Tailor hourly rate calculator
This free calculator works out the hourly rate a freelance tailor should charge, starting from the income you need — then converts it into the per-garment prices clients actually pay. Garments are the unit, priced per job — the hourly rate exists to check that those prices, across a week split between the bench, the fitting room and the phone, add up to a living. With the honest presets below it lands near $70 an hour, $556 for a full day: a standard trouser hem prices near $35, and a two-hour alteration near $140.
The pricing reality for freelance tailors
A tailor's week splits three ways: bench time at the machine, fitting time with the client standing in front of you, and everything else — consultations, sourcing notions, pressing, phone calls about deadlines. Only some of it is visible in the price of a garment, which is exactly how tailoring gets underpriced: the hem takes twenty minutes at the machine, and arrived with a fitting, a conversation and a pressing either side of it.
Demand arrives in waves — wedding season, the start of term, the weeks before the holidays — and a large share of it arrives late and urgent. Rush work displaces booked work and eats evenings; if it is priced like ordinary work, the busiest weeks become the worst-paid ones.
The preset below starts billable time at 62%: bench time bills, but fittings, consultations, sourcing and admin bill only partly, when they bill at all. The numbers are starting presets, not a survey: a $50,000 target income, $8,700 a year of expenses — the studio share is the shape of it, alongside machines and their maintenance, notions and fabric stock, insurance and marketing — and 62% billable time. With those starting numbers the calculator lands near $70 an hour.
Your numbers — tailor presets
Your recommended rate
| Income + expenses needed | $0 |
| Grossed up for tax | $0 |
| With profit margin | $0 |
| Working weeks | 0 |
| Total working hours | 0 |
| Billable hours | 0 |
Your rate is saved on this device only, so the Proposal Generator can show it when you price a project.
Costs tailors forget to put in the rate
- Fitting time. A fitting is skilled work — pinning, marking, judging fit on a moving person — and a two-fitting garment carries two of them. Priced as pure bench time, the fittings are free.
- Machines and their maintenance. Sewing machines, overlockers and presses need servicing, needles, feet and repairs. A machine down in wedding season is income stopped, not paused.
- Notions and stock. Thread, zips, buttons, interfacing and lining are small, constant and easy to forget, because each garment uses so little. Across a year they are a real shelf of money.
- Consultations that go nowhere. Measuring, advising and quoting for work that never arrives is part of the trade's week. Bespoke quotes especially should carry their share of it.
- Rush displacement. An urgent job doesn't just take its own hours — it pushes booked work later and borrows your evening. Priced flat, the rush job is the cheapest work in the week and costs the most.
How this calculator works
Start with the hours you can genuinely sell. Take 52 weeks, subtract your vacation weeks, multiply by your hours per week, then multiply by your billable percentage. With the tailor presets — four weeks off, 40 hours a week, 62% billable — that is 1,190 billable hours a year: the bench hours left once fittings, consultations, sourcing and admin have taken theirs.
Next, work out what those hours must bring in. Add your desired income and your annual business expenses together — $58,700 on the presets — gross the total up for tax by dividing by one minus your tax rate — at a 22% estimate, divide by 0.78 to get $75,256 — then add your profit margin to reach $82,782 and divide by your billable hours. That final number, $70, is the rate below which the year stops adding up.
Now convert it into the units clients buy. A standard trouser hem — about half an hour of work once the garment is pinned — prices at $35. A dress alteration across two fittings and about two hours of total work is $140. The labour in a bespoke garment, at roughly twelve hours of bench and fitting time, is $840 before fabric. Quote the per-garment price as the per-garment price — but build it from these hours, fittings included, so the price respects the whole job and not just the minutes at the machine.
Tailor rate questions
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