Pricing a T-Shirt Print Job So You Actually Profit

Plenty of small print shops and hobbyists-turned-sellers price a job the same way: look at what a competitor charges, or just guess at something that feels fair, and hope it works out. The trouble with that approach is it doesn't actually tell you whether you're making money — it's entirely possible to be "busy" with print jobs and still losing money on some of them.

Start with what a print actually costs

A print's true cost has several pieces, and it's easy to forget one or two of them when pricing quickly. There's the screen and setup cost — reclaiming an old screen, coating it with fresh emulsion, burning a new stencil, and the shop time all of that takes. There's the ink itself. There's labor — the time spent actually printing, not just the setup. There's the blank garment. And there's a share of overhead: electricity for the dryer and press, shop rent, and equipment wearing down over time.

Why quantity changes everything

Setup cost is fixed — reclaiming and burning a screen costs roughly the same whether you're printing 10 pieces or 500. That means spreading it across more pieces drops the per-piece share fast. A $50 setup cost spread across 10 prints adds $5 to each one; the same $50 spread across 100 prints adds only 50 cents. This is the entire reason small runs cost noticeably more per piece than large ones, even when the ink, labor, and blank costs per piece are identical — and it's worth explaining to a client who's surprised that a 10-piece order costs more per shirt than a 100-piece order.

A worked example

Say a job has a $50 setup cost, a run of 100 pieces, $0.35 of ink per print, $0.50 of labor per print, a $3.00 blank garment, and $0.15 of overhead per print. The setup cost per piece is $50 ÷ 100 = $0.50. Add that to the rest: $0.50 + $0.35 + $0.50 + $3.00 + $0.15 = $4.50 total cost per print. If you're targeting a 40% profit margin, the suggested sale price is cost ÷ (1 − margin) = $4.50 ÷ 0.60 = $7.50, leaving $3.00 of profit per piece.

Why margin-on-price instead of markup-on-cost

Dividing by (1 − margin) rather than simply multiplying cost by a markup percentage is a deliberate choice: it guarantees that the margin you specify is exactly that share of the final sale price, which is usually the number you actually care about. A 40% margin calculated this way means 40 cents of every sale dollar is profit — not 40% added on top of cost, which works out to a smaller share of the sale price than it sounds like.

Treat the suggested price as a floor, not a rule

This kind of calculation tells you what you need to charge to hit your target margin given your real costs — it's a floor, not a ceiling. Market rates, rush turnaround, complex multi-color art, or a client who clearly values the work more than the bare minimum may all justify charging above that floor. What the calculation protects you from is the opposite mistake: quoting a price below your true cost per print because you didn't account for setup cost, overhead, or both, and only noticing the problem after the job is done.

Keep your own numbers current

Ink prices, blank garment costs, and your own labor rate all drift over time, and a pricing model built on stale numbers will quietly under-price every job until you update it. It's worth revisiting your actual costs every few months — check what you're really paying for ink and blanks right now, and adjust your overhead estimate if your rent or equipment costs have changed — rather than pricing every job off a spreadsheet from a year ago.