Most shops price a screen printing job one of two ways: by gut, or by copying the last invoice for something that looked similar. Both feel fast, and both quietly cost you money. Gut pricing swings high enough to lose the job or low enough to lose the margin, and copying an old invoice carries forward whatever mistake was baked into it — usually a setup fee that never covered the screens.
The good news is that a screen printing job only has three costs. Once you can name them and see how each one moves, you can price any job in about a minute and know the number is right before it ever hits the press.
The three costs in every job
That's it — every screen print job is blanks, printing, and setup. Nothing else is a cost; everything else is margin.
- Blanks. What you pay for the shirt itself, per piece. This is a hard number — it's on your supplier invoice. If you're pulling live pricing from S&S or AS Colour, it's whatever the blank costs today, not what it cost last spring.
- Printing. The cost to put ink on the shirt, per piece. The key thing here: the per-shirt print cost drops as the quantity goes up. Running 12 shirts through the press costs about the same in labor and setup-per-print as running the 13th and 14th, so the more shirts in the run, the cheaper each print gets. That's why price charts have quantity columns.
- Setup. One screen per color, burned once for the whole run. A 3-color print needs 3 screens whether you print 24 shirts or 240. Setup is a fixed cost for the job, so its impact per shirt depends entirely on how many shirts you spread it across.
Keep those straight and the whole job prices itself: blanks and printing scale with quantity, setup is fixed and gets divided by it.
Try it on your own numbers
The calculator below runs exactly this math — blank cost, ink colors, quantity, and your markup. Drag the sliders and watch the per-shirt price, the order total, and your actual margin move. Every input shows its value, so you can take the numbers straight to your own pricing.
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The mistake that kills margin on small runs
Here's the trap, and it catches good shops. A customer asks for 24 shirts instead of 72. You quote the same per-shirt price you'd give on a bigger run because it feels close enough, or you knock a little off to be nice. But your screen fee didn't change — a 3-color job still burns 3 screens. You just went from spreading that setup across 72 shirts to spreading it across 24.
Say your setup is $60 in screens. Across 72 shirts that's $0.83 a shirt. Across 24 it's $2.50 a shirt — more than triple, on every single piece. If your per-shirt price didn't move to cover it, that $2.50 comes straight out of your margin. A markup that looked healthy on paper turns into a break-even job, and a small "friendly" discount on top turns it into a loss you won't notice until you tally the month.
Small runs aren't bad business — they're just fixed-cost-heavy business. Price them like it. The setup has to land on fewer shirts, so the per-shirt number has to be higher, not the same. Slide the quantity in the calculator down to 24 and watch the margin drop if you leave everything else alone; that's the effect, live.
Price it the same way every time
The fix for gut pricing isn't a fancier spreadsheet — it's a checklist you run identically on every job:
- Start with the blank. Pull the current cost for the exact style and color. Not last year's — today's.
- Set the print cost by quantity. Use your per-print rate for that quantity break and multiply by the number of colors.
- Add setup as screens ÷ shirts. One screen per color, divided by the actual run size. This is the step everyone skips on small runs.
- Apply your margin — as a margin, not a markup. More on that distinction in the price-chart post, but the short version: decide the profit you want to keep, and price up to it.
- Sanity-check the per-shirt number. If it looks too low to be worth pulling a squeegee, it probably is. Trust the math over the reflex to win the job.
Do that five-step pass the same way every time and two things happen: your quotes get faster because you're not reinventing the number, and your margin stops leaking on the jobs that used to sneak by. That's the whole point of a system — not to make pricing complicated, but to make it boringly consistent.
This is exactly what InkTracker does on every quote automatically: it pulls the live blank price, applies your per-quantity print rates and per-color screen fees, spreads the setup across the run, and shows you the margin before you send it. You set your rates once; every quote after that just runs the checklist for you.
Common questions
- What's the difference between margin and markup?
- Markup is what you add on top of cost; margin is what you keep out of the final price. Mark a $6 cost up 50% and you get $9, but that $3 is only 33% of the sale — not 50%. If you want to keep half, divide cost by 0.5, not multiply by 1.5. People lose real money confusing the two.
- Do I really need a setup fee if my prints already cover overhead?
- Yes. Burning, taping, registering, and reclaiming a screen costs the same whether you print 25 shirts or 250. On big runs it's pennies a shirt; on a 12-piece job it's the whole difference between profit and working for free. Charge per screen, and drop to a lower re-setup rate on reorders where the screens already exist.
- How much should I mark up the blank garment?
- Keep garment markup on its own ladder, separate from the print price, and slide it down as blanks get pricier. 40% on a $4 tee is fine; 40% on a $30 hoodie makes you the most expensive shop in town, so a hoodie might get 15%. Keeping it separate is what lets you swap a tee for a hoodie without rebuilding the quote.