Laser Engraving Pricing Calculator: Price Each Piece From Your Costs

October 21, 2026 · Selling products and running the numbers

To price laser engraving, charge setup once per job and everything else per piece. Setup and artwork are minutes at your hourly floor. Each piece then adds its hands-on minutes at the floor, its engrave minutes at the machine’s cost per minute, the blank and finish, and an allowance for ruined blanks. Divide by (1 minus your margin). In the illustrative example below the floor is $62.04 an hour, setup is $36.19 a job and each piece adds $5.83, so a job of 12 prices at $11.06 a piece, while one piece ordered alone is $52.53.

None of these are market prices. The income, hours, machine figures, blank prices and ruined share belong to one made-up maker. Time your own setup and handling, read engrave minutes off your own software, and use your own figures. Treat this as a laser engraving pricing guide to the method, not a source of prices.

The laser engraving pricing formula

floor rate        = (income / (1 - tax set-aside) + business costs)
                    / billed hands-on hours a year
laser per minute  = (wear + tube + upkeep + electricity per hour) / 60
setup per job     = (setup + artwork minutes) x floor / 60
cost per piece    = hands-on minutes x floor / 60
                    + engrave minutes x laser per minute
                    + blank and finish + ruined-blank allowance
price per piece   = (setup per job / pieces + cost per piece) / (1 - margin)

Step 1: what an hour of your time has to earn

The example maker wants $45,000 a year kept and spends 25 hands-on hours a week on orders: artwork, setup, loading and finishing. The laser running on its own is costed in step 2, not here.

Spread over every hands-on hour, ignoring the ones that cannot be billed, the answer would be $55.83, short of the floor. Of the 1,680 hours worked in the year, 1,080 are billed, 64%, so the income comes to $26.79 per hour actually worked. The freelance hourly rate calculator works the same split for any hourly trade.

Step 2: laser engraving cost per minute

The machine’s price, less resale, is spread over the hours expected from it, and the tube over its own hours. Power is the measured draw of everything that runs with the laser, at the rate on the maker’s own bill.

A laser hour costs $1.43 in this example. A hands-on hour at $62.04 is over 43 times that. The machine is not where the money goes.

Step 3: blanks and an allowance for ruined ones

A pack of 25 blanks at $50.00 landed puts each blank at $2.00, and masking, finish and fill add $0.30. One attempt at a piece costs $5.54: the blank and finish, 6 engrave minutes ($0.14 of laser) and 3 hands-on minutes to place, align, remove and clean ($3.10).

With 5% of blanks ruined, each good piece should carry $0.29 for the ones that go in the bin. An order of 40 good pieces needs 43 blanks on hand, 3 spares. Which materials a machine can engrave, and how, is for the manufacturer’s instructions and the material’s label to say, and so are ventilation and settings. This is cost arithmetic only.

Step 4: setup per job vs cost per piece

The example spends 20 minutes on file prep, jig, focus and a test burn, and 15 minutes on layout and a proof: 35 minutes, or $36.19, whatever the job size. Each piece then adds $5.83.

Setup is 34% of the 12-piece job’s cost, and the whole of the difference between the two columns. One piece alone prices at 4.7 times the per-piece price in the larger job. Quote a flat price per piece and the single orders are the ones that lose. Charge setup per job, or set a minimum order.

The insight: the laser is cheap, setup and your minutes are not

Bed reloads add a second fixed cost. The example’s jig holds 6 pieces, and each reload takes 5 minutes, so prices fall in steps:

The 12-piece price here, $12.13, sits above step 4’s $11.06 because it pays for the reloads too. Each tier carries the same 20% margin; the 85% gap from one piece to 60 is setup spread, not a discount.

The same holds for personalization. Each add-on is your minutes plus a few laser minutes, with no new blank or setup:

In every row your minutes cost more than the laser’s. An order of 12 names, 1 photo and 2 second sides adds $115.05 and 132 minutes. Price add-ons by the minute and they stop being free favors.

A laser engraving price list

A price list needs a job size to spread setup over. The example’s past orders run 8 pieces a job, so each piece carries $4.52 of setup. Ruined blanks are folded in by dividing the attempt cost by (1 minus the ruined share), and each price is rounded up to a whole dollar so it clears the 20% margin:

Item 1 is the piece from step 3, listed at $13. A list price assumes the job size behind it; a single piece ordered alone costs more, as step 4 shows. The margin is profit as a share of the price, not a markup on cost, which markup vs margin works through. For selling to a shop, the same cost per piece feeds wholesale pricing.

Laser engraving cost of an order: did it pay?

After the fact, take the money in, subtract fees and the costs that came with the order, and divide by the hands-on hours it took. The example sold 12 pieces at $14.00, ruined 1 blank, and spent 1.75 hands-on hours:

That is $71.17 an hour against a $62.04 floor, so this order cleared it. The price per piece that pays exactly the floor is $12.60, $1.40 under what was charged. The fee share is whatever your own statement shows.

How these were calculated

The floor is income divided by (1 minus the tax set-aside share), plus business costs, divided by hands-on hours a week x (1 minus the unbillable share) x working weeks. Laser cost per hour is (price minus resale) / expected hours + tube price / tube hours + yearly upkeep / hours a year + watts / 1,000 x the price per kWh, and per minute is that over 60, carried at four decimal places. The ruined-blank allowance is one attempt’s cost x ruined share / (1 minus ruined share). Price per piece is (setup / pieces + cost per piece) / (1 minus margin), with bed runs rounded up so a part-filled bed takes a full reload. Figures carried from one step to the next are rounded to the cent, as the spreadsheet carries them. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that adds the billed hours up week by week and sums the laser cost line by line per minute, and the two agree to the cent. All inputs are illustrative, not market prices, measured engrave speeds or material advice. None of this is financial, legal, tax or safety advice.

To run this on your own year, machine and blanks, the pack below has eight linked calculators, so a change to your floor flows through every price.