How much should you pay yourself for handmade work?
There is no correct hourly rate for your own work, which is why this question usually gets answered badly — people either skip it entirely or pick whatever number makes the final price look reasonable. Both produce the same outcome: a shop that appears profitable and never quite has any money in it.
The rate that’s always wrong
The one chosen backwards. You cost the materials, add a rate, see the price, decide the price is too high, and lower the rate until the price looks sellable.
That isn’t pricing, it’s arithmetic in reverse, and it guarantees you can never learn anything from the number. A rate that bends to fit the answer can’t tell you a product is too slow to make, which is the main thing you needed it for.
Three ways to pick a real one
- What you’d accept from someone else. If a friend asked you to make forty of these for their shop, what hourly rate would make you say yes? That figure is honest because it was formed without a price attached.
- Your opportunity cost. If you have other paid work, or could have, that rate is the real floor — every hour at the bench is an hour not spent there.
- Minimum wage as an absolute floor, not a target. Your local minimum wage is the least defensible number, and you are carrying risk, admin, unpaid marketing hours and no holiday pay on top of the making. A rate at the floor means you’re being paid less than an employee doing only the making.
Most makers who do this honestly land somewhere well above minimum wage and well below what they’d charge as a freelancer. The precise number matters far less than having one and using it consistently — consistency is what makes two products comparable.
Why consistency matters more than the rate
Suppose you use $20 an hour. Product A takes 15 minutes and nets $1.22 after everything. Product B takes 45 minutes and nets $12.99.
Now change the rate to $15 an hour, or $30. Both products move, but they move together — B stays far ahead of A at any rate you choose. The ranking is stable even though the absolute figures aren’t, and the ranking is what you act on.
That’s the real argument for putting a number in even if you’re unsure of it. Using zero, by contrast, actively distorts the ranking: it flatters whichever product takes longest, which is precisely the one you should be most suspicious of.
Count the hours that aren’t making
A subtler error than skipping the rate: applying it only to bench time. The hours that actually consume a maker’s week are photography, listing, messages, packing, post office trips, bookkeeping and sourcing.
Two workable approaches. Either add a per-order allowance for the packing and admin that every order carries — often 5 to 10 minutes — or accept that your margin needs to cover the overhead hours and price for a higher one. What doesn’t work is pretending those hours don’t exist, since they’re the reason a “profitable” shop can leave you with no money and no evenings.
When the honest rate makes a product unsellable
This is the moment people reach for a lower rate, and it’s exactly the moment not to. The calculation has just told you something true, and there are three legitimate responses:
- Make it faster. On a labor-heavy product this is usually the biggest lever — batching, jigs, a different technique, simplifying a step nobody notices.
- Charge more, working the price backwards from the margin you want. The break-even math shows how much volume a rise can afford to lose.
- Stop making it. A perfectly nice product that can’t pay you is still a product that can’t pay you, and the hours have somewhere better to go.
What isn’t on the list is lowering your notional wage until the spreadsheet agrees. That doesn’t change what the product costs to make — it just moves the loss into your own unpaid time, where you can’t see it.
MakerMargin applies your rate consistently across every product from the order file Etsy already exports, so the comparison holds. The margin guide covers what the resulting number should look like, and costing materials covers the other half.
Fee figures in the examples are computed by the same fee engine MakerMargin bills against, at rates read from Etsy’s Fees & Payments Policy on 14 September 2026. The hourly rates and times are illustrative. This is general guidance on costing, not employment or wage-law advice — minimum wage rules vary by country and by state.
Do this for every order at once
MakerMargin reads the order file Etsy already exports and runs this math across your whole shop — per product, per month, with your materials included and a tax-ready year-end summary. See your last 30 days free, no card needed.
Short answers
What hourly rate should I pay myself as a maker?
Start from what you'd accept to do the same work for someone else, and treat your local minimum wage as an absolute floor rather than a target — you're also carrying the risk, the admin and the unpaid hours that an employee wouldn't. The rate matters less than using a consistent one, because that's what makes products comparable.
Should I include my time in my handmade pricing?
Yes. Leaving labor out is the single most common reason a shop looks profitable and still feels like it's losing money. It also systematically favours your slowest, most labor-heavy products in any comparison, which is exactly backwards.
What if paying myself properly makes my prices too high?
That's the finding, not a reason to lower the rate. It means the product is too slow to make at that price, and the answers are to make it faster, charge more, or stop making it. Reducing your notional wage until the number looks acceptable just hides the problem inside your own unpaid hours.
How much does Etsy take per sale?
The full stack of fees on one order, added up on real numbers instead of percentages.
Etsy Offsite Ads fees, and the $100 cap nobody applies
Why one order can cost you $100 in advertising fees, and why it can never cost more.
Does Etsy charge fees on shipping? Yes — here's the math
The fee sellers most often forget to subtract, and why free shipping doesn't dodge it.