How to Price Custom Drapery

Most drapery workrooms can measure and fabricate with confidence, then lose money at the quoting stage. Pricing custom drapery is not one number. It is three separate calculations layered together, and the middle one, labor, is where most underpricing happens.

This guide covers the method the trade actually uses: how to separate materials from labor, why drapery labor is charged per width rather than per yard, how billing widths differ from the widths you physically cut, and how upcharges and fees stack on top. Every figure below is illustrative, because rates vary widely by region, by construction standard, and by shop. The structure is what transfers.

The Three Parts of Every Drapery Price

Whatever the style, a custom drapery quote breaks into the same three buckets:

• Materials: fabric, lining, interlining, trim, and button tape, each priced as yardage multiplied by your cost per yard.
• Labor: the cost of making the panels, charged per width of goods.
• Fees: everything that is neither material nor construction, such as measuring, delivery, installation, and rush charges.

Total Price = Materials + Labor + Fees

Why it matters: keeping these separate is what lets you raise labor rates without touching your fabric markup, and quote a COM (customer’s own material) job by simply dropping the materials bucket.

1. Pricing Materials

Materials are the straightforward part. Once your yardage is calculated, each material is priced the same way:

Material Cost = Yardage × Price Per Yard

Do this separately for face fabric, lining, and interlining, because each has a different cost per yard and each may be marked up differently. If you are unsure how to arrive at the yardage figure in the first place, start with how to calculate fabric yardage for pleated drapes.

Two things separate a profitable materials line from a break-even one:

• Price the yardage you buy, not the yardage you use. Pattern repeats, cutting tolerance, and railroading all mean you order more than ends up in the panel. The customer pays for the bolt, not the offcut.
• Apply markup consistently. Whether you mark fabric up or bill it at cost and take your margin in labor is a business decision, but pick one and apply it to every job, or your quotes stop being comparable to each other.

2. Why Labor Is Priced Per Width

Drapery labor is almost universally charged per width of fabric, not per yard, per panel, or per hour. The reason is that construction effort tracks widths far more closely than it tracks anything else.

Each additional width means another seam to sew and press, more header and buckram, more hem, more pleats to form and tack, and more weight to handle at the table. None of that changes because the fabric happened to cost $18 a yard instead of $180, which is exactly why pricing labor as a percentage of fabric cost misprices the work in both directions.

Per-hour pricing has the opposite problem: it penalises you for getting faster, and it forces you to estimate time before you have made the panel. Per-width pricing is predictable for the customer, defensible in a quote, and improves as a margin the more efficient your shop becomes.

Rates are normally set by construction type, because the labor genuinely differs:

Illustrative only. These figures show the shape of the ladder, with interlined running roughly double unlined. They are not what you should charge. Set your rates from your own costs and your own market.

3. Billing Widths vs Actual Widths

This is the distinction that catches most workrooms out, and it is worth getting exactly right.

An actual width is physical. It is how many widths of this particular fabric you cut off the bolt, and it drives your yardage and your material cost.

A billing width is a pricing unit. It is the same panel measured against your shop’s standard billing width, the bolt width your labor rate was set against, most commonly 54".

On standard goods the two are close enough that nobody notices. On wide goods they come apart badly. Consider a single width of 118" fabric:

• Actual widths: 1, because you cut it once.
• Billing widths: 118" ÷ 54" = 2.19, which bills as 2.5.

That one cut carries roughly two and a half standard widths of seaming, heading, hemming, and pleating. A shop charging per actual width bills it as one, and the wider the goods, the worse the shortfall. Wide fabric saves you seams; it does not save you two thirds of the panel.

Finding the billing widths for a job takes three steps:

1. Divide the panel size by your standard billing width.
2. Round that figure up to the next half width.
3. Multiply by the number of panels.

Billing Widths Per Panel = Panel Size ÷ Standard Billing Width, rounded up to the next half

Total Billing Widths = Billing Widths Per Panel × Number of Panels

For the 118" example above: 118 ÷ 54 = 2.19, which rounds up to 2.5 billing widths for that panel.

Building this in a spreadsheet? There is no built-in function for rounding to the nearest half, so double the figure, round it up, then halve it again: =ROUNDUP(PanelSize / StandardWidth * 2, 0) / 2

4. Round Up to the Half Width on Every Panel

Two details in that formula do real work, and both are easy to get wrong.

Round to the half, not the whole. Rounding each panel up to a full width compounds across the job. A panel needing 1.2 widths rounds to 2, and across two panels you have billed 4 against a true 2.4. That is a 67% overcharge, and it will lose you the quote. Rounding to the nearest half bills 1.5 per panel, or 3 across the pair, which is 25% over. Half widths keep you profitable without pricing yourself out of the job.

Round per panel, then multiply. Each panel is cut, sewn, and pleated separately, so the rounding belongs at the panel. Totalling first and rounding once understates the work on every panel but the last.

5. Upcharges That Sit On Top of the Base Rate

Base labor covers a typical panel. Three common upcharges cover the ones that are not.

Single width upcharge

A one-width panel costs nearly as much to set up as a two-width panel. Same header, same hems, same handling, but it earns half the labor. A flat upcharge on single-width panels closes that gap. It is charged once, not per width.

Oversize width upcharge

Very wide panels get disproportionately harder: more table space, more handling, more risk. A width ladder adds a per-width upcharge once the job passes a threshold, measured as a count of billing widths. Only the highest threshold the job exceeds applies, and the tiers do not stack.

Width Upcharge = Upcharge Per Width × Total Billing Widths

Oversize length upcharge

Long panels behave the same way. Past a certain finished length, often somewhere around 90" to 120", hemming and handling stop being routine. The length ladder works identically, except the threshold is a finished length rather than a width count, and the resulting upcharge is still applied per billing width.

Set thresholds in ascending order. A ladder entered out of sequence will silently apply the wrong tier, and the error grows with the size of the job, which means it hits your largest, most valuable quotes hardest.

6. Fees

Fees cover work that is neither material nor construction. The useful thing about fees is that each one can be billed against whatever unit actually drives it:

Charging a per-window measuring fee on a five-window job, rather than folding it into a single flat number, is the difference between covering the site visit and absorbing it.

7. A Worked Quote, Start to Finish

One window, a pair of lined pinch pleat panels, 96" finished length, on 54" goods. The shop’s standard billing width is 54".

Billing widths

Each panel measures 130" across before hemming, including seam allowances.

• 130" ÷ 54" = 2.41 raw widths
• Rounded up to the nearest half: 2.5 per panel
• × 2 panels = 5 billing widths

Materials

Labor

No single width upcharge applies here, because each panel is 2.5 widths, not one.

Fees

Total

$416.00 materials + $270.00 labor + $65.00 fees = $751.00

Notice how much of the quote moves if the billing widths are wrong. Bill this job at 4 widths instead of 5 and you lose $54 in labor and $6 in fees on a single window, before you have made a single mistake in the workroom.

Common Pricing Mistakes

• Charging per actual width on wide goods. The single most expensive error on this list, and it scales with the size of the job.
• Rounding widths to the whole. Overprices small jobs badly enough to cost you the work.
• Rounding the job total instead of each panel. Understates the labor on multi-panel orders.
• Pricing labor as a percentage of fabric cost. Overcharges on expensive silk and undercharges on inexpensive cotton, when the sewing is identical.
• Forgetting the single width upcharge. Small panels quietly run at a loss.
• Absorbing measuring and delivery. These are real hours. Put them on the quote as fees, even at a modest rate.
• Quoting from memory. Two similar jobs priced weeks apart should come out the same. If they do not, the method is not written down.

Price Every Job the Same Way

Consistent pricing is less about finding the perfect rate than about applying the same method every time. Once your rate per width, your upcharge thresholds, and your fees are set, quoting becomes arithmetic rather than judgement, and your margins stop depending on how busy you were the day the quote went out.

The EZ Pleating Calculator applies this method automatically. It works out billing widths from the panel size and your standard width, rounds them correctly, applies your rates, upcharge tiers, and fees, and produces a line-by-line estimate alongside the cut list, so the price and the fabrication plan come from the same set of measurements.

Try EZ Pleating free for 30 days →