How to price embroidery: per 1,000 stitches, minimums, setup and the numbers that actually drive it

Embroidery is priced by time, and time is stitches. Everything else in a quote, minimums, setup, garment cost, is there because stitches alone do not cover the parts of the job where the machine is not running. This guide builds a quote from the machine outward, with the numbers shops use, so the calculator makes sense rather than producing a figure you cannot defend.

Start with the machine's time

A single-needle home machine runs 600 to 800 stitches per minute; a commercial single head 800 to 1,000; a multi-head 800 to 1,200 per head. At 650 spm an 8,000-stitch left-chest logo takes 12.3 minutes of stitching.

Then add what the file does not show:

• Colour changes: about 30 seconds each on a single-needle machine (thread change, trim, restart); on a multi-needle machine the change is automatic but each still costs a trim and a restart, and the needle setup costs time once per job.
• Hooping and unhooping: 30 to 60 seconds per piece for a practised operator, more for jackets and caps.
• Trims: a few seconds each on machines with automatic trimmers, ten or more by hand.
• Thread breaks, bobbin changes, checking the first piece: not predictable, so they go into the rate rather than the count.

So the 8,000-stitch logo with three colours is 12.3 minutes of stitching plus 1.5 minutes of changes plus 0.75 minutes of hooping: about 15 minutes per piece on one head. Twelve pieces is three hours. That is the number a quote has to pay for.

Convert time to money: the stitch rate

Shops express this as a rate per thousand stitches because it scales with the design. In 2026 the US range is roughly:

| Situation | Per 1,000 stitches | Per-piece minimum | |---|---|---| | Contract work, customer supplies garments, 24+ pieces | $0.75–1.00 | $5–6 | | Contract work, 1–12 pieces | $1.00–1.50 | $6–8 | | Retail, shop supplies garment | folded into a per-piece price | $12–20 for a left chest on a supplied polo | | Caps (3D foam, structured) | $1.00–1.50 plus a cap surcharge | $8–10 |

At $1.00 per thousand, the 8,000-stitch logo is $8 per piece. At the $6 minimum, anything under 6,000 stitches is $6. The minimum is what makes small designs worth hooping.

To sanity-check your own rate: 15 minutes per piece at $8 is $32 per machine-hour. That has to cover the machine, thread, stabiliser, your time and profit. Most single-head shops want $40 to $60 per machine-hour, which is why small runs sit at the top of the range and why multi-head shops can quote lower.

Setup and digitising

A new design needs digitising: $15 to $30 for a simple text logo, $40 to $60 for a detailed one, more for jacket backs. It is a one-time fee per design; keep the native file and quote repeat runs without it. If a customer supplies a stitch file, check it before agreeing to sew it. Five minutes with the pre-flight check finds the short stitches and stacked density that turn a fifteen-minute piece into an hour of thread breaks, and that is worth a "file check and repair" line of $10 to $20 when needed.

Garments and consumables

If you supply the garment, its cost plus a markup goes in as a line of its own. Thread and stabiliser are small per piece: the 8,000-stitch logo uses about 22 m of top thread and 9 m of bobbin, a few cents; a piece of cut-away is 10 to 30 cents. They are in the rate, not on the invoice.

Quantity breaks

The setup and hooping overhead is spread across pieces, so larger runs cost less per piece. A common ladder is full rate to 11 pieces, 10 % off from 12, 20 % off from 48, 30 % off from 144. Below the minimum quantity you can charge a small-order fee instead of raising the rate.

A worked example

Left-chest logo, 7,800 stitches, three colours, on 24 customer-supplied polos, single-head shop at 700 spm.

• Stitching: 7,800 ÷ 700 = 11.1 min. Changes 1.5 min. Hooping 0.75 min. 13.4 min per piece, 5.4 hours for the run.
• Rate: $0.90 per thousand at this quantity = $7.02, above the $6 minimum. $7.02 per piece.
• Setup: existing design, $0.
• Total: $168.48, or $31 per machine-hour before consumables.

If that hourly figure is below what the shop needs, the rate is wrong for the shop, not the customer. Put your own numbers into the calculator; it does this arithmetic from the file's real stitch count and colour changes, with your rate, minimum, setup, garment cost, quantity, machine speed, heads, labour and markup as inputs.

Names and personalisation

Names are priced per name because the setup dominates: choose the font, type it, generate, hoop. Shops charge $4 to $8 for a name on its own and $2 to $4 for a name added to a logo already being sewn. The batch tool generates a file per name from a list so that thirty names is one setup; batch names for shops walks through a team order.

What to put on the quote

Stitch count (from the file, not a guess), price per piece, quantity, setup if any, garment if supplied, and the run's turnaround. Attach a preview. Say that the count is from the supplied file and that changes to size or design are re-quoted. Customers who see the stitch count stop arguing about why a jacket back costs more than a chest logo.