Setup time vs run time: why the difference decides your price
There is no article on this anywhere. There is one forum thread. Here is the whole thing, in one place.
7 min read · updated August 2026
Setup time is what it takes to get ready to make the first good part: pulling fixtures, dialling in, touching off tools, proving the program, cutting the first piece and measuring it. You pay it once per lot no matter how many parts follow.
Run time — cycle time — is what each part takes once you are running. You pay it once per part.
That difference sounds obvious written down, and it still causes more quoting damage than any other single thing in a small shop, because the consequences only show up at the extremes of quantity.
What goes wrong at low quantity
On a lot of one or two, setup dominates completely. A job with ninety minutes of setup and a four minute cycle is 95% setup. Shops that quote prototypes off a per-part price built for production quantities lose money on every one, and often conclude that prototype work is unprofitable in general. It is not. It was mispriced.
What goes wrong at high quantity
The opposite error costs more. Quote one part, multiply by fifty, and every one of those fifty parts is carrying a full setup that only happened once. You are roughly $70 a part too expensive on a job where the winner was $2 a part over cost, and you never find out why you lost it.
Losing a quote because your arithmetic double-counted setup is the most expensive kind of error, because it leaves no trace. The job simply goes elsewhere.
The case people miss: the same part twice in one assembly
If you build assemblies, the lot that matters is not the number of assemblies, it is the number of that part going through that machine in one go. Two identical shafts per gearbox, five gearboxes ordered, is ten shafts in one setup. Price the setup over ten.
Nearly every quoting tool aimed at small shops prices a part at a time, so this correction has to be made by hand, and it usually is not.
| Quantity | Setup per part (90 min at $95/h) | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $142.50 | Setup is the whole job |
| 5 | $28.50 | Still dominant |
| 25 | $5.70 | Starting to disappear |
| 100 | $1.43 | Effectively free |
Practical rules
- ·Track setup and cycle as separate numbers on every job. If your records blend them, you cannot quote a different quantity of the same part without guessing.
- ·Quote quantity breaks explicitly. It shows the customer where the price comes from and it wins you the larger order.
- ·When the customer cuts the quantity after you quoted, reprice. The setup did not shrink.
- ·Time your setups honestly for a month. Most shops find they take considerably longer than the number in their heads.
See how the split moves a price
Try it on a real print →Common questions
- What is the difference between setup time and cycle time?
- Setup time is the one-off work of preparing the machine for a job — fixtures, tooling, touching off, proving out the program and the first article. Cycle time is the repeating time to produce each part once the machine is running. Setup is charged once per lot; cycle time is charged once per part.
- How do you spread setup cost across a job?
- Divide the total setup cost by the number of parts in the lot, and add that to each part's cost. If the same part appears more than once in an assembly, multiply the assembly quantity by the parts per assembly first — that is the real lot going through the machine.
- Should I quote setup as a separate line item?
- On prototypes and first articles, yes — it protects you if the quantity later drops. On repeat production, spreading it into the part price is simpler and makes quantity breaks easier for the customer to see.
Work it out with your own numbers
Keep reading