How job shops really price laser and plasma cutting

Where these numbers come from

We read the threads where shop owners talk money — PlasmaSpider, the Langmuir Systems forum, Signs101 and LightBurn — and kept every rate with its post and date. Read them for what they are: mostly plasma, mostly US dollars, mostly small shops, and many of them from 2009–2016. We found no forum post giving an hourly rate for a fiber-laser sheet-metal job shop. The question itself never goes away. In 2016 a new shop asked: “How do I charge for just cutting? Flat hourly, by the piece, by the linear inch?” Ten years later, on the Langmuir forum, another asked: “Do you factor complexity (pierce count, cut length, etc.) into pricing…”

Formula 1: machine time

Price = cut time × machine rate + material + setup. The cut time comes from the CAM or controller simulation; the rate is meant to pay for the machine, not just the operator. One Australian poster listed what his AU$220 an hour plus GST covers: labour, power, consumables, maintenance and the machine's depreciation, costed on run time only.

• Plasma, 2009: $100 an hour for the machine, written as $1.67 per minute of cutting.
• Plasma, 2016: “The rate is $100 per hour for cutting.” That shop turns down jobs that only pay less.
• Laser (sign shop), 2019: $2 a minute plus 2–3× materials as the “standard/suggested” price — with the warning “$2/min on some jobs will be way too high”.
• Laser (sign shop), 2019: $0.75 a minute wholesale, $1.50 retail, a $25 minimum setup and material at least doubled.
• Laser, 2021: “anything from .30 cents to $1.50 per min of laser time” seen in the market.

Machine time is simple for the shop and honest about thick plate, where the machine is slow. Its weakness is the customer: a minute rate is hard to check against another shop's quote.

Formula 2: per inch (or metre) plus per pierce

Price = cut length × rate per length + pierces × rate per pierce + material + design time. This is the formula the downloadable plasma spreadsheets use, and the rates people post are strikingly close:

Converted to metres, $0.10–0.33 an inch is about $3.94–13.00 a metre. The pierce charge has a clear job: “Pierce charges (0.15 per) usually cover my plasma consumables.” Thickness changes both: “The price per cut inch increases as the material thickness increases”, wrote one poster in 2009, because the machine is slower. Another only charges pierces on thick plate: “I don't usually charge for pierces unless it is over 5/8" thick.”

The two formulas are one formula

A per-metre rate is just the hourly rate divided by how many metres the machine cuts in an hour: rate per metre = hourly rate ÷ (60 × speed in m/min). A pierce rate is the hourly rate times the seconds a pierce takes, divided by 3600. For example, at €90 an hour and 3.5 m/min — the starting value how to price laser cutting uses for 3 mm mild steel at 3 kW — that is about €0.43 a metre. The trouble starts when the per-inch figure comes from someone else's spreadsheet. One poster in 2020: “I just used the defaults that were in the spreadsheet when I downloaded it.” Another, in 2024, found after tweaking the numbers that he had been undervaluing his products and his time. Work the rate out from your own hourly cost and your own speeds; see price per metre, minute or hour.

Material, minimums and the rest of the pie

• Material: marked up 25–35 % on big jobs and up to 2–3× on small ones in these threads; often billed on the part's bounding rectangle so the skeleton is paid for. See material cost in a quote.
• Minimums: a 1-hour design minimum (2016), a $25 setup charge waived on bigger jobs (2019), $100 minimum orders on some equipment (2019).
• Drawing and customer time: a cut report is “only a piece of the pie for pricing”, one owner wrote in 2022. Charge for drawing, the back-and-forth and sign-off; he budgets material at twice cost so a remake does not come out of his pocket.
• Sheets: a 2021 poster asked how to price a job of three 4×8 sheets — whole sheets or only the parts. Decide it once and write it on the quote.

Where the numbers go wrong

The forum stories of lost money are rarely about the rate. A 2015 job of 23 sheets of 2.5 mm stainless was quoted at about $1,000 for cutting, and the poster soon “realised I'd really under priced the job.” In 2014 a plasma shop worked out $30 of cutting and $15 of toolpath and handling for a part with 581 inches of cut and 49 pierces, then saw a laser shop charge $135 for it, material included. The numbers that decide a quote — cut length, pierces, sheets used — are exactly the ones people count by hand. On SheetCAM in 2022, one answer to “how many pierces?” was that you could just count them manually for the first part. See count pierces and cut length.

The online prices your customer checks

• SendCutSend: every example on its pricing page — a 2 × 2 in part in 0.059 in mild steel, a 1.5 × 3 in part in 0.187 in aluminium — shows $19.51 each for one part. There is no minimum quantity, bulk discounts go “up to 80% off”, and “More cutouts = more processing time = higher cost”. US shipping is free from $39.
• Fractory: about £10 in set-up fees for each sheet loaded on the machine — £1 a part if ten parts share the sheet — no minimum order, and the price is worked out from cutting time, material and logistics.

Neither is a price to copy. They tell you what a one-off customer has already seen, and that a set-up charge per sheet is normal.

A pricing setup that holds up

1. Work out a machine rate that pays for the machine: labour, power, gas, consumables, maintenance and depreciation over the hours it really runs. See machine hourly rate.
2. Time one real job and replace the speed chart with your own speeds; derive the per-metre and per-pierce rates from the hourly rate.
3. Price material from a dated price per kg with a markup, and decide whether you bill the part rectangle, the net area or whole sheets.
4. Add a set-up charge per job or per sheet, and a minimum order.
5. Charge drawing and file clean-up separately, with its own minimum.
6. Write the quote in the style the customer can compare — often per part — and keep the hourly view for yourself.