proof rounds of 1 hour and 0.5 hour of print file preparation come to 11 hours, so the design fee is $440.00. It is charged once per order, whatever the guest count. Put the number of included proof rounds in the contract; extra rounds are billed in step 6.

Step 2: materials in one suite

The suite is an invitation, a reply card and a details card, with an outer and a reply envelope. Shown to four places so the lines add up:

Spoilage is the extra stock bought for misprints and test sheets, spread over the suites you deliver. Use your own record of what you lose. Postage is not here; it goes on the order in step 7.

Step 3: your assembly time

Folding, stuffing, wrapping and sealing take the example 6 minutes a suite. At $40.00 an hour that is $4.0000, more than the $3.1668 of materials, for a full cost of $7.1668 a suite. Your time is 55.8% of that cost. A 100 suite order is 10 hours of assembly before a single envelope is addressed.

Step 4: price per suite at each quantity

The printer charges the example $30.00 of setup and test prints per order, shared by every suite in it. At a 40% margin, each price is the cost divided by (1 - margin), rounded up to the cent so the margin is never below yours:

The price per suite at 150 is 5.2% below the price at 50, and the only reason is the setup shared by more suites; the example assumes no paper price breaks. The design fee is charged on top, once. The margin is profit as a share of the price, on top of your hourly pay, not the same as a markup; the markup vs margin chart converts between them.

Step 5: digital only, printed or handmade

A digital-only design is the design fee plus 1.5 hours for phone and email files: $500.00. It pays exactly $40.00 an hour, because it is all design time and carries no margin.

The printed order quotes $1,685.00, the design fee plus $1,245.00 of suites. After $346.68 of materials and setup paid out, it keeps $1,338.32 for 21 hours of design and assembly: $63.73 an hour, because the margin applies to everything in the suite. If you want a margin on digital-only work too, raise its hourly figure.

For handmade suites, 12 extra minutes of handwork and $1.10 of extra materials take the cost to $16.2668, priced at $27.62 a suite at the same margin and setup, a premium of 121.8% over the printed suite. The order is $2,762.00 plus the design fee, and needs 30 hours of handwork, three times the printed assembly. Book the hours on your calendar before you quote the date.

Step 6: extra proofs and a rush

The couple asks for 2 proof rounds beyond those included: $80.00 at your rate. A 20% rush fee on the design fee, the suites and the extra proofs together adds $353.00. Faster shipping on your paper stock is passed on at its cost, $25.00, with no rush fee on it. The quote is now $2,143.00.

Step 7: postage, addressing and the card fee

Weigh a finished suite at your own post office for the postage figure; the example uses $2.00 a suite, $200.00 for the order, passed on at cost. Addressing at 3 minutes an envelope at your rate is $200.00.

The card processor in the example takes 3% of the price the couple pays, postage included, so the quote is divided by (1 - fee share), not marked up by it. Dividing gives $2,621.65, a card fee of $78.65 and $2,543.00 left, the whole quote. Adding 3% on top would give $2,619.29, and the fee on that would leave you short. If your processor also charges a fixed fee per payment, add it once per payment: with a deposit and a balance, that is twice.

A 40% deposit is $1,048.66, leaving a balance of $1,572.99. For the couple, the whole order works out to $26.22 per guest.

The insight: your hands cost more than the paper

In this example, your assembly minutes cost more than every sheet, envelope and embellishment in the suite, and handmade work triples the hours. Price a suite as “paper times something” and the time that goes into it disappears. The other trap runs the other way: the design fee is the same for 50 guests or 150, so spread it into the price per suite and a small order underpays you. Keep the design fee separate, price suites from full cost, and time your own assembly with a stopwatch on a test batch before you trust any per suite figure. The wedding flowers post prices another wedding order built from labor and materials the same way.

How these were calculated

The design fee is the design hours times your rate. Materials are card stock per invitation (price per sheet over invitations cut from it), printing, inserts, envelopes and embellishments, with spoilage as a share of those materials added on top. Full cost adds assembly minutes at your rate. Each tier price is (full cost + setup / suites) / (1 - margin), rounded up to the cent. The rush fee is a share of the design fee, the suites and the extra proofs. The full quote is everything before the card fee divided by (1 - fee share), rounded up to the cent, and the deposit is that quote times the deposit share, rounded to the cent. Figures are carried from step to step as the spreadsheet shows them. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that adds materials line by line and steps each price up a cent at a time until the margin, or the card fee, is covered, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not supplier prices, postal rates or market prices. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own paper, timings and postage, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from the design fee to the full quote and deposit.