Free job shop quoting and estimating tool. Price a new CNC or machine shop job from material, setup, cycle time, and margin. Shows price per part, setup payoff, and exports a PDF quote.
Every shop owner has a story about a job they quoted too low. Usually the story runs the same. A good customer calls, the quantity looks reasonable, the setup felt familiar, you wrote a number on a sticky note and emailed it back. Six weeks later the job runs and you realize the cycle time was off, material went up, and the margin you thought you were making never existed. This calculator won't save you from optimistic cycle times. Nothing will. But it will at least make sure you've charged for all the things you should charge for in the estimate you're working with.
The math is deliberately simple. Material cost per part, setup time amortized across the run, cycle time at your loaded shop rate, consumables, scrap allowance, then a margin on top. That's it. No CAD upload, no AI, no pretending it knows more about your shop than you do. It's a cocktail napkin quote that makes sure you haven't dropped a zero or forgotten to include setup.
Material cost per part.What you'll actually pay your distributor, not the catalog price from six months ago. Round up if you're guessing. Steel and aluminum prices move, and the gap comes out of your margin. Include waste if you're buying stock to a length the part doesn't fully consume.
Setup time.Honest setup. Pull tooling, load the program, indicate the first part, debug the first article. Most shops undercount this by 30 to 50 percent. Setup is one time, but it gets divided across the whole run, so on small quantities it's often the biggest cost per part.
Cycle time per part.Run time for one complete part. Drop load and unload if you're running attended and don't want to count operator time twice. If you're quoting off a drawing and don't know the real cycle time, use the cycle time helper below or check your tooling vendor's charts. For anything over $1,000 in revenue, quote the first article at your estimate and true it up on the second.
Quantity.Quantity is what amortizes setup. Twenty parts is a totally different price than two hundred parts at the same cycle time, because the per part setup share is ten times smaller at 200. The calculator does the division for you, but the insight is worth spelling out. If a customer asks you to quote a quantity that feels too small, it's because the setup per part is going to dominate and they're not going to like the number.
Shop rate.Your loaded hourly rate. Labor plus machine plus overhead, not just wages. If you came here from the shop rate calculator it's already filled in. If you don't know your shop rate cold, calculate that first. Quoting at $65/hour when your real cost is $85/hour is the fastest way to lose money while looking busy.
Target margin.Default is 20 percent. Industry articles cite 15 to 25 percent as normal for small machine shops. Below 15 you have no buffer for a bad quarter. Above 25 and you're probably too expensive for commodity work. The right number depends on how much competition you have and how captive the customer is.
The setup payoff number tells you how many parts you need to run before the margin you earn covers the setup cost you already sunk. Below that quantity you're running to cover setup. Above it you're earning real margin. It's the cleanest way to see whether a small run is actually worth taking at your quoted price.
If the calculator says your setup doesn't pay back until 45 parts and the customer wants 30, you have three options. Raise the price until payoff hits 25. Negotiate a higher minimum. Or decline the job. Running it at the original price means paying the customer to use your shop floor, which is rarely a good trade.
Full CAD based quoting software (Toolpath, DigiFabster, QuoteCAM) is real and it works for shops that run high volume, have a consistent machine mix, and can afford $300 to $1,000 a month in subscriptions. Small job shops running one off and low volume work usually find the upload and wait workflow slower than writing a number on a sticky note, and the estimates are often wrong on small quantities because setup dominates and setup is hard to estimate from geometry.
This calculator is the opposite. Fast, transparent, and it trusts you to know your own shop. You type six numbers, see the math, adjust, and send the number back to the customer. The point isn't to replace your judgment. It's to make sure you haven't forgotten setup, underpriced material, or applied zero margin because you were in a hurry.
The optional cycle time helper takes tool diameter, cutting speed (SFM or m/min), chip load, and flutes, and gives you spindle RPM, feed rate, and cutting time for a given length of cut. The formulas are the basic ones every machinist learns. RPM equals (SFM times 12) divided by (pi times diameter) for imperial. Feed rate equals chip load times flutes times RPM. Cutting time equals length divided by feed rate. These are starting points, not the answer. For real speeds and feeds use G-Wizard, FSWizard, or your tooling vendor's data. The helper is here so you don't have to leave the page to ballpark a new part.
If you're running commodity work. Simple parts, lots of competition, customers who shop on price. You need to be tight on the math and honest about your utilization. Running at 80 percent capacity with a $72/hour break-even means $78/hour is a viable quote. If you're running specialty work. Tight tolerance, short lead times, unusual materials, customers who need delivery more than they need the cheapest price. You can charge your real target rate with confidence, and you should. Most shops that quote too low do it out of habit, not because the competition actually demands it.
Say a customer sends you a drawing for 50 aluminum 6061-T6 brackets. Simple 3-axis VMC work, nothing exotic. Two setups: one for the profile, one to flip and hit the back side. You pull up the drawing, look at the features, and start plugging in numbers.
Material is $4.80 per part. You're buying 2" x 3" flat bar from your service center and each bracket eats one cut plus a stub of waste. Setup is 1.5 hours total for both ops: load tooling, pick up the program, indicate the vise, run a first article, flip the fixture, repeat. Cycle time is 6 minutes per part across both operations. Your shop rate is $92 per hour. Consumables (inserts, coolant share, deburring) run $0.40 per part. You're comfortable with a 2 percent scrap allowance on this material and feature set. Target margin is 20 percent.
Start with setup cost per part. Setup hours times shop rate, divided by quantity: 1.5 times $92 is $138 of setup cost, spread across 50 parts, which is $2.76 per part. Run cost per part is cycle time in hours times shop rate: 6 minutes is 0.1 hours, times $92, which is $9.20 per part. Now add everything up for raw cost: $4.80 material plus $2.76 setup plus $9.20 run plus $0.40 consumables equals $17.16 per part.
Scrap allowance accounts for the parts you'll lose. At 2 percent, that's $17.16 times 0.02, which is $0.34 per part. Total cost per part is $17.16 plus $0.34, which is $17.50. Apply your 20 percent margin: $17.50 times 1.20 gives you a quoted price of $21.00 per part. Your profit is $3.50 per part. Total job price is $21.00 times 50, which is $1,050.00.
Now check the setup payoff. You sunk $138 in setup and you're earning $3.50 profit per part. Divide $138 by $3.50 and round up: that's 40 parts before setup is paid off. Since the order is 50, you're clearing real margin on the last 10 parts. That's tight but workable, especially if this customer reorders.
If the customer asks for 25 instead of 50, setup cost per part doubles to $5.52 and the price jumps to $23.77. That is the conversation you need to have before you commit to a number.
Production shops quote one part and run it for months. They amortize fixture design, programming time, extensive first-article testing, and tooling qualification across thousands of parts. The per-part setup share rounds to almost nothing. A production shop can spend 40 hours building a fixture and still come in cheap because the denominator is 10,000 parts.
Job shops don't get that luxury. You're quoting a new part every week, sometimes every day. Setup comes out of each run, and runs are short. The fixture from the last job is already torn down. The programmer is already on to the next drawing.
The most common mistake is quoting job shop work with production assumptions. Using 2,000 billable hours per year instead of the 1,700 you actually get after maintenance, quoting, and cleanup. Assuming zero debug time on a new part. Ignoring the switching cost of tearing down one job and setting up the next. These are small errors individually, but they compound into a margin that only exists on paper.
This calculator is built for job shop estimating. The setup payoff number exists because short runs are reality, and pretending otherwise is how you end up busy and broke.
Pricing pressure comes from two directions. Customers who shop every job to three shops and pick the lowest number. And your own fear of an empty machine. Both are real, but neither justifies quoting below cost.
Below about 12 percent margin you are working for the customer, not yourself. The machine is running, the spindle hours look healthy, but the profit isn't there. When it makes sense to negotiate down: repeat work from a reliable customer who pays on time, or filling idle machine hours during a slow month where the alternative is zero revenue. When to hold the line: tight tolerances, unusual material, rush delivery, new fixturing required, or any job that ties up your best machine for days. Those jobs carry risk, and risk has a price.
Forgetting programming time on new parts is the most common one. If it's a new program, someone is spending an hour or three in CAM, and that hour has a cost. Either roll it into setup or quote it as a separate NRE line item. Pretending it doesn't exist is how shops subsidize their customers' engineering.
Using last year's material prices will burn you quietly. Aluminum and steel move. Call your distributor or check current service center pricing before you quote anything over 20 parts. Quoting cycle time straight from CAM without adding 15 to 20 percent for real-world conditions is another silent killer. CAM doesn't account for chip clearing, tool changes, deburring, or the operator walking to the other end of the shop to grab a gauge.
Not charging for inspection time on tight GD&T is expensive. If the print calls out true position on six holes and profile of a surface, someone is spending time on the CMM. That time has a shop rate. Giving volume pricing on a small quantity because the customer promises more later is a gamble you almost always lose. And amortizing setup across a quantity the customer hasn't actually committed to is the same mistake wearing a different hat. Quote the PO in front of you, not the one the buyer is hinting at.
The 15 to 25 percent target margin range reflects NTMA profitability reports for small job shops in the United States. Material pricing uses typical US service center rates for common bar stock as of 2024-2025. Setup time estimates of 1 to 2 hours for standard 3-axis VMC work come from Modern Machine Shop's Top Shops surveys (2023-2024 data). Scrap allowance of 1 to 5 percent is consistent with PMPA quality benchmarks for precision machined parts. The default shop rate of $85 per hour represents the median for equipped small US job shops per NTMA survey data. All figures are US-focused. Shops outside the US should adjust for local labor rates, material costs, and overhead structures.
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