Stamping Cost

Sheet Metal Stamping Cost Per Piece: How to Quote Material, Press Time, and Scrap

A money-focused breakdown of stamped part cost: material at true yield, press hourly rate, tooling amortization, scrap credit, and where quotes go wrong.

Material is 55 to 75 percent of a stamped part's cost, so quote it at real yield, not net weight. If a part nets 0.21 lb but runs at 65 percent Coil Yield, you buy 0.21 / 0.65 = 0.323 lb per piece. At $0.62/lb for cold-rolled steel that is $0.20 in purchased material, of which $0.07 is scrap you never ship. Every point of yield you recover through the Blank Size Optimization and Strip Layout Yield tools drops purchased weight by about 1.5 percent, which on a million-piece order is real money, not a rounding difference.

Press time is priced by the machine hour, not the part. Set an hourly rate that recovers depreciation, floor space, power, and operator: a 200 ton press line commonly runs $75 to $140/hr fully burdened. Divide by good parts per hour to get press cost per piece. At 6,000 good parts/hr and a $110/hr rate, that is $0.0183 per part. The lever is throughput, so pull Press Strokes Per Minute and Progressive Die Output into the estimate. Dropping from 120 to 90 SPM raises press cost per piece by a third, which quietly kills margin.

Scrap runs two directions and both belong in the quote. Skeleton and slug steel sells back as scrap, so credit it: 0.113 lb of offal at a $0.14/lb scrap price returns $0.016 per piece, offsetting about 8 percent of your material cost. Use the Scrap Strip Value tool to price the return realistically, since prime scrap segregated by grade fetches more than mixed. Never assume full mill price on return, and never forget the credit entirely, since a forgotten scrap credit inflates a quote by 5 to 10 percent and loses the job.

Tooling is a capital cost you amortize, not a line item you eat. A progressive die at $85,000 amortized over a 500,000 piece program adds $0.17 per part. Amortize over 2 million and it is $0.0425. Buyers push to spread die cost thin, so pin the amortization volume in writing. Add die maintenance at roughly 3 to 6 percent of tool value per year, plus sharpening every 150,000 to 400,000 hits. If the program volume is soft, quote a separate tooling charge rather than burying an optimistic per-piece amortization that you cannot recover.

Changeover and downtime are cost, even when no part moves. Price setup using Die Changeover Cost: a 2.5 hr changeover on a $110/hr line is $275, and spread over a 20,000 piece run that is $0.0138 per part, but over a 2,000 piece run it balloons to $0.138. Coil Change Downtime adds up too, at 8 to 15 minutes per coil across a shift. Short runs are expensive per piece precisely because fixed setup dominates, so quote small orders with an explicit lot charge instead of a flat per-piece price.

Consumables and secondary work are small but real. Lubricant on the Lubricant Usage tool typically runs $0.001 to $0.005 per part depending on draw depth and application method, with electrostatic systems using a third of the oil that flood systems do. Add deburring, washing, plating, or heat treat as their own line items at supplier quotes, not guesses. Freight on steel parts is weight-driven, often $0.01 to $0.04 per piece regional, so quote it separately and revisit it when fuel surcharges move, since it is not part of your conversion margin.

Overhead and margin turn cost into price. Layer SG&A at 8 to 15 percent of factory cost, then apply target margin, commonly 12 to 25 percent on stamped commodity parts and higher on complex draws. Sum the pieces: material net of scrap credit, press time, tooling amortization, setup, consumables, secondary, freight, then overhead and margin. For the running example that is roughly $0.184 material minus $0.016 scrap plus $0.0183 press plus $0.0425 die plus consumables, near $0.24 factory cost before overhead, landing around $0.30 quoted.

Estimates go wrong in predictable places. The top three killers are overstated yield (assuming 75 percent when the strip really runs 62 percent), understated changeover on short runs, and a forgotten scrap credit. A close fourth is quoting at nameplate SPM instead of the 82 to 90 percent real uptime the line actually holds. Rebuild every quote from a coil mass balance and a machine-hour rate, sanity check it against the last similar job's actual cost, and flag any assumption more optimistic than shop-floor history before you send the number.

Published 2026-07-01.