Machine shop rate calculator
What one spindle hour actually costs you — before any profit. Fill in what you already know from your own bills. Nothing to sign up for, and we do not ask for your email.
Your numbers
Everything here comes off a bill you already get. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Hours the machine is actually cutting — not hours the doors are open. This is the number that moves your rate the most.
Taxes, comp, insurance, PTO
Rent, insurance, software, admin — everything you pay whether or not you cut
Inserts, coolant, perishable tooling
The mistake this calculator is built to catch
Most shop rate math divides the machine and the overhead by the hours the doors are open. A shop open 40 hours a week assumes 2,000 billable hours a year. But a job shop with high mix and low volume does not cut for 40 hours a week — setups, programming, inspection, waiting on material and dead time all come out of that number. Real spindle time is closer to 20 or 25 hours.
That difference is not small. On the same machine, the same wage and the same rent, the cost of a spindle hour can move by 40% depending on how busy the shop is. If you quote a slow quarter at the rate you calculated in a busy one, every job in that quarter is underpriced and nothing on your invoices tells you.
That is what the utilization slider above is for. Drag it to what your shop is actually doing this month, not what you wish it were doing.
Common questions
- What is a machine shop rate?
- Your shop rate is what one hour on a machine costs you before any profit: the machine's depreciation, the operator's burdened wage, electricity, the share of fixed overhead that machine carries, and consumables like inserts and coolant. It is a cost, not a price. The price is your shop rate plus the markup you decide.
- Why does my shop rate go up when the shop is slow?
- Because depreciation and overhead are fixed per year but get divided by the hours you actually cut. A machine that runs 40 hours a week absorbs those costs across twice as many hours as one running 20. Same shop, same bills, and the hourly cost can be 40% higher in a slow month. Quoting a slow shop at a busy shop's rate is one of the most common ways job shops lose money without noticing.
- Should I use open-door hours or spindle hours?
- Spindle hours — the hours the machine is actually cutting. Using the hours your doors are open assumes 100% utilization, which no job shop has. This single mistake understates most shop rates by 30 to 50%.
- What markup should I add to my shop rate?
- There is no correct number, and anyone who gives you one without seeing your books is guessing. What matters more is knowing your break-even first. Most shops that check discover the rate they have been quoting is below the number this calculator produces — which means the markup conversation was moot.
Knowing the rate is step one. Step two is harder.
A rate tells you what an hour costs. It does not tell you how many hours a particular job takes, what the material costs today, or whether the job you finished last week actually took as long as you quoted. That is what Spindlerate does — and you can start by taking a photo of a print.
Quote a part from a photo →