Pricing is the single business decision that most determines whether an upholstery workshop survives or doesn't.
Get it right and the workshop pays its bills, your wages, and your retirement. Get it wrong and you're subsidising your customers' furniture restoration out of your own savings. We've made every pricing mistake possible across thirty years; what follows is what we wish someone had told us in 1995. The numbers throughout are 2024 rates for our workshop in West Yorkshire — adjust for your area's going rates and your own business costs.
Re-do the pricing calculation in this chapter every year. Inflation, changes in your costs, and changes in what local customers will bear all shift the right rate. We recalculate every January.
Setting your hourly rate
Start from your annual income target and work outward. Work it through for our two-person West Yorkshire workshop, at 2024 figures:
- Annual income target — what you need to take home after tax, overheads, materials, and equipment depreciation. For two people in West Yorkshire in 2024, £50,000–60,000 combined is a viable living-wage target.
- Workshop overheads — rent, business rates, insurance, utilities, vehicle costs, materials stock, accountant. Ours run to about £25,000 a year.
- Tax — income tax, National Insurance, and VAT if you're registered. Tax adds 25–35% to whatever you want to take home.
- Total annual revenue needed — roughly £100,000 for our two-person workshop.
- Billable hours — and this is where most workshops fool themselves. Genuinely billable bench hours are far fewer than the hours you work: perhaps 13 a week each, because the rest of a 45-hour week goes to quoting, customer visits, materials sourcing, deliveries, admin, and holiday. Across the two of us that's about 26 billable hours a week, or roughly 1,250 a year.
The rate falls out of the division: £100,000 ÷ 1,250 = £80 an hour. Pat and I charge £80 an hour for everything we do — and counting only the hours we can genuinely bill is the part new workshops get wrong, which is how they end up setting a rate less than half of what they actually need.
Hourly rates have to rise with your costs. We've put ours up several times over the years to keep pace, and every rise loses us a customer or two and gains us better ones. The customers who leave over a rate rise are almost always the ones you'd been subsidising — they're the right customers to lose.
Building a quote
A quote has three parts — materials, labour, and contingency. Each is calculated separately, and each is presented separately to the customer.
Materials. List everything in detail: 4 m of webbing £4, 9 springs £36, and so on. Add 15% for “sundries” — the twine, tacks, and small stuff that adds up — and add the show fabric at the customer's chosen price.
Labour. Estimate the hours by project type, multiply by your hourly rate, and round up — never down.
Contingency. Add 10–15% of the labour cost. This covers the unforeseen: frame repair that wasn't visible at the quote stage, fabric that turns out harder to handle than expected, a customer who changes their mind partway through. Present it as a separate line; some customers will negotiate it out, but it should be there.
Present the whole thing as a single document — the customer's name, the chair description, the breakdown, and a single bottom-line total. We use a one-page Word template, updated for each customer and emailed or printed as preferred.
Most quotes are fixed-price: the customer pays the quoted total regardless of how long the job actually takes. That protects the customer from over-runs but transfers the risk to the workshop. Hourly billing is more honest but harder to sell; we use it only for major restorations where the scope genuinely can't be estimated up front.
Reference: typical project pricing
Prices split along the two ways a job can be built, and it pays to be clear with the customer which they're buying.
Traditional work means stripping the piece to the frame and rebuilding it by hand — webbing, hand-tied coil springs, fibre or hair stuffing built up and stitched into shape with stitched edges, then calico, wadding, and the top cover. It's slow, it's all hand skill, and it lasts for decades. Modern work means foam cut to shape over a ply or sprung platform, a Dacron wrap, and a stapled top cover — far quicker, lower in cost, and right for everyday pieces. The hours below are our own billable hours at £80; materials are average estimates and vary considerably with fabric choice.
Traditional re-upholstery
| Project | Hours | Materials | Labour | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stuffover dining chair | 5 h | £60 | £400 | £460 |
| Stool / pouffe | 3 h | £60 | £240 | £300 |
| Wing-back armchair | 20 h | £500 | £1,600 | £2,100 |
| Chesterfield sofa | 40 h | £3,200 | £3,200 | £6,400 |
Modern re-upholstery
| Project | Hours | Materials | Labour | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drop-in dining seat (recover) | 30 min | £35 | £40 | £75 |
| Headboard | 5 h | £100 | £400 | £500 |
| Modern sofa re-cover | 10 h | £350 | £800 | £1,150 |
Our own billable hours at £80/hour, for the projects in Part Three. Materials are average estimates and vary considerably by fabric choice — leather and patterned fabric especially. Use them as a starting point for your own quotes, at your own rate.
When the customer pushes back
About one in five customers will try to negotiate the quote down, so have a position before they ask. Ours: materials prices are fixed (we've quoted at trade cost); labour rates are fixed (it's what we charge everyone); but we'll discuss the scope. If they want a cheaper job, we can quote a cheaper scope — less restoration work, lighter materials, no contingency. The conversation moves from price to what they're actually buying.
We don't discount our hourly rate for any customer. Discounting once teaches the customer — and ourselves — that the rate is negotiable. If the rate is right at £80, it's right at £80 for everyone. Some customers will leave for a cheaper quote, and that's fine: the customer who wants to pay 70% of our rate is the customer who will also expect 70% of the work. We're better off without them. (The Part Six story on the wing-back that wasn't a Howard is the same principle seen from the other side of the bench.)
When a customer's budget genuinely can't stretch, we refer them to a foam-and-staple shop in Halifax that specialises in cheap modern re-covers. The customer gets work done; we get a clean ending; the other shop gets a referral. Everybody wins, and nobody is subsidising anybody.
In 2008 we underquoted a wing-back restoration by £800. We'd estimated 30 hours of labour; it ended up being 50 — partly because we hadn't seen the frame damage at the quote stage, and partly because we'd underestimated the deep-buttoning time. We took a 30% loss on the project to honour the quote.
The lessons: look at the frame carefully before quoting (open the upholstery up enough to see the joints); add contingency for the unforeseeable; and quote on your worst-case time estimate, not your best-case. Sixteen years later we still re-tell that 2008 quote in the workshop as a cautionary tale. The customer never knew, the project was finished beautifully, and the workshop absorbed the loss. We've not done it since.
Pre-industrial upholsterers worked on a guild-controlled per-piece rate, set by the Worshipful Company of Upholsterers (founded 1465). A standard joint-stool was sixpence in 1660; a feather mattress was a guinea. The rates were rigid, and competition between upholsterers was on workmanship rather than price.
Hourly billing is a twentieth-century invention — a legacy of American manufacturing. British shops moved to hourly rates between the 1950s and 1970s, partly because customers had begun comparing prices with factory-made furniture. Pricing per piece is what the trade did for 500 years; pricing by the hour is the modern thing. Either is honourable; we use hourly because the projects vary too much for fixed per-piece rates.
- Underquoting to win the work. The customer who took your underquote will be the same customer next time, expecting the same price. You've trained them to expect a loss-making rate. Don't.
- Forgetting contingency. Every job has unforeseens; 10–15% built into every quote is the professional standard.
- Not quoting in writing. Verbal quotes get remembered differently by customer and upholsterer. Always written, always emailed or signed.
- The wrong rate for friends and family. Charge them your full rate. Discount as a gift at the end if you like — subtract it from the bill — but never quote below cost; you'll train them and build resentment.
- Not raising rates. Inflation is real. If you're still charging the rate you set five years ago, you're earning 30% less than you were. Raise it; lose a few customers; gain better ones.
Quote it right, charge it right, and the workshop survives. The next chapter covers the other half of the business side: how to talk to customers, how to manage the workshop's calendar, and the natural rhythms of an upholstery year.