How to Price Welding Jobs: Build a Rate Sheet With AI

Build an hourly rate from your costs, then match the unit to the job: hourly for repairs and unknowns, per weld or per inch for repeat work you have timed, a fixed price for defined fabrication. Test it by comparing quoted and actual hours on your last 20 jobs, which AI can do in minutes from a pasted table.

Published shop rates are wide: InvoiceFly's guide, updated in August 2026, puts them at $60 to $100 an hour and says a minimum service charge of $100 or more is common for portable work. A range like that cannot tell you whether your own rate pays. Your job history can. In the illustrative history below, arc time is 31% of the hours, and it is not the part that gets underquoted.

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Build the hourly rate from five costs

Start with the difference between a paid hour and a billable one. An owner-operator who wants $58,000 a year and can bill about 1,250 hours (roughly 60% of 2,080 paid hours, after quoting, buying steel, travel, maintenance and bookkeeping) has a labour cost of $46.40 for every billable hour. Overheads and equipment are the second cost: shop rent, utilities, insurance, software, marketing, tool and machine upkeep and the van come to $31,250 a year, or $25.00 an hour. Together that is $71.40 before profit.

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The same logic applies if you pay a welder instead of yourself. A $32 wage with 30% burden is $41.60 a paid hour, and at 60% billable it costs $69.33 for every hour you can invoice. Skipping that step makes a welder on the payroll look profitable on paper when the hours actually invoiced do not cover the wage.

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One caution on the margin step. InvoiceFly's own worked example multiplies labour plus overhead by 1.2. That is a 20% markup on cost, which is a 16.7% margin on the price, and it is the reason the formula here divides by 0.85, not multiplies by 1.15. The markup versus margin sheet explains why the two differ and how to convert between them.

Consumables are the fifth cost, and you can treat them in two ways. Fold them into the overhead figure so they sit inside the rate, or show them as a line at $7.50 for each billable hour. Never do both. A separate line is easier to defend on a job that burns a lot of gas, and it keeps your rate comparable with other shops' quotes.

Setup time is the cost most quotes leave out

Arc time is the visible part of welding, so it is the part people price. The rest of the job is cutting, fitting, positioning, grinding, finishing and fetching steel. Take a pair of swing gates built in the shop and hung on site. Written out as operations, the hours look like this:

Arc time is 1.1 of those 10.5 shop hours, about 10%. A quote built from arc time alone would charge $93.50 of labour for a job that needs $892.50 in the shop. Few quotes are that crude, but it is easy to price "welding plus a bit" and leave the other nine hours to luck. Writing the steps in a column, as above, is what forces them into the price.

A fixed-price quote worked end to end

Now price the gates. The shop hours go at $85 and the two hours of hanging at the mobile rate of $100. The trip is priced from minutes and miles: 8 miles (13 km) each way is 16 miles and about 32 minutes in all. At $1.19 a minute of your time ($71.40 an hour) and a van cost of $0.65 a mile, the trip costs $48.48, and divided by 0.85 that is $57.04, rounded to $57. Steel, hinges, latch and paint cost $412, with a 15% markup for handling and waste. Consumables go on every billable hour, 12.5 in all.

Your cost on the job is $1,470.73, so the profit is $249.27, a margin of 14.5%. It lands slightly under the 15% target because consumables are charged at cost and a 15% materials markup is a 13% margin on the price. Now ask what happens when the job runs long. With shop hours 10% over (1.05 extra hours at your $71.40 cost) the profit falls to $174.30 and the margin to 10.1%. At 25% over it is $61.85, or 3.6%, and the job breaks even at about 3.5 extra hours, one third more than quoted. The wire and gas burned in those extra hours trim each figure a little further. A fixed price is only safe on gates if your history says you land within about 10% on gates, and the test further down is how you find out.

Whatever the price, state what it covers: the drawing, the dimensions, the finish, delivery and hanging. Say that changes after approval are priced at the hourly rate. If the work is to a code or needs certified procedures, quote it separately and add the paperwork time, which the tutorial on weld procedure records and material certificates describes.

Travel and the minimum call-out

The trip charge uses the same rule each time: minutes of your time at your cost per minute, plus miles at your cost per mile, divided by one minus the margin. The 8-mile trip came to $57. A job 18 miles (29 km) each way is 36 miles and 72 minutes in all, which costs $109.08 and prices at $128.33. Quote distance bands if you prefer, but derive the bands from this sum so they are not guesses.

A customer who needs a 20-minute repair on a trailer bracket 8 miles away blocks about two hours of your day: loading the rig, driving both ways, setting up and clearing away. At the two-hour minimum on the mobile rate plus the trip, the price is $257. That feels steep for 20 minutes of arc time, and it is what the slot costs you. The alternative is to ask the customer to bring the part in, where the same repair falls under the shop rate with a one-hour minimum of $85.

Hourly, per weld, per inch or fixed: matching the unit to the job

Per weld and per inch prices look simple and are the easiest to get wrong, because they hide the batch size. Take a bracket with four 3-inch (76 mm) fillet welds, 12 inches (305 mm) in all. Timing a first run gave 1.4 minutes per inch including repositioning, 6 minutes of fit-up and 2.5 minutes of cleaning per bracket, plus one hour of set-up for the run. At $85 an hour plus consumables on the production hours, the price falls as the batch grows:

The per-weld price runs from $14.00 for five brackets to $10.28 for forty, and the per-inch price from $4.67 to $3.43. A single "per inch" figure is therefore right for one batch size only. Published per-inch figures disagree widely, because they mix processes, materials and certification levels. Your own timing, by process, position and batch size, is the only version that fits your shop. For quoting work from drawings, the tutorial on pricing fabrication from a drawing covers what AI can and cannot read from one.

A rate-sheet prompt, and the paid-hours slip to catch

Give the assistant every input, say which hours are billable, and ask for the trip charge as a formula you can reuse. Any of the main assistants will do the layout from pasted text, so choose whichever you already use. Put your own numbers in.

I run a one-person welding business. Build a spreadsheet layout for Excel or Google
Sheets that turns my costs into a rate sheet. Use formulas, name every input cell and
list every assumption you make.

Inputs:
- Pay target per year: 58000
- Paid hours per year: 2080
- Billable hours per year: 1250 (about 60% of paid hours)
- Overheads and equipment per year: 31250
- Rig cost per hour for mobile work: 12
- Consumables per billable hour: 7.50, shown as a separate line, not inside the rate
- Target profit margin on price: 15% (margin on price, not markup on cost)
- Van cost per mile: 0.65
- Markup on materials: 15%

Show: cost per billable hour; shop rate; mobile rate; a trip charge calculator (miles
each way, average speed 30 mph, price = (minutes x cost per minute + miles x cost per
mile) / (1 - margin)); a two-hour mobile minimum; and a quote sheet for a gate job with
shop hours by step [paste the steps], 2.0 install hours, $412 of materials and 8 miles
each way.
Add a second tab where I paste past jobs (job, type, quoted hours, actual hours, arc
hours, travel hours) and which reports by type: total quoted, total actual, hours over,
percent over, and arc time as a share of actual hours.

A first reply might print the headline figures like this, with the correct ones alongside (illustrative):

The sheet divided by the 2,080 paid hours instead of the 1,250 billable ones, and the rate it printed would lose money on every hour you invoice. Two things give it away. The shop rate sits below InvoiceFly's $60 to $100 range and well below what you charge now, and a hand sum disagrees: $58,000 plus $31,250 is $89,250, and divided by 1,250 that is $71.40. When a result looks wrong, paste the discrepancy back and ask which hours the sheet used. A slip like this is easy to make when paid and billable hours both appear in one block of inputs.

Compare quoted and actual hours on twelve past jobs

This is the test that makes a rate sheet trustworthy. Export one row per finished job with the type, the hours you quoted, the hours you actually worked, the arc hours and the travel hours. Take out customer names and addresses before you paste anything into an assistant, and tidy messy notes first, as the tutorial on cleaning messy data describes. In this illustration the arc hours you quoted matched the arc hours you logged to within a tenth of an hour on every job, so the overruns sit in the other work and the travel.

Below are twelve finished welding jobs (customer names removed): job, type, quoted
hours, actual hours, arc hours, travel hours.
For each type give total quoted, total actual, hours over and percent over. Then say
what share of actual hours was arc time and what share was travel. Tell me which type
of job I should add an allowance to, how large it should be, and what the overruns
cost me in these twelve jobs at $71.40 an hour.
[paste the table]

The summary below is what a correct reply contains. Check at least one row by hand; fabrication is quick: 6.0 + 8.0 + 7.0 + 7.0 + 6.5 is 34.5 quoted hours, and 7.5 + 10.5 + 8.5 + 7.0 + 8.0 is 41.5 actual.

Arc time was 25.9 of the 82.5 hours, 31.4%, and travel was 4.4 hours, 5.3%. The overruns cost 11.0 hours at $71.40, or $785.40 across the twelve jobs. Read the table for what it says about each type, not for the average of 15.4%, which would push an increase onto jobs that do not need one.

• Mobile jobs. Of the 5.0 overrun hours on the three repairs and the install, 4.0 are travel (2.9 and 1.1) that nobody quoted. The fix is not a bigger hourly rate. It is the trip charge, shown as its own line on every mobile quote.
• Fabrication. Twenty per cent over, 7.0 hours, with arc time only 28% of the hours (11.5 of 41.5). The extra time is in cutting, fit-up and finishing, which an allowance on shop hours covers.
• Repeat batches. Ten per cent under. Leave them alone until you have seen a few more runs, because a cushion on repeat work may be doing useful work against a bad run.
• The shop repair. One job proves nothing. Wait for five.

What the test changes in the gate quote

Apply a 20% allowance to shop hours on the gate: 10.5 hours becomes 12.6, shop labour $1,071 and consumables $109.50, and the total rises to $1,911.30, quoted at $1,910 instead of $1,720. If the job takes 12.6 hours the margin is 14.3%, as intended. If it takes the original 10.5 hours the margin is 23.0%, which is the reward for estimating well. Showing the extra as "fit-up and finishing" hours on the quote makes it easier to explain than a bare increase. Keep the allowance for fabrication and leave it off the batch price list.

The assistant should not set these figures itself. Do not ask it to guess the price of a job from a description; give it your rates and your history, and use it to calculate and compare. What a real ChatGPT test got wrong on machine shop quotes is a useful warning, and the overview of AI tools for welding shops covers the software side of quoting and scheduling.

A rate page for customers

The customer version shows rates, minimums and terms, and leaves the build-up out. For example, built from the figures above:

Shop rate: $85 an hour. Mobile rate: $100 an hour with a two-hour minimum, plus a trip charge of $57 within 8 miles and $128 at 18 miles. Consumables: $7.50 per hour worked. Materials: at cost plus 15%. Fixed-price quotes are based on the drawing dated [date], valid for 30 days, with changes after approval charged at the hourly rate and a 30% deposit on fabrication over $1,000. Certified or code work is quoted separately.

Review the sheet every quarter. Paste the quarter's jobs into the second tab, read the table by type, and change one allowance at a time so you can tell which change did what. After two or three quarters the sheet holds numbers that came from your own work, and a shop rate that was a guess has become a figure you can defend to a customer who thinks it is too high.

Questions welders ask about pricing

Should I charge per weld, per inch or by the hour?

Charge by the hour for repairs and anything you have not made before. Use a per-weld or per-inch price only for repeat work you have timed, and remember the price falls as the batch grows because set-up is shared. Use a fixed price for defined fabrication, with a clause that prices changes at your hourly rate.

What should a minimum call-out be?

Set it as the shortest job that still pays for the trip and a short weld. With the illustrated mobile rate of $100 an hour, a two-hour minimum is $200 plus the trip charge. InvoiceFly's guide calls a minimum service charge of $100 or more common for portable work; your own figure should come from your costs.

Should consumables be a separate line?

Either fold them into your rate or show them as a line, never both. To find the figure, add last year's receipts for wire, gas, discs, tips and rods and divide by your billable hours. In the illustration that is $7.50 an hour. A separate line is easier to defend on a job that uses a lot of gas.

How many past jobs do I need for the AI test?

Ten to twenty jobs of two or three types is enough to see where hours go. Keep types apart, because repeat batches, repairs and one-off fabrication overrun by very different amounts and an overall average hides that. A handful of jobs shows direction; wait for more before you change a rate.

Further reads

• AI for Welders: What a Welding Business Can Hand Over Today — Other jobs in a welding business AI can take on.
• Welding Marketing: Website, Google Profile and Posts Drafted With AI — Bring in the kind of work your rate sheet suits.
• How Much to Charge for a Service Call: Build the Fee From Your Costs — Build a call-out fee from your costs.
• Hourly Rate for a Tradesman: Work Out Yours Without Guessing — Work out an hourly rate without guessing.
• How to Price Building Work: Check Your Rates Against Past Jobs With AI — Check rates against past jobs in another trade.
• HVAC Markup and Margin: A Worked Check on Past Jobs With AI — A worked margin check on past jobs.
• Plumbers AI: Turn Supplier Price Lists Into a Parts Markup Sheet — Turn supplier price lists into a materials markup sheet.
• AI-Generated Welder Website Marketing: Case Study Pages for Custom Work — Turn job photos and spec notes into case study pages that bring custom fabrication enquiries, with claim checks, consent wording and a better quote form.
• How to Price Christmas Light Installation: Roofline, Trees and Take-Down — A worked quote with roofline, two trees and take-down as separate priced lines, the cost behind each rate, and an AI check of the sheet.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: InvoiceFly's guide to quoting welding jobs (updated 25 August 2026) for the published shop-rate range, markup example and minimum charge quoted. Every cost, rate and job figure in the worked examples is illustrative.