# Price to charge for labor?



## Duality (Sep 13, 2012)

Hi all, this is my first post and had a question about laboring cost. I've been lurking the forums here and there, but I decided to join today.

Someone that I met said if I could press his shirts for him and he would pay me for the labor. He said he would have everything set, that I would just have to manually transfer the design to the t-shirt and repeat.

I'm using a heat press. I told him I will get back to him on the price, but honestly what would be a good price range for this kind of request? Thanks!


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## league33 (Jun 30, 2012)

My general charge for pressing is $2.00 per location.


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## IYFGraphics (Sep 28, 2009)

Duality said:


> Hi all, this is my first post and had a question about laboring cost. I've been lurking the forums here and there, but I decided to join today.
> 
> Someone that I met said if I could press his shirts for him and he would pay me for the labor. He said he would have everything set, that I would just have to manually transfer the design to the t-shirt and repeat.
> 
> I'm using a heat press. I told him I will get back to him on the price, but honestly what would be a good price range for this kind of request? Thanks!


Welcome to TSF.....

Not a easy question to answer, for our shop it would come down to quantity of shirts which translates into how many hours it would take standing over a hot heat press.

Typically lets say we were going to do 100 shirts in your scenario single sided (lets say a full back print) customer provides everything we need as far as shirts and transfers, we'll say the average time to load, position transfer, press, unload, repeat is 1-2 minuets per shirt.

We would probably charge somewhere in the neighborhood of .50 to .80 per shirt, lower quantities would be higher per shirt, higher quantities might be a little cheaper per shirt, pressing both sides would double the work and also double the cost to the customer.

One thing you need to be clear on with the customer is WHO is responsible for miss prints or screw-up, while we would take ownership for poorly placed or positioned prints (our screw-up) bad transfers or other abnormalities not related to our labor would be the customers sole responsibility. 

The big thing to me in our shop is we want to be compensated for our time, and shop expenses, while a job like this can be a money maker it can also be a real headache if the materials being used are sub-par or the customer has unreasonable expectations. 

Hope this helps.


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## binki (Jul 16, 2006)

It depends on the transfer and dwell time. Some plastisol transfers take about 5 seconds. With 2 people you can bang out 10 shirts a minute or 60 an hour. With vinyl you can do 2-4 per minute. 

You also have to factor in your setup. You have to figure out how to place the shirt, where to put the transfer, etc. Sounds simple but once you start getting shirts on the press you will find out there are a lot of variables. 

Another way you can go is to just charge a flat hourly rate no matter how many you get done.


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## missswissinc (Feb 21, 2012)

I guess it will depend on how many shirts your friend wants done. does he want just 1 or 100 or 1,000 done. How quickly does he want them back. 7, 5 next day that will also affect your prices. I would suggest getting a rough idea from him and say hey how many shirts you want done and sit down and see how many you could get done in an hr. so lets say you can get 30 an hr done. well if he says I need 60 well your going to spend 2 hrs behind a machine. well if you do min wage at $8.00 hr well then your looking at $16 well do you feel you should get close to $30 for the 2 hrs. if you did that its about $0.50 per shirt compaired to $0.27 if you did min wage work. Granted every location will have either higher or lower overhead but make sure atleast you cover your expenses besides your pay.


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