Laser Engraving Price Calculator

How laser engraving jobs get priced

Every laser quote is built from four blocks: machine time, material, handling and setup. A shop that charges $8 for a keychain and $60 for a cutting board is not guessing. It charges for the minutes the laser head moves, the square inches of blank it burns, and the work that happens before and after the burn.

Retail laser engraving in the US in 2026 mostly lands between $0.50 and $2.00 per square inch, or $45 to $95 per hour of machine time. Fiber work on bare metal runs $80 to $150 an hour because the source costs more and the parts are often one-offs. Hobby diode shops can charge $25 to $40 an hour and still make money, since the machine cost $400 rather than $40,000.

Those rates carry more than the laser. They pay for tube or diode replacement, exhaust filters, lenses, electricity, software and shop rent. A shop that bills only for power and material is paying itself about $2 an hour to run a $40,000 machine.

Read the table as a sanity check, not a price list. A coaster that takes four minutes at $60 an hour is $4 of machine time. Add a $1 blank, $1 of handling and a 55% margin and the coaster should sell near $13, not $6. Shops that price from the table without running the numbers usually lose money on small items and overcharge on large ones.

Machine time: where the minutes go

Raster engraving time follows the bounding box of the artwork, not how much ink the design uses. The head sweeps the full width of the rectangle once per line, so a logo tucked into the corner of a 10 inch plaque costs the same as a logo that fills it. Line spacing, usually 0.004 to 0.01 inch, sets how many passes the head makes, which is why a 0.005 inch interval takes twice as long as 0.01 inch on the same art.

Vector cutting works differently. Time follows path length and the number of passes needed to get through the material. A 12 inch circle has about 37.7 inches of path. At 20 inches per minute and one pass, that is 37.7 / 20 = 1.89 minutes of cutting, before any lead-in or tab breaks.

Machine throughput in square inches per minute is the number that makes quoting possible. Epilog's material and speed guides publish starting speeds for common materials, and every shop should replace the estimates below with its own stopwatch numbers after a test run.

The working formula is minutes = area / throughput, then multiply by a detail factor of 0.85 for text, 1.0 for a logo and 1.7 for a photo or dense fill. Set a floor of one minute per piece so that loading, focusing and unloading are never free.

Material cost per square inch

Material is the easiest cost to measure and the easiest to forget. Price it by the square inch of the blank, not by the square inch you engrave, because offcuts and failed pieces are part of the cost. Add 10% to 15% for waste, and add the masking tape, transfer tape and cleaning supplies if you use them.

Retail blanks cost far more than sheet stock. A 12 by 20 inch sheet of 1/8 inch birch plywood runs $6 to $9, which is about $0.03 per square inch, but a pre-cut ornament blank of the same material often costs $1.50 each. xTool's material settings chart is a useful starting point for what each material needs in power and speed, and the settings change the time as much as the price.

The speed factor matters more than the price per square inch on slow materials. Glass at $0.10 per square inch looks cheap next to anodized aluminum at $0.15, until the glass takes 50% longer on the machine and produces twice the breakage.

Setup, design and handling charges

Setup is the part of the job that happens with the lid open. A repeat order with a saved file needs two minutes to load and align. A new design needs a vector file, a test burn and a proof. Photo work needs cleanup, contrast adjustment and often a second test. Charge for each level instead of hiding it in the per-minute rate.

Common 2026 setup charges: no charge for a repeat file, $15 to $25 for a resize or text change, $35 to $60 for a new vector design, and $60 to $90 for photo cleanup or tracing. Charge setup once per order. On a run of 25 pieces, a $15 edit adds $0.60 per piece; on a single piece it adds the full $15, which is why small orders need a minimum.

Handling covers loading, masking, cleaning, inspection and packing. Most shops spend 2 to 5 minutes per piece, which is $1 to $3 at a $30 hourly shop rate. Add a separate packing charge for retail-ready packaging, and a shipping charge if you mail the order.

If the customer supplies the blank, keep the handling charge and add a damage clause. Customer blanks fail at a higher rate, and a ruined $40 tumbler is not covered by a $2 handling fee.

Turning cost into price with a margin

Cost and price are different numbers. A margin is the share of the selling price that is left after cost. A markup is added on top of cost. Mixing the two is the most common pricing error in small shops: adding 55% to a $3.03 cost gives $4.70, which is a 35% margin, not 55%.

The margin formula is price = cost / (1 - margin). At a 55% margin, divide cost by 0.45, which is the same as multiplying by 2.22. The table below shows the multiplier for the margins most craft shops use.

Most home-based laser shops need 50% to 65% to cover rent, insurance, software, marketing, rework and their own time. A shop with no rent can survive at 45%. A shop selling through a marketplace needs more, because the platform fee comes out of the same price. Run the number after fees, not before.

Worked example: 25 wooden ornaments

Take a 4 by 3 inch ornament, 25 of them, on a 60W CO2 laser at $28 an hour. The engraved area is 12 square inches. At 14 square inches per minute that is 12 / 14 = 0.86 minutes, raised to the one minute floor, so each piece uses 1.0 minute of machine time. Machine cost is 28 / 60 = 0.47 dollars, which is $0.47.

Material at 0.035 x 12 = $0.42, plus 10% waste for $0.46. Handling at $1.50 brings the cost to $3.03 per piece. A $15 file edit spread over 25 pieces adds $0.60, so the full cost is about $3.63 per piece, or $90.72 for the 25 piece run.

At a 55% margin, the order price is $90.72 / 0.45 = $201.60, which is $8.06 per piece and $110.88 of profit. That is the number to compare against the $6 to $12 retail band for ornaments. It sits comfortably inside the band, which tells you the job is priced correctly rather than guessed.

Change one input and the answer moves. Switch to a 10W diode at $12 an hour and 6 square inches per minute, and the piece needs 2.0 minutes and $0.40 of machine time, but the same handling and setup. The cost barely moves. Switch to a photo fill at 1.7x and the machine time rises to 1.7 minutes on the CO2, which adds about $0.32. Handling, not the laser, is what makes small items expensive.

Quantity breaks, minimums and rush fees

Price per piece falls as quantity rises, but only because setup and design spread thinner. Material and machine time stay linear, so a 50% discount on a 100 piece order can wipe out the profit if the quote was built on a per-piece rate that already included setup.

A workable structure: list price at 1 to 24 pieces, 10% off at 25 to 99, 15% off at 100 to 249, and 20% off at 250 or more. Hold the line at material plus handling plus 30% as the absolute floor. Below that, the job is buying work rather than selling it.

Set a minimum order of $25 to $50 to cover setup and packing on tiny jobs. Add a rush fee of 20% to 30% for turnarounds under 48 hours, and quote wholesale at 50% of retail only when the volume is predictable and the files are clean.

Finally, quote an expiry date. Material prices moved a lot between 2021 and 2024, and a quote that stays open for a year is a promise to absorb every increase. Thirty days is standard.