How Much to Charge for Welding Per Hour and Per Inch, Worked Through

October 31, 2026 · Pricing a service business

How much to charge for welding per hour starts with the hourly floor your own year needs, plus the wire, gas, tips and discs a shop hour burns. In the illustrative example below that is $73.30 for each paid hour plus $12.64 of consumables, so a shop hour costs $85.94 and sells for $101.11 at a 15% margin. Per inch, the same shop hour lays 48 inches, which prices an inch of weld at $2.11.

None of these are market rates. Every price, usage figure, speed and hour belongs to one made-up welder, and every one of them is meant to be replaced with your own. Nothing here is structural, code, certification or safety advice; the arithmetic prices time and materials only.

The welding price formula

hourly floor        = (income / (1 - tax set-aside) + business costs)
                      / paid hours a year
shop hour cost      = floor + consumables per arc hour x arc-on share
price per hour      = shop hour cost / (1 - margin)
inches per shop hr  = inches per arc-on hour x arc-on share
price per inch      = shop hour cost / inches per shop hr / (1 - margin)

Step 1: your hourly floor

The example welder wants $60,000 a year kept after a 25% tax set-aside and carries $15,000 of business costs: insurance, shop rent, machine upkeep, phone, advertising. That needs $95,000.00 of revenue. They book 30 hours a week for 48 weeks, and cancels and slow days take 10% of those, leaving 1,296 paid hours. The floor is $73.30 for every paid hour. Ignore the lost hours and it looks like $65.97, which quietly pays less than the year needs.

There are also 11 unpaid hours a week of driving, quotes, ordering and invoicing, so the welder keeps $30.49 per hour actually worked. The floor already pays for those hours, because the year’s revenue is spread over paid hours only. So count here only time you never bill: if a mobile call-out or a steel pickup is billed to the job, as in steps 4 and 6, leave those hours out of this count or you charge them twice.

Step 2: consumables per shop hour

Weigh a spool before and after, read your gas flow, and count tips and discs over a few weeks. The example’s figures, per hour with the arc on:

The arc is on 40% of a shop hour here; the rest is fit-up, grinding and moving parts. That is why a shop hour carries $12.64 of consumables, not $31.60.

Step 3: how much to charge for welding per inch

The welder lays 120 inches of finished weld per arc-on hour on this joint and position, timed, not guessed. With the arc on 40% of the hour that is 48 inches per shop hour.

Change the inches per hour for each joint size and position; a vertical or overhead weld on the same job is a different line.

Step 4: a mobile call-out

A mobile visit pays for the drive and the rig as well as the weld. The example drives 40 minutes each way, 50 miles round trip at $0.70 a mile from its own vehicle records, and spends 1.5 hours on site with a rig that costs $18.00 an hour to run (welder, generator fuel, truck setup wear: the welder’s own figure).

That is above the example’s $250.00 minimum, so the visit is charged as priced. A shorter visit would bill the minimum instead.

Step 5: the small-job minimum

A 20 minute repair is not 20 minutes. Add 30 minutes of setup and cleanup and 15 of customer time and paperwork and it is 65 minutes. At the floor plus consumables, with $5.00 of flat supplies, it costs $98.10; rounded up to a $5.00 step, the minimum is $100.00. Priced on the work minutes alone it would be $28.65, $71.35 short.

Step 6: steel and the offcut

The job’s cut list uses 48 feet of steel, sold in 20 foot sticks at the example’s supplier price. That means buying 3 sticks for $192.00 and keeping 12 feet of offcut. Charged to this job, each foot used costs $4.00, against $3.20 a foot on the stick. With $38.00 of other material, a 20% markup and 1 hour of ordering and pickup at the floor, the material line is $349.30. If the offcut really goes into a later job, charge it once, not twice.

Step 7: a fabrication quote

Fabrication is priced by stage, every hour at the floor plus consumables:

A 40% deposit of $649.68 covers the material line before the first cut.

The insight: the arc is off most of the hour

Price an inch from arc speed alone, as if the arc never stopped, and the example’s floor and consumables give $1.03 an inch at the same margin. The real figure is $2.11, more than twice as much, because only 40% of a shop hour is arc time. The same thing shows in fabrication: welding is 4 of the 12 hours, 33% of the job, so a quote built on weld time alone leaves out two-thirds of the work. And on small jobs, setup and talk turn a $28.65 weld into a $100.00 minimum. Timing the whole hour, not just the bead, is what makes the price per inch and the price per hour agree.

Did the job pay?

Say a job was sold at $1,600 and took 13.5 hours of shop, drive and site time, with $240.00 of material and $140.00 of consumables, 30 miles and a 3% card fee. It leaves $1,151.00, or $85.26 per hour against the $73.30 floor, so it clears. The price that pays exactly the floor on those hours was $1,433.56. Log the real hours against the estimate: this job’s 13.5 hours, drive and site time included, ran past the 12 shop hours the step 7 quote was built on, and it still cleared because the price had room above that floor price.

How these were calculated

The floor is (income / (1 - tax set-aside) + business costs) / (booked hours x (1 - lost share) x weeks). Consumables per arc hour are wire pounds x price + gas flow x cylinder price / cylinder cubic feet + tips x price + discs x price; per shop hour, times the arc-on share. Price per inch is (floor + consumables per shop hour) / (inches per arc hour x arc-on share) / (1 - margin). The small-job minimum is all-in minutes at floor plus consumables, plus flat supplies, rounded up to the price step; steel is bought in whole sticks with the offcut charged in. Figures carried between steps are carried as the 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 adds paid hours week by week and buys steel a stick at a time, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not market rates or measured speeds. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice, or structural, code or safety advice.

To run this on your own year, usage and speeds, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from the hourly floor to a check on whether a finished job paid.