Most print shop owners know what they pay their team per hour. Far fewer know what that hour actually costs, and the gap between those two numbers is where profit quietly disappears.
When you pay someone $35 an hour, the real cost is significantly more. Superannuation (currently 12%), workers compensation, annual leave, sick leave, public holidays, these on-costs add up fast. Then layer in your overheads: rent, power, insurance, equipment, software subscriptions. Suddenly that $35/hr employee needs to be charged out at $80, $90, or more just to break even.
If your charge-out rates don’t account for all of this, every quote you send is a guess. And guessing is how busy shops stay broke.
This free calculator is built specifically for Australian print businesses. Enter your working hours, leave entitlements, on-costs, and overheads. It will show you the minimum hourly rate you need to charge to cover your true costs and hit your profit target.
General Settings: Set your working time (paid weeks, days, hours), leave entitlements (annual, personal, public holidays), and cost factors like superannuation, workers comp, and your target profit margin. The calculator works out your available productive hours after accounting for all the days your team is paid but not producing.
Labour Groups: Not everyone in your shop costs the same. Set up separate groups for your production team, finishing staff, designers, or installers, each with their own hourly wage, team size, and downtime percentage. The calculator gives you a charge-out rate for each group and a weighted average across your whole operation.
Overheads: Add your annual operating costs: rent, power, technology, insurance, equipment maintenance, vehicles, marketing, office supplies. These get distributed across your chargeable hours so every job carries its fair share of the cost of keeping the lights on.
Your hourly charge-out rate is the foundation of every quote you write. Get it wrong and it doesn’t matter how efficient your production is or how many jobs you push through, you’ll be working harder to earn less.
Here’s what a lot of print shops get caught by: an employee working 38 hours a week doesn’t give you 38 productive, billable hours. Once you subtract annual leave, sick days, public holidays, and daily downtime (cleaning, setup, waiting for files, tea breaks), a typical full-time employee delivers closer to 1,400-1,500 productive hours a year. That’s roughly 27 hours a week of actual chargeable output.
If you’re pricing labour at what you pay per hour instead of what it costs per productive hour, you’re undercharging on every single job.
Experienced operators develop a gut feel for pricing over the years, and it serves them well, most of the time. But gut feel tends to miss the slow-moving costs that creep up:
On-costs keep rising. Superannuation alone has climbed from 9.5% to 12% over the past few years. Workers comp premiums vary by state and industry. These aren’t optional extras; they’re mandatory costs that need to be recovered in every quote.
Overheads are easy to forget. It’s common to price jobs based on materials and labour, then wonder why the P&L doesn’t look as healthy as the job board. Rent, insurance, software, vehicle costs, and equipment maintenance all need to be baked into your rates, not absorbed as an afterthought.
Downtime is real. No one prints for eight hours straight. Between job setups, file preparation, cleaning, rework, and the hundred small interruptions in a day, most shops run at 65-80% productive capacity. Your rate needs to reflect the hours you actually bill, not the hours you’re open.
Once you know your true charge-out rate, you can use it to:
Audit your existing quotes. Compare the rate you’ve been using against what the calculator shows. If there’s a gap, you’ve just found where your margin has been leaking.
Price new work with confidence. No more second-guessing whether a quote is too high or too low. When you know your real costs, pricing becomes a straightforward calculation, not a negotiation with yourself.
Set rates in your quoting software. Your charge-out rate feeds directly into operation pricing in any print MIS or quoting system. In Krino, it powers every hourly-rate operation automatically.
Krino uses your charge-out rates to automatically price labour across every quote, so every job covers its true cost from the moment you hit send. Combined with formula-based material pricing, overhead recovery, and smart markup curves, it takes the guesswork out of quoting for good.
