How to Quote a Screen Printing Job - What Affects the Price

Last Updated: Tuesday 8th September 2026 By Admin

Three things move your price, and only one of them is quantity. Quantity is the one everybody expects. More shirts, lower cost per shirt, because the setup spreads further.

The curve is steep early and then flattens. Going from 25 shirts to 100 changes your unit price a lot. Going from 500 to 600 still moves it, but the percentage is less.

Colour count is the one that surprises people. One colour in the design means one screen. Four colours means four screens, four setups and four alignments.

A screen holds exactly one ink, because two inks in the same screen would mix, and neither would come out the colour you asked for. This is why a four-colour design on 50 shirts can cost more than a one-colour design on 100.

Print positions work the same way. Front and back is two print runs on the same garment, not one job with a bonus. Left chest, full back and a sleeve is three.

So if you want a lower quote, the fastest lever is rarely the shirt. It is dropping a colour or a print position.

One more thing worth knowing about our quotes specifically. We build the screen setup into the printed price instead of listing it separately, which makes us look dearer than a competitor who quotes you a shirt and then adds screens at the bottom of the invoice.

Ask every printer for the all-in figure, delivered, setup, and GST included, and compare those numbers instead.

Where Screen Printing Stops Being the Cheaper Option

The alternative to screen printing has been DTG, which doesn't scale with quantity. Now we have DTF digital transfers added to the mix, which hold a flat per-piece price from ten units up. There is still setup, but it is much lower than screen printing.

That has moved the line. Current 2026 comparisons put the break-even between digital transfer and screen printing somewhere between 24 and 48 pieces, and where it falls depends almost entirely on how many colours you are running.

Against DTG specifically, as seen above. Screen printing needs higher volume to be cheaper than DTG or DTF

Treat that table as a rough map rather than a quote. It tells you which conversation to have with us. If your job sits near one of those boundaries, we will price it both ways and tell you which one wins.