← Screen printing and embroidery price calculator
Names no specific product or company. This compares a free calculator against the generic pricing habit apparel decorators are shopped against every day: one flat "per shirt" price — commonly a "$14 a shirt" quote — charged the same regardless of decoration method, colour count, or how many placements the job actually needs.
A quote sheet or a walk-in customer needs a number before anyone has counted screens. "$14 a shirt" is a perfectly fine headline rate, and no calculator replaces having one. What follows is not an argument that the flat rate is wrong. It is what that same rate stops showing you the moment a job is real and you know its quantity, its decoration method, and how many placements it needs.
Both columns below are this calculator's own shipped default shop rates — a $20/hr wage loaded 18% to $23.60/hr, $18 to burn and register each screen, $4.20 blanks with a 4% spoilage allowance, $5,200 of monthly overhead spread across 2,600 monthly pieces — on the same 12-shirt, 3-colour screen-print order, quoted at the same $14-a-shirt price either way. The only thing that changes between the two columns is whether the design is printed on the front only or on the front and the back.
| Question | Front only — 12 shirts, 1 placement, 3 colours | Front + back — the same 12 shirts, 2 placements, 3 colours each |
|---|---|---|
| What the flat $14/shirt price charges | $168.00 — 12 × $14 | $168.00 — 12 × $14, unchanged |
| Screens needed | 3 — one per colour, one placement | 6 — one per colour, at every placement |
| Setup cost (screens + art time) | $65.80 | $119.80 |
| Blanks (13 purchased at 4% spoilage) | $54.60 | $54.60 — unchanged, same 12 shirts |
| Run labour and ink | $7.20 | $12.50 — a second press pass, twice the ink |
| Overhead share | $24.00 | $24.00 — unchanged |
| Total cost before any profit | $151.60 | $210.90 |
| What the flat $14/shirt price actually nets | $16.40 profit — a thin 9.8% margin | −$42.90 — a real loss, not a thin margin |
| This calculator's break-even price per piece | $12.63 | $17.57 |
| This calculator's price at a 40% target margin | $21.06 | $29.29 — $8.24 more, for the same $14/shirt headline |
A flat per-shirt rate answers "what do I charge per shirt," not "how many screens this job needs." Both live inside the same $14 either way. The calculator splits them out — 3 screens on the front-only job, 6 screens the moment a back placement is added — so a second placement is a visible line item instead of one flat rate that happened to work out on the last job.
This is the one that costs real money. The flat rate charges $14 a shirt whether the order is a single front placement or the same order printed front and back, but the cost behind it is not the same — on this calculator's own defaults, the flat rate still nets a thin profit on the front-only job and a real loss the moment a second placement is added, with nothing on the quote sheet to say so. A shop quoting "$14 a shirt" on every job can price the front-only orders fine and lose money on every one that turns out to need the back printed too.
For a quote sheet, it plainly is. A walk-in customer or a phone quote cannot fill out a live calculator, and most people asking "how much for a shirt" want one number, not a form. The sensible arrangement is both: quote the flat rate to close the sale, then run this calculator once you know the quantity, the decoration method, and the placement count, to check whether that job's version of "the $14-a-shirt order" still covers cost — and, on a job with more placements than the one the flat rate was set against, whether it needs its own price instead.
Every figure on this page is this calculator's own worked example, computed from its own shipped default shop rates ($20/hr wage, 18% payroll load, $18 screens, $4.20 blanks, 4% spoilage, $5,200 monthly overhead over 2,600 monthly pieces), not a claim about any real shop's business or an industry benchmark. Your rates, wages, and overhead will produce different numbers — the point is which numbers to produce, not what they should come out to.
No, and it should not go away. A quote sheet or a walk-in customer needs one number, and "$14 a shirt" is a fine headline rate. The point of this page is not that the flat rate is wrong — it is that the same per-shirt number is charged whether the job is a single 3-colour front placement or that same front plus a 3-colour back, and only a real cost breakdown separates the two.
On this calculator's own shipped defaults, yes, with room to spare on paper but not much on target margin. A 12-piece, one-placement, 3-colour job costs $151.60 in total before any profit. At $14 a shirt that is $168.00 in revenue — a $16.40 profit, a 9.8% margin, well under the 40% target margin this calculator ships with by default.
It goes from a thin profit to a real loss. The identical 12-piece order printed front and back needs six screens instead of three, so total cost rises to $210.90 on this calculator's own defaults — and the same $14-a-shirt price still only brings in $168.00. That is a $42.90 loss, a -25.5% margin, on an order that looked exactly as biddable as the front-only one from the quote sheet.
No, and it is not trying to. The flat rate is what you quote to close the sale. This calculator is what you run once you know the quantity, the decoration method, and the number of placements, to check whether that job's version of "the $14-a-shirt order" still covers cost — and, on a job with more placements than the one the flat rate was set against, whether it needs its own price instead.
Price your own decoration job →
Should I charge extra for a second print location? →