Typical ranges
U.S. job shop rates mostly land in these bands. Region, overhead, and how specialized the work is move shops up or down within them:
| Machine / work type | Typical rate |
|---|---|
| Manual mill / lathe work | $60 – $90 /hr |
| 3-axis CNC milling | $75 – $115 /hr |
| CNC turning | $70 – $110 /hr |
| 4/5-axis machining | $100 – $160 /hr |
| Swiss-type turning | $100 – $150 /hr |
| EDM / grinding / specialty | $90 – $150+ /hr |
Treat these as sanity checks, not answers. The only rate that matters is the one that covers your costs with room for profit — and that comes from a calculation, not a survey.
The burdened-rate formula
An hour of machine time costs you three things:
- Machine: (purchase price ÷ useful life + annual maintenance + annual power/consumables) ÷ billable hours per year
- Labor: operator wage × (1 + benefits & payroll burden %). Burden is typically 25–45% — if you're quoting on bare wage, you're subsidizing every job.
- Overhead: the machine's annual share of rent, insurance, utilities, software, and inspection ÷ billable hours.
Add the three and you have your burdened cost per hour — the floor below which every job loses money. Your billing rate goes above it, and your profit comes from the margin you add when quoting the job itself.
The number everyone gets wrong: billable hours
A full-time year is 2,080 hours. No spindle bills 2,080 hours. Between setups, maintenance, quoting gaps, holidays, and the jobs that just don't come in, a well-run machine might bill 1,400–1,800 hours a year. Divide your costs by the honest number, not the theoretical one: a machine costing $108,000 a year to own and staff is $60/hr at 1,800 billable hours and $90/hr at 1,200. Overestimating utilization is the most common way shops end up with a rate that feels busy and loses money.
Run your own numbers in 60 seconds
The free shop-rate calculator does this exact math in your browser. The full workbook version handles three machines side by side and feeds straight into job quoting.
Free Shop Rate Calculator Full Workbook — $29From rate to quote
Your rate is only half of pricing — the other half is applying it to a job correctly: setup amortization, cycle time with load/unload, material with scrap, and margin applied to price rather than cost. The quoting guide walks the whole calculation with a worked example, or the free quote calculator just does it for you.