Pricing guide

How much to charge for 3D printing per hour

People ask for one number: a rate per hour of printing. The honest answer is that a printer hour costs you cents, and the hourly price that reaches your margin is different for every job. This guide shows both figures, and a three-part rate that is as quick to quote as a flat one.

Published 11 November 2026 · by Spool & Margin · about 6 minutes

What a printer hour costs you

With the sample settings we use across this site: a $700 printer expected to last 5,000 printing hours, drawing 150 W on average, with electricity at $0.16 per kWh.

• Machine wear: $700 ÷ 5,000 h = $0.14 per hour
• Electricity: 0.15 kW × $0.16 = $0.024 per hour
• Together: $0.164 per hour. With an 8% allowance for failed prints: $0.164 × 1.08 = $0.177 per hour

The expected life and the failure allowance are assumptions you set yourself; our guide on how to price 3D prints explains how to choose them. For the electricity price, read it off your own bill. As a reference point, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported an average residential price of 18.16 cents per kWh for August 2026 (Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A, read 11 November 2026), with state averages in the same table running from under 13 cents to over 40. At 18.16 cents, 150 W costs 2.7 cents per hour.

So the machine itself costs well under a dollar an hour. If you charged $0.18 per hour of printing and nothing else, you would give away the filament, your time and the packaging, and earn nothing.

What price per hour reaches your margin

Turn the question around. Take the price each product needs for a 40% margin and divide it by its print hours. These are the five sample products from our free spreadsheet, with a marketplace that takes 9.5% plus $0.45 in fixed fees (the figures are explained in the Etsy pricing guide). The last two columns show what happens if you charge all of them the phone stand's rate, $4.50 per hour.

One printer, one margin target, and the "right" hourly price runs from $2.42 to $5.75. A flat $4.50 does two kinds of damage:

• It overprices long, hands-off prints. The vase comes out at $42.75 when $22.99 already reaches the target. That may be fine if buyers pay it, but on a quote it loses the job to someone who priced it properly.
• It underprices short prints with a lot of handling. The name sign needs 20 minutes of your time. At $18.00 its margin is 27.3%, well short of 40%.

The reason is that print time is not what drives the cost. In the name sign, labor is $6.67 of a $10.93 true cost. The printer hours are $0.66.

A three-part rate you can quote from

If you want something as quick as "X per hour" that still follows your costs, quote three rates and add packaging:

1. Material, per gram, from the slicer's weight for the whole job.
2. Machine time, per print hour.
3. Hands-on time, per minute you actually work on the order.

Take each cost and divide by what is left of the price after your margin and any percentage fee. For a direct sale with no selling fees and a 40% margin, that is ÷ 0.60:

Note what the machine line says: about 30 cents per print hour. Rates of several dollars per hour only make sense when they also carry the material, your time and the profit.

Worked example: a 6-hour job

A customer asks for a part that slices to 120 g and 6 hours. You expect 15 minutes of hands-on work and $1.00 of packaging. They pay by bank transfer, so there are no selling fees.

At $16.99 the profit is $7.34 and the margin is 43.2%. Expressed per hour, that is a price of $2.83 per print hour and a profit of $1.22 per printer hour. The same figure falls out of the three-part rate: 120 g × $0.036 + 6 h × $0.30 + 15 min × $0.556 = $14.46, plus packaging at $1.00 ÷ 0.60 = $1.67, gives $16.13, four cents above $16.09 because the three rates were rounded up.

If the customer had asked for a quote "per hour" and you had answered $4.50, the price would have been $27.00. If you had answered $2.00, it would have been $12.00 and a margin of 19.6%. Neither number came from the job.

When a per-hour figure is the right tool

• Comparing products. Profit per printer hour tells you which products deserve the machine when you have a queue. That is the subject of our guide to profit per printer hour.
• Setting a floor for long jobs. If your printers are busy, decide the lowest profit per printer hour you will accept and turn down jobs below it.
• A first answer on the phone. Work out your own typical price per print hour from a few real jobs, say it is an estimate, and send the real quote after slicing. Our guide to pricing custom orders covers what goes into that quote.

Do this for your own printer

1. Divide your printer's price by the hours you expect from it. Add a per-hour amount for parts if you replace nozzles, belts or plates regularly.
2. Measure average watts with a plug-in meter and multiply by your electricity price.
3. Enter both in the calculator with a real job's grams, hours and hands-on minutes.
4. Divide the suggested price by the print hours. Repeat for three or four different jobs and look at the spread before you ever quote a flat rate.

Questions

The product figures on this page come from the sample data in the Spool & Margin free price checker and can be reproduced in the calculator. The printer life, wattage, labor rate and failure allowance are example settings, not benchmarks. This is a calculation method, not tax or financial advice.