Free tool
Work out what to charge for a machine embroidery job. Put in the stitch count, what you paid for the blank, your hooping fee, and your digitizing fee, and you'll get a price per piece and an order total with all the math shown. It's free and there's no signup. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
The total stitches in the design, from your stitch file.
Most shops charge between $1.00 and $3.00.
If you don't have a stitch count yet, start from a common job.
These are ballpark counts for typical designs. Replace the number with the real one once the design is digitized.
Or estimate from the size of the design.
Rough estimate: 8,400 stitches
What you pay for the shirt, hat, tote, or towel. Enter 0 if the customer supplies it.
What you multiply the blank cost by. Doubling is the common rule.
Your charge for each time the piece gets hooped and set up.
One for a chest design. Add one for each sleeve, back, or second location.
Caps, bunny ears, sleeve placement, tricky fabric, rush work, or a buffer for a chatty order.
How many identical pieces are in this order.
Charged once for a new design, not per piece and not on a reorder.
The least you'll take an order for, no matter what the math says.
Price per piece
$37.00
The order
Shipping, sales tax, and card processing aren't in this number. Add those separately so you can see what the embroidery itself earns.
You build an embroidery price out of parts. There's the garment, the stitches, the setup time on the machine, and a one-time charge for turning artwork into a stitch file. Add them up, check the total against your minimum, and you have your price.
The reason to build it this way instead of guessing at a round number is that the parts don't move together. Make the design bigger and you use more thread and more machine time, but the shirt costs the same. Add a sleeve and you've added a whole second hooping. Stitch a second identical shirt and you're buying another blank, but the digitizing is already done and already paid for.
The formula this calculator runs
Price per piece = (blank cost x markup) + (stitch count divided by 1,000, times your rate) + (hooping fee x placements) + complexity
Order total = (price per piece x quantity) + one-time digitizing, with your minimum order as the floor
Start with what you actually paid for the blank, then double it. That's the standard in decorated apparel and it isn't padding. What you paid on the invoice was never the real cost. There's freight. There's the time you spent sourcing it and placing the order. There's the stock sitting in your closet in the sizes nobody wanted, and there's the shirt you'll ruin on a bad run and eat. Sell blanks at cost and one ruined shirt eats the profit from the next two.
If your supplier gives you a real case price, that saving is genuine and you can pass it along here.
This is the per-1,000-stitch charge, and it's the number everyone wants to know. It pays for machine time, thread, bobbin thread, stabilizer, needles, and power. It also pays for you standing there, because you can't walk away from a running machine. Thread breaks. Bobbins run out.
Here's what that looks like on a real job. A left-chest logo at 10,000 stitches, charged at $1.50 per 1,000, is $15. On a commercial machine that's about fifteen minutes of run time, plus the hooping before it and the trimming and pressing after. Do that arithmetic on a rate you're considering before you commit to it.
One thing to add that this calculator doesn't do for you: bill a minimum stitch count. A 2,000-stitch name at $1.50 per 1,000 is $3.00 of stitching, and it takes you the same hooping and trimming and pressing as a job ten times that size. Shops handle it by billing a floor no matter what the file says. Corporate Casuals bills every uploaded design at 6,000 stitches. Dubow Textile's grid starts at 4,000. Somewhere around 5,000 is a sane place to set yours.
Charge by the hooping, not by the garment. A chest design is one. Chest plus a sleeve is two, because that piece comes off the machine, gets re-hooped, gets lined up again, and runs again. Caps and sleeves need a special frame and take longer to set up than a flat front, which is what the complexity line is there for.
Published rate cards usually price the first placement higher than the ones after it. One 2026 card charges $5 for a hat, $10 for a first left chest or sleeve, and $15 for a front and back. Another shop prices every additional location at 60 to 80% of the first. Either approach beats charging the same $5 for a hat and for the first placement on a jacket, so set the hooping fee to whatever fits the piece in front of you.
Digitizing is turning artwork into a stitch file. Somebody sets the stitch types, the directions, the densities, the underlay, and the order the machine sews in, then test-stitches it and fixes whatever pulls.
It's separate work from stitching, and you charge for it once. Not per piece. Not again when that same customer comes back for ten more of the same design. For a reorder, switch the digitizing toggle off in the calculator and watch the price drop.
Some jobs cost more than their stitch count says they should. Caps, tiny kids' clothes, stuffed animals, towels, sweatshirt sleeves, stretchy knits, anything you have to float instead of hoop. They all take longer, and they all go wrong more often.
The customer who's sent you fifteen messages before paying costs you real time too. That goes here. Otherwise you're giving it away.
A minimum isn't there to punish anybody. It's there because the work around a job barely changes with the size of the job. You answer the message, confirm the spelling twice, pick the thread, load the file, hoop it, run it, trim it, press it, pack it, and hand it over. That's about the same half hour whether the design is 800 stitches or 8,000.
Under about $30, an order takes more out of you than it puts back. Pick your floor and quote it without apologizing for it.
Across small shops the working range is about $1.00 to $3.00 per 1,000 stitches. Contract work sits at the bottom of that. You're stitching someone else's garments in volume, usually for a business that supplies the blanks, the setup gets spread over dozens of pieces, and they come back every season. One-off personalized work sits at the top, because every order is a new design, a new conversation, and a new setup.
You can't look this rate up and have it be true for your shop. Set one, then test it. Take a job you've already stitched, price it in the calculator at the rate you're thinking about, and divide by the hours it really took you. Count the messaging and the hooping and the packing, not just the minutes the machine was moving. If that hourly number is one you'd get out of bed for, keep the rate. If it isn't, the answer is a higher rate, not faster hands.
What the calculator gives you is the price of the embroidery. Everything below gets charged on top, and it's where the money usually leaks out:
This is worth saying plainly on a page that hands you a stitch-count calculator. In June 2026 the National Network of Embroidery Professionals surveyed 545 US shops on how they price. They scored the industry 7.54 out of 20. Just over half the shops landed in the lowest tier, and only 7% scored well. Their finding was that nearly every shop is missing at least two pricing factors completely, and usually doesn't know it. Their president, Jennifer Cox, put it this way: quoting by stitch count was never designed to produce consistent profitability.
So use the number this calculator gives you as your starting point, not your answer. It prices thread and machine time well. It knows nothing about the forty minutes you spent messaging about thread colors, the drive to pick up blanks, the design you re-hooped three times, or the fact that your calendar is already full for two weeks and this job is going to cost you a weekend. Experienced shops handle this by checking the stitch-count price against the hours, and on complicated one-off work, some skip stitch count entirely and price by the hour.
Get the whole spec before you quote, and send the quote in one message. Garment and brand, color, sizes, every placement said out loud including the ones with nothing on them, the exact wording with the spelling confirmed, thread colors, quantity, the date they need it, and pickup or shipping. All of it, once.
Going back three days later to ask one more question is what makes a customer start to worry about their order. Then they ask again about the date. Then they ask if you got their last message.
Be clear about payment before you stitch anything. Once a piece has someone's name on it you can't sell it to anybody else, which is why the terms are what they are. An individual customer pays in full up front. An established business account usually puts down 50% to start production, with the balance due before delivery. Put it in the quote in plain words and you never have to have the awkward version of that conversation.
Most machine embroidery shops land between $1.00 and $3.00 per 1,000 stitches. If you're a small shop doing personalized retail work, $1.50 is a reasonable place to start. Contract work for other businesses runs lower, because the volume is steady and they're supplying the garments. Don't just copy someone else's number, though. Run yours through the calculator on a job you've actually stitched and see what it earns per hour on your machine.
Start from a job like it. A single name in satin stitch is around 2,000 stitches. A short word outline is around 3,500. A left-chest or cap-front logo usually runs 8,000 to 12,000, and a large back design starts around 20,000. You can also multiply the design's width by its height in inches, then by about 700 for lettering and outlines, 1,400 for mixed text and small fills, or 2,000 for a solid fill. Both of those are guesses. Once it's digitized the stitch file gives you the real count, and if it comes back way off what you assumed, re-price it before you start.
Yes, once per new design. Digitizing is separate work from stitching. Somebody has to convert the artwork into a stitch file, set the stitch types and directions, and test it. Published 2026 shop rates for a simple left-chest logo run about $10 to $25, and contract shops charge more. If you send your digitizing out you'll pay somewhere around $8 to $17 for that same logo, so that's your floor. Charge it one time no matter how many pieces are on the order, and don't charge it again when that same customer comes back for more of the same design. Shops that reuse a design free forever tend to say it's what brings people back.
Set the blank cost to zero and charge full price for everything else. The stitching, the hooping, the setup, and the digitizing are the work, and none of it gets cheaper because they bought the shirt. Plenty of shops add a handling charge on customer-supplied garments, because if you ruin a garment you didn't buy, you can't just pull another one off the shelf. Put that in writing before you take the garment.
Discount what actually costs you less, and nothing else. Digitizing is charged once no matter the quantity, and blanks often really are cheaper by the case, so pass that on. The stitching doesn't get cheaper. Twenty pieces is twenty hoopings, twenty runs, and twenty rounds of trimming and pressing. Shops that discount stitching by volume end up earning less per hour on their biggest orders than their smallest ones, which is backwards.
For a home or small shop, somewhere between $25 and $35 is normal. The reason is that everything around the job takes about the same time whether the design is 800 stitches or 8,000: the messages back and forth, checking the spelling, loading the file, hooping, trimming, pressing, packing. A minimum isn't a rule against small jobs. It's what makes small jobs worth saying yes to.
Charge a percentage of the order with a dollar floor under it. Published 2026 rate cards land around 50% for expedited work, 30-40% for a three-to-four day turnaround, and up to 100% for a true 24-hour job. The percentage matters because a rush scales with the order: one sweatshirt jumping the queue is a small disruption, and fifty hats jumping it is a week of your life. The floor matters because even the smallest rush costs you a reshuffle, so a lot of shops won't take one under about $50. Put it on the quote as its own line so the customer can see they're paying for the schedule.
Broidry is order-management software for machine embroidery shops. Your designs, your thread colors, and your fonts live in one searchable library. It also remembers the rates on this page: your per-1,000-stitch charge, your blank markup, your hooping fee, your minimum. So when a quote comes up, the math is already done. Orders from Etsy, Facebook, text, and email land on one list with a price, a status, and a due date.
The calculator above stays free either way.