Free CNC costing tool
Estimate the real hourly cost of a CNC machine and the charge-out rate needed to achieve your target gross margin.
This is a planning estimate, not accounting advice or a customer quotation. Your result is only as reliable as your cost and utilisation assumptions.
Free CNC costing tool
Enter your own assumptions. Nothing is submitted or saved.
Method
The calculator converts annual ownership, labour, overhead, and operating costs into a cost per productive machine hour. Lower utilisation spreads fixed annual costs across fewer saleable hours.
Scheduled hours = working weeks × scheduled hours per week
Productive hours = scheduled hours × utilisation
Owned depreciation = (purchase price − residual value) ÷ useful life
Owned acquisition = depreciation + annual finance interest and fees
Leased acquisition = annual lease cost
Allocated labour = loaded operator cost × scheduled hours × operator allocation
Energy = average power draw × electricity price × productive hours
Total annual cost = acquisition + labour + overhead + maintenance + energy + tooling + software + inspection + floor space + insurance and other
Break-even rate = total annual cost ÷ productive hours
Gross profit per hour = charge-out rate − break-even rate
Charge-out rate = break-even rate ÷ (1 − gross margin)
Annual revenue = charge-out rate × productive hours
Sensitivity recalculates productive hours, energy, total annual cost, break-even, and charge-out rates. The selected utilisation is always retained and labelled. Comparison scenarios use the existing 5% and 95% bounds, with three scenarios in ascending order even when the selected value is nearer 0% or 100%.
For a £180,000 owned machine with a £20,000 residual value over ten years, 1,920 scheduled hours, 65% productive utilisation, shared labour, and the operating costs shown in the calculator:
A useful rate includes machine acquisition, allocated labour, factory overhead, maintenance, energy, tooling, software, inspection, floor space, and other machine-specific costs. Leaving out real costs understates the break-even rate.
Productive utilisation is the percentage of scheduled machine time spent producing saleable work. It should reflect setup, stoppages, maintenance, waiting, and other real losses rather than assuming every scheduled hour is billable.
Markup divides profit by cost, while gross margin divides profit by selling price. A 25% gross margin requires dividing cost by 0.75; simply adding 25% produces only a 20% margin.
Do not combine full lease or loan principal payments with depreciation. This calculator uses depreciation plus finance interest and fees for owned or financed equipment, or annual lease payments without depreciation for leased equipment.
No. It is a planning estimate based on the assumptions entered. Market pricing, risk, batch size, material, programming, inspection, and commercial terms still affect an actual quotation.
If utilisation, overhead allocation, staffing, or machine investment is difficult to pin down, Triaxis can help review the real constraint and costing model.