How to Price Laser Engraving Jobs (Without Guessing)
A repeatable way to price laser engraving and cutting work: the four things every job actually costs, why setup time is the number most people miss, and how to choose a margin instead of a markup.
Most laser shops price the same way to start with: look at the job, think “that feels like about $40,” and hope. It works until it doesn’t — usually on a big batch, a fiddly multi-material piece, or the tenth revision of a wedding order that somehow made no money.
The fix isn’t a magic number. It’s pricing the job from what it actually costs you to make, then adding the profit you decided you want. Here’s the whole method.
The four things every job costs
Whatever you’re making, the cost breaks into four parts:
- Machine time. Not just electricity — the real per-hour cost of running the machine (more on this below).
- Your time. Setup, design or file prep, weeding, masking, assembly, packing. This is labour, and it’s almost always underclocked.
- Materials. The sheet, the blank, the hardware, the box — plus the offcut you can’t use.
- Margin. The profit you add on top, as a deliberate choice, not an afterthought.
Machine time is not “the power bill”
A 100W CO₂ tube might cost $1,400 and last around 4,000 hours. That’s about $0.35 an hour in tube wear alone — before a cent of electricity. Add the power the machine and extraction actually draw, a slice of your rent, insurance, software and consumables, and the fact that you’re standing there running it, and a realistic figure for a hobby-to-small-business laser lands somewhere around $30–$70 an hour all-in. We break the full calculation down in The Real Cost of Running a Laser Cutter.
The point: charging “20¢ for the electricity” on a 15-minute engrave isn’t pricing the machine, it’s subsidising your customer.
Setup time is the number everyone misses
A name plaque might cut in six minutes but take fifteen to set up: open the file, fix the customer’s low-res logo, position on the jig, test-fire on scrap, focus, tape down. That setup happens once whether you make one plaque or twenty — which is exactly why a single-unit order and a bulk order need very different per-item prices.
Track your setup time honestly for a week. Most people are shocked how much of a small job is setup, and it’s the single fastest way to stop losing money on one-offs.
Choose a margin, not a markup
These sound the same and aren’t. A markup adds a percentage on top of cost: $100 cost + 30% markup = $130 price. A margin is a percentage of the final price: for costs of $100 to be 70% of the price (a 30% margin), you charge about $143.
Margin is the more useful lens because it answers the question you actually care about — “what fraction of this sale do I keep?” — and it doesn’t collapse on low-cost, high-effort work the way a markup does. Pick a target margin (25–40% is common for craft laser work) and apply it consistently.
A quick worked example
Say a batch of 20 engraved bamboo cutting boards works out to:
- Machine time: 40 min at $45/hr = $30
- Setup + design: 25 min at $60/hr = $25
- Boards + packaging: $95
That’s $150 of cost. At a 30% target margin the batch sells for about $214 before GST, or roughly $10.70 a board ex-GST. Now it’s a number you can defend, repeat, and adjust when the price of boards jumps.
Where a tool helps
You can do all of this on paper. A calculator just makes it repeatable: enter your machine details and rates once, then every future quote is the same few numbers — cut time, setup time, material cost — and the margin and GST are handled for you. Try it below with a job you quoted recently and see how close your gut was.
Next: the pricing mistakes that quietly eat margin, and how to work out your real hourly rate.