Welding Cost Calculator

Five Lines in Every Welding Bid

A welding quote looks like one number and is built from five. Filler metal, shielding gas, electricity, labor, and the small stuff that wears out. Add overhead and profit and you have a price per foot.

Cost per foot = filler + gas + power + labor + consumables, then overhead and profit on top

The order matters less than the size of each line, and the sizes are lopsided. In the 100 foot example below, labor is $903.98 of $1,006.23 in cost, which is 90 cents of every dollar. Filler metal is $47.02, under 5 percent. Electricity is $2.31, about two tenths of one percent.

That is the first thing to understand about welding economics. The wire price that customers negotiate over is the smallest line in the bid. The number that decides the price is how many pounds per hour the arc puts into the joint, because labor hours are the deposited weight divided by that rate.

The AWS Welding Journal ran a February 2024 piece by Decker, Cross and Miller laying out three ways to compute weld cost: cost per unit, cost per length, and cost per weight. This page uses cost per length, which is the one a fabricator quotes when a customer asks for a number per foot of fence, rail or pipe.

Deposited Weight: The Number Everything Else Divides By

You cannot cost a foot of weld until you know how much metal goes into it. For a fillet weld the cross section is a triangle, so the area is half the leg squared. Real welds carry a little crown, so add 20 percent. Multiply by 12 inches and by the density of the metal and you have pounds per foot.

Pounds per foot = 0.5 x leg x leg x 1.2 x 12 x density

Steel weighs 0.2836 pounds per cubic inch. Stainless runs about 0.290 and aluminum about 0.098, which is why the same weld on aluminum is a third of the weight and a third of the filler bill.

Two things follow from that table. Area grows with the square of the leg, so one size up adds anywhere from 44 to 125 percent more metal depending on where you start, and doubling the leg quadruples it. A joint that calls for 3/8 instead of 1/4 needs 2.24 times the metal, so it costs more than twice as much in labor, even though the two welds look similar from across the shop.

Groove welds work the same way with a different shape. A single V butt joint on 1/4 inch plate with a 60 degree included angle and a 1/16 inch root gap carries roughly 0.10 to 0.12 pounds per foot before reinforcement, so it prices close to a 1/4 inch fillet. Measure the joint, do not guess it.

Worked Example: 100 Feet of MIG Fence

A shop quotes a run of 100 feet of 1/4 inch fillet weld on carbon steel tube, welded with solid wire MIG, at an $85 per hour shop rate. Every input below is a real setting you can change in the calculator.

1. Area of the fillet: 0.5 x 0.25 x 0.25 x 1.2 = 0.0375 square inches.
2. Pounds per foot: 0.0375 x 12 x 0.2836 = 0.1276.
3. Deposited metal for the run: 0.1276 x 100 = 12.76 lb.
4. Wire to buy at 95 percent efficiency: 12.76 / 0.95 = 13.43 lb.
5. Filler cost at $3.50 a pound: 13.43 x 3.50 = 47.02.
6. Arc time at 4 lb per hour: 12.76 / 4 = 3.19 hours.
7. Paid hours at a 30 percent operating factor: 3.1905 / 0.30 = 10.635 hours.
8. Labor: 10.635 x 85 = 903.98.
9. Gas at 25 cubic feet an hour and 35 cents a cubic foot: 3.1905 x 25 x 0.35 = 27.92.
10. Power at 25 volts and 200 amps, so 5 kW, for 3.19 hours: 15.95 kWh x 0.145 = 2.31.
11. Tips, nozzles and grinding discs at 25 cents a foot: 25.00.
12. Cost before overhead: 47.02 + 27.92 + 2.31 + 903.98 + 25.00 = 1,006.23.
13. Overhead at 12 percent: 120.75. Profit at 15 percent of cost plus overhead: 169.05.
14. Price: 1,296.03, or 12.96 per foot and 1.08 per inch.

Ten and a half paid hours to lay 100 feet of weld is about 9.4 feet an hour, which matches what a fabricator with a fixture and a clean joint does. If the shop has to grind every weld flush, add hours that never appear in the arc time.

One caution on the joint size. A 1/4 inch fillet is heavy for ornamental fence work, where most shops run 1/8 inch tacks on 14 and 16 gauge tube. Drop the leg to 1/8 inch and the same 100 feet comes to $348.15, or $3.48 a foot, because the metal drops by 75 percent and the hours fall with it. Quoting $12.96 a foot against a competitor quoting $3.50 is usually an argument about weld size, not about price.

Worked Example: 20 Feet of TIG Stainless Handrail

Now a different animal: 20 feet of 3/16 inch fillet on stainless handrail, TIG welded, with the same $85 shop rate and a 25 percent operating factor because TIG stops more often for fit and filler dips.

1. Area: 0.5 x 0.1875 x 0.1875 x 1.2 = 0.0211 square inches.
2. Pounds per foot at stainless density: 0.0211 x 12 x 0.290 = 0.0734.
3. Deposited metal: 0.0734 x 20 = 1.47 lb.
4. Rod to buy at 98 percent efficiency: 1.47 / 0.98 = 1.50 lb.
5. Filler at $14 a pound for ER308L: 1.50 x 14 = 20.97.
6. Arc time at 1.2 lb per hour: 1.47 / 1.2 = 1.22 hours.
7. Paid hours at 25 percent: 1.2234 / 0.25 = 4.894 hours.
8. Labor: 4.894 x 85 = 415.97.
9. Argon at 20 cubic feet an hour and 65 cents: 1.22 x 20 x 0.65 = 15.90.
10. Power at 14 volts and 110 amps for 1.22 hours: 0.27.
11. Consumables, tungsten, brushes and discs at 60 cents a foot: 12.00.
12. Cost before overhead: 20.97 + 15.90 + 0.27 + 415.97 + 12.00 = 465.11.
13. Overhead at 12 percent: 55.81. Profit at 15 percent: 78.14. Price: 599.06, or 29.95 per foot.

Twenty feet of handrail takes almost five paid hours and costs $30 a foot in welding alone. That number surprises homeowners who compare it to the price of the tube, and it should: this figure is labor and consumables only. It does not include the stainless tube, the polishing, the hardware or the installation, which is why a finished handrail sells for two to four times the weld cost.

TIG is slow on purpose. One and a fifth pounds of metal an hour is about a seventh of what spray arc MIG does, and the gas is more expensive because argon costs more than a C25 blend and flows at 20 cubic feet an hour. You pay for control, appearance and a weld that needs no cleanup on visible stainless.

The Same Joint in Four Setups

Hold the joint, the length and the shop rate constant and change only the process. The 100 foot, 1/4 inch fillet job reprices by a factor of six.

Doubling the deposition rate halves the labor and cuts the price almost in half, because labor is the cost. That is why shops invest in spray transfer, pulse, and positioners before they shop for cheaper wire.

The AWS Welding Digest of March 2024 gives a real example of the same lever on flux-cored wire: a 5/16 inch fillet with E71T-1 and 0.052 inch wire at 300 amps and 28 to 30 volts deposits 9.21 pounds an hour, and dropping to 275 amps cuts that to 8.07 pounds an hour and pushes arc time from 108 minutes to 124. The same article notes that flux-cored electrodes run 80 to 90 percent deposition efficiency because of slag and stub loss, while solid wire runs higher.

Operating factor is the other lever and the one most estimates get wrong. A welder is not welding for the whole shift. Fitting, tacking, chipping, changing wire, repositioning and looking at a drawing all eat the clock. Thirty percent arc-on time is normal for shop work with a fixture, 20 to 25 percent is normal for field work, and a fully automated cell can pass 60 percent. Halving the operating factor doubles the hours you pay for, with no change in the weld.

What the Formula Leaves Out

The five lines cover the arc. A real bid has to cover everything around it, and the omissions are where a job that looked profitable turns into a job that ate a week.

• Fit-up and tacking. Cutting, beveling, squaring and clamping can take longer than the weld. On small parts it usually does.
• Grinding and finishing. A weld that must be flush, polished or painted costs more in abrasives and time than it does in wire. Stainless needs dedicated brushes or the surface rusts.
• Position. Out of position work runs hotter settings and slower travel, and vertical up with stick can halve the deposition rate.
• Rework. A 3 percent reject rate on 100 feet is 3 feet of cut-out, reweld and re-inspect. Price it in or eat it.
• Travel and mobilization. A field job with a truck, a generator and two hours of driving carries a minimum charge before the first arc.
• Consumable setup. Gas bottles, wire spools and rod ovens are bought in bulk and consumed slowly. The per foot rate in the calculator is a placeholder for that wear.

The clean way to handle the extras is a second line on the quote: welding price per foot from this tool, plus fit-up hours, plus finishing, plus mobilization. Customers accept itemized extras far more readily than a per foot number that quietly doubled.

Safety Rules That Change the Bid

Ventilation is not optional and it costs money. OSHA 29 CFR 1910.252(c)(2) requires mechanical ventilation when welding is done in a space of less than 10,000 cubic feet per welder, in a room with a ceiling under 16 feet, or where partitions and balconies block cross ventilation. The minimum rate is 2,000 cubic feet per minute per welder unless a local exhaust hood or an approved respirator is used.

A movable hood has to hold 100 linear feet per minute of air velocity at the arc, which in practice means roughly 150 cubic feet per minute when the hood sits 4 to 6 inches from the weld and 425 when it sits 8 to 10 inches away. That gap is the argument for keeping the hood close: the same capture costs a third of the airflow.

Confined space work adds a permit, an attendant, a gas monitor and often airline respirators, and none of that shows up in a per foot number. A shop that welds galvanized, stainless or painted steel also needs fume extraction for metal fume and hexavalent chromium, and the filters and duct work belong in overhead.

Electricity is the one utility that stays cheap. The U.S. Energy Information Administration put the average commercial price at 14.47 cents per kWh in August 2026, against 9.64 cents for industrial customers. At those rates a 5 kW MIG rig running 3.19 arc hours uses 15.95 kWh, which is $2.31 on a $1,296 job. Do not spend an afternoon chasing a cheaper power rate; spend it on deposition rate.