Why upholsterers quote per piece but price from bench hours
Customers buy a chair or a set of cushions, so upholsterers quote per piece and use hours behind the scenes to check the piece price holds up. A wing chair is the clearest case: 20 hours at $50 is a thousand dollars of labour, and a shop might write it up as $975 because a number under a thousand reads better to a customer.
Marine work goes further and prices every cushion on its own, piece by piece, because no two cushions on a boat are the same size or shape. On sofas, many shops won't split the price by seat and quote the whole piece instead. Either way, the hours are the check, not what the customer sees.
How much do upholsterers charge per hour?
About $50 an hour of shop time is where one working furniture shop puts the countrywide average, and big metro areas run well above it. These are one shop's figures from 2020, so treat them as a starting point, not a price list.
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Area | Shop rate per hour |
| 2 | Countrywide average | about $50 |
| 3 | Southern metro areas | $50 to $70 |
| 4 | Boston metro | about $80 |
| 5 | New York City | $100 to $120 |
| 6 | Rural shops | at least 20% under $50 |
To find your local market rate, ask a friendly upholsterer, or call a shop about a piece and listen to how they price it. That tells you the market, not your floor. Your floor is your break-even rate, the least a bench hour must bring in; the formula is in the true hourly rate guide.
In the sample shop (an owner, one upholsterer and a part-time helper who strips, with $36,800 of overhead a year) that floor is $49.10 per billable hour. The owner bills the fewest hours, because the trips to see furniture, fabric picking and the phone all land on the owner. Run your own numbers in the free true hourly rate calculator.
Metro labour prices for wing chairs, sofas and slip seats
In a big metro shop, labour prices are the hourly rate times the hours each piece takes, and fabric goes on top. These are one shop's labour-only numbers.
| A | B | C | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Piece (metro area, labour only) | Price | Hours |
| 2 | Wing chair | about a thousand dollars (quoted $975) | 20 |
| 3 | Club chair | about $950 | 18 to 19 |
| 4 | Loveseat | $1,100 to $1,300 | 22 to 25 |
| 5 | Box seat for a dining chair, piped | $125 | close to 2 |
| 6 | Slip seat | $90, or $75 if it needs nothing more | not given |
A medium sofa runs about $1,650 of labour on the same scale, and a chair-size box cushion about $75 for an hour and a half. Stripping a piece down to the frame and rebuilding it adds about 50% to the labour. Move 30 to 40 miles out of the city and the same work can sell for almost half.
Fabric changes the total more than people expect. A wing chair needs about 7 yards, so at $50 a yard list, offered at 20% off, the chair lands near $1,280 before tax. Free pickup and delivery inside about 10 miles is a strong close, because a professional mover can charge about $500 each way.
Is the chair worth redoing? Answering sticker shock
Compare the labour with what the piece costs new, because that is what the customer is doing in their head. A high-end wing chair from a design showroom can run several thousand dollars new, so a thousand dollars of labour plus fabric is an easy yes.
Mid-quality furniture still reupholsters for about half the cost of buying new. The hard sell is cheap flat-pack furniture: a customer on their third or fourth cheap sofa in ten years has already spent more than one good rebuild would cost. That is the conversation to have before you drop your price.
Worked example: 8 dining chair slip seats at $147.41 each
The sample job prices out at $1,179.29 for 8 seats: strip the old covers, new foam and batting, mid-grade shop fabric and new dust covers, seats only, no frame work. That is about 8 hours on the bench and about 11 labour hours once the time around the job is counted.
Stripping is the step that swings most. One slip seat might take 15 minutes to strip, and the next, with three old covers and a few hundred staples, half an hour. Time your own on the next set and put the real figure in the Quote tab.
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Part of the price | 8 seats |
| 2 | Materials and bench time | $655.45 |
| 3 | Don't-forget costs | $211.33 |
| 4 | Markup, safety cushion and profit | $312.51 |
| 5 | Price for the set | $1,179.29 |
The $312.51 is what the shop keeps after every cost, the owner's wage included: 26.5% of the price, which takes about a 36% markup on the $866.78 cost (markup vs margin explains why those two numbers differ). Spread over the 11 labour hours, the job brings in about $77 an hour against the $49.10 floor.
As a sense check, $90 of slip-seat labour plus half a yard of fabric and doubled foam lands around $130 to $140 a seat, and a piped box seat is $125 of labour alone. The sample's $147.41 sits between the two because it also carries the trip, the yardage work and the delivery.
Why 2 seats cost $244 each and 12 cost $137
The trip to see the chairs, fabric picking, foam shipping and delivery are paid once per job, so the fewer seats there are, the more of it each one carries.
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Seats in the order | Price per seat (sample) |
| 2 | 2 | $244.33 |
| 3 | 8 | $147.41 |
| 4 | 12 | $136.64 |
That is why many shops lower the per-seat price when someone brings in 12 chairs, often before the customer asks. The other end needs a floor too. Some auto and marine shops set a minimum of about $125 to $150, so a 15-minute repair still pays for the phone call, the check-in and the time around it.
How much fabric does a chair or sofa take?
Seven yards for one wing chair and 18 to 20 for a 7-foot sofa with cushions are common rules of thumb, and yardage is the biggest material line on most quotes.
- A pair of wing chairs: 13 to 14 yards.
- A tight-back sofa with no cushions: about 16 yards.
- A settee: 6 to 7 yards. A club chair: about 10. A simple chair with a seat cushion: about 4.
- Tufting: add 4 to 5 yards. Welting on a sofa: add 1.5 to 2 yards. A skirt adds more again.
Pattern repeat, velvet nap and stripes all push those numbers up, which is why it pays to see a picture of the fabric before the customer buys it. Cutting a piece too short is the worst outcome, because the customer has to reorder and wait.
When the customer supplies the fabric, give them the yardage in writing, because a second bolt from the same dye lot may not exist.
Boat cushions, motorcycle and jet ski seats: per-piece prices
Auto and marine upholsterers charge by the piece, and a boat can bring in more than a living room. One marine shop's worked boat priced its cushions at $375, $475, $575 and $775 each, and that shop puts whole boat jobs at three thousand to eight thousand dollars.
- Motorcycle seats: 300 to 1,000 dollars depending on the design, one or two a day, and only the seat comes in.
- Jet ski seats: 500 to 1,200 dollars in 2024 and 2025, about a one-day turnaround.
- Marine vinyl: a few dollars a yard more than standard vinyl, a small line on a boat job.
- Aircraft interiors: high-paying work, with a burn-test certificate required for every material that goes into the plane.
Boat owners near a big lake refer each other, so one well-priced boat can bring the next three.
The costs upholstery quotes leave out
On the 8-seat sample, the don't-forget list adds $211 of cost, about $26 a seat, and none of it is foam, fabric or bench time. Leave it off and the same profit rules price the set about $266 lower, roughly $33 a seat out of the owner's pocket. What goes on it:
- The customer's fabric choice. Sample books and the time it takes someone to pick, on jobs you win and jobs you don't.
- Working out yardage and repeat. Get it wrong and you either eat a short cut or go back to the customer.
- Fabric lost to pattern matching. Stripes and florals waste yardage lining up; a plain fabric barely does.
- Shipping on foam and fabric. Bulky foam costs a lot to ship, which is why some shops charge double what they pay for foam.
- Tagging every piece. A minute a seat, and real time on a boat with 14 cushions. Shops that skip it lose furniture.
- Pickup and delivery. Free inside 10 miles still costs a van, padding and a driver's afternoon.
- Messages and invoices. Pictures sent at night, fabric options, dates. It's why the owner bills the fewest hours.
- Sweeping staples. Small per seat, steady all year.
- Frame damage found after stripping. The sample leaves this line unanswered on purpose, so the quote flags it. Price it and get it approved before the repair, as a change order.
- The card fee. Tell customers up front about a fee on card payments rather than eating it.
The simplest way to get your own numbers for these: time them on your next three jobs.
Upholstery pricing mistakes that cost shops money
A ballpark over the phone is the most common one, because every seat, chair and boat is different until it's in front of you. Many experienced shops refuse to give a phone price at all until they have seen the piece.
If you must give a phone number, write it as an estimate, not a quote (quote vs estimate). Customers remember a shop that charged a few hundred dollars more at pickup than it quoted; the fix is a full price up front and written approval for anything found under the cover.
Pricing low out of nerves. You can always come down on a price but you can't go up once it's said. One auto and marine owner says his prices doubled in about a year once he stopped quoting low.
Pricing foam at the supplier's list. Shipping bulky foam is a real cost, so mark foam up well past what you paid.
Starting without a deposit. Half down on every job is common, and it buys the materials and pays for the first part of the work.
Promising a date you can't hit. A busy shop can have 30 to 40 jobs in the queue, and few customers will wait 15 or 20 weeks, so the lead time belongs on the quote too.
Is upholstery profitable? What the sample Job Log shows
Upholstery pays when the hours on the quote are the hours on the bench, and the sample Job Log shows both sides. A single wing chair quoted at 20 hours took 31 once the cover came off, and lost money. A 6-piece marina job quoted at 22 hours took 24 and still made its profit.
The research gave no industry profit margin for upholstery, so we don't quote one. The way to learn your own is to log quoted against real hours on every job, as described in job costing.
Quote the next set of chairs in the spreadsheet
The Upholstery Pricing Calculator does every step above in Excel or Google Sheets: your floor rate from your own rent and wages, yardage and foam per piece, the don't-forget list, the per-seat price at other quantities, and a customer quote with terms written for upholstery. The Job Log then shows which chairs, sofas and boats made money.