What your machine hour rate should include

A machine hourly rate is the foundation every other number sits on, and it is usually the number a shop has thought about least. “Forty euros an hour sounds about right” is not a calculation.

Here is the calculation.

The components

Depreciation. Purchase price minus what you would get for it at the end, divided by its useful life in billable hours - not calendar hours. A machine that runs 40 hours a week for three years is about 6 000 billable hours, not 26 000.

Space. Rent, or the opportunity cost of the space, apportioned by the footprint the machine occupies including the room to work around it.

Maintenance. Scheduled servicing plus a realistic allowance for the unscheduled kind. Look at your last two years, not the brochure.

Wear items with lifetimes. Nozzles, belts, build sheets, FEP film, LCD panels, laser tubes, filters, blades. Anything with an hour or job rating belongs here, at its real replacement cost.

Energy. Measure it. Machine nameplate power is not average draw, and on a heated-chamber machine the difference is large.

Failure allowance. This is the one shops leave out, and it is the one that quietly eats margin. Some proportion of your prints fail: wasted material, wasted machine time, and the labour of starting again. If that is not in the rate, it comes out of your margin, and it comes out unevenly - the fiddly jobs that fail most are subsidised by the easy ones.

Utilisation. All of the above divided by billable hours, not available hours. A machine you bill 55 % of the time has a rate roughly twice the naive number.

The one that changes the answer

Utilisation and failure rate together typically move a “sounds about right” rate by 50–100 %. A shop that computes €40 by dividing costs by available hours and assuming nothing fails will land near €70 once it uses real utilisation and a real failure allowance.

That is not a reason to charge €70 - your market decides that. It is a reason to know that €40 is a decision to subsidise, taken deliberately, rather than a cost.

Different machines, different rates

Averaging across your fleet is the same mistake as averaging across your parts. The seven-year-old workhorse and the machine you bought in March do not have the same depreciation, the same failure rate or the same capability. Give each machine class its own rate and let the quote be priced on the machine that would actually run the job.

Where it should live

In one place, referenced by everything, not typed into a spreadsheet in four tabs. When your electricity bill changes, you want to change one number and see what it does to every job you quote - and ideally to check it against a handful of parts whose right price you already know before you publish it.

A sanity check worth doing

Take the ten jobs you ran last month. Compute what each one cost you, using the rate you just calculated. Compare against what you charged. If any of them are negative, you have found something useful; if none of them are, you have found something reassuring.

How machines and rates are configured →