How to price printed signs: corflute, ACM, acrylic, safety signs and wide-format

Price a printed sign from the sheet or roll it comes out of, not its finished area: material at real yield, print time and ink, cutting, finishing, hardware and packing, then margin. Get that right once and you win the bulk orders, still make money on the one-offs, and your customers can price corflute, ACM and acrylic themselves, any hour.

One rate per square metre cannot work across materials. On the same 1200 x 900 mm sign at example rates, corflute, ACM and acrylic cost roughly 1 : 3 : 6, and the gap is cost, not margin.

The done-for-you automation platform for sign and print businesses: your customers price, order and pay on your own website, and we connect it all for you.

Every dollar figure on this page is ex GST, in Australian dollars, built from example rates, not market prices. Plug in your own sheet costs, machine rates and margin. The structure holds across businesses.

How do you price a printed sign?

From six lines, then margin.

1. Material at real yield. The sheet or roll length the job consumes, including the offcut nobody else will use.
2. Print. Machine time plus ink. Ink is small, about A$1.50 to A$5 a square metre, but heavy coverage forces slower print modes, and machine time is the hidden cost.
3. Cutting. Trim on corflute, routing and deburring on ACM, routing and edge polishing on acrylic.
4. Finishing. Eyelets, stake holes, hemming, lamination, edge finishing. On small runs this often costs more than the print.
5. Hardware. Stakes, standoffs, fixings. Linear with quantity; it never gets a volume discount from nesting.
6. Packing and freight. Scales with fragility. Acrylic needs film, wrap and corners.

Waste adds about 8 to 15% to raw material in a well-run business, and 20 to 30% where jobs are not nested across sheets and roll widths. Layout matters: in a nesting benchmark we published, laying 18 lettering jobs out tightly instead of as drawn used between 6% and 57% less material, with a median of 39%.

Corflute vs ACM vs acrylic: which is cheaper and which lasts?

Corflute is the cheapest and shortest-lived. ACM is the long-life outdoor panel. Acrylic is the premium and the only one of the three that lets light through.

The same 1200 x 900 mm sign, full colour, single sided, square corners, priced three ways at example rates (5 mm corflute A$10/sqm, 3 mm ACM A$35/sqm, 4.5 mm acrylic A$75/sqm, machine time A$40 to A$50 an hour, 50% margin):

Example rates for illustration, ex GST, not market prices.

The margin stays the same. The price gap is a cost gap. Compare cost per year of service as well: a corflute shopfront sign replaced twice is not cheaper than one ACM panel that lasts five years.

How much should you charge for corflute, ACM and acrylic signs?

Know the sheet the sign came from, then price the yield. Corflute comes in 1200 x 900, 1800 x 1200 and 2400 x 1200 mm sheets, with 5 mm the outdoor workhorse. ACM comes in 2440 x 1220 and 3050 x 1500 mm sheets, 3 or 4 mm, with a standard or a fire-rated core, each a different cost base. Acrylic is cast, which laser cuts with a polished edge, or extruded, which is cheaper but melts and stress-cracks more readily.

Three worked examples at example rates, ex GST:

Example rates for illustration, ex GST, not market prices.

Same rate, different yield, different outcome. Yield has to be priced per job. Then let volume move the price where the cost actually moves:

For screen-printed runs, see screen printing rates.

How should you price bulk safety sign orders?

As one production run, not a stack of single quotes. Australian workplace safety signs follow AS 1319, so most of a site pack shares a few standard sizes, mainly 225 x 300 and 300 x 450 mm. In a worked 40-sign induction pack with 12 artworks in 5 mm corflute, one nested run used five sheets and quoted about A$21.80 a sign. Priced artwork by artwork, it used seven sheets and twelve setups, about A$28.90 a sign. That is about a quarter cheaper, A$7 less a sign, from layout alone. Facilities that reorder these packs are repeat trade accounts; a B2B portal lets them reorder without a new quote.

Banner pricing: how do you price wide-format prints and banners?

Same lines, on a roll. Typical material costs, ex GST:

Five PVC banners, 2400 x 900 mm, hemmed with eyelets, quote at A$434.02 at a 55% margin: about A$86.80 a banner, or about A$40 a square metre. A "banners are A$25 a square metre" habit quotes A$270 and leaves nothing for overhead or margin. Margins differ by product: interior wall graphics about 65 to 75%, floor graphics and custom decals about 60 to 70%, PVC banners about 45 to 55%. For decals and stickers in detail, see how much to charge for vinyl decals and stickers, and for film choice, cast vs calendered vinyl.

What are the most common printed sign pricing mistakes?

• One rate per square metre across every material and size.
• Quoting the finished area and paying for whole sheets.
• Giving finishing away inside the print price.
• Round-number discounts that ignore where cost actually drops.
• No minimum charge, so the smallest jobs run at a loss.

How does SwiftSignQuote price a printed sign?

From the same lines, worked out from real numbers on every quote.

• Material from the nest. Every panel is nested on the real sheet size of the board it is cut from, so the material line is the sheet the job actually uses, offcuts and all. Our nesting uses a machine learning algorithm that nudges shapes inside each other to pack tighter. On fabricated lettering it used around a third less material on average than standard bin packing in our nesting benchmark.
• Print, laminate and cut time from the job. A square cut, a rectangle and a custom shape each take different time on the cutter, at your machines' real rates.
• The setting changes the build. Indoors, outdoors, a construction site, a building facade or a reception wall each bring their own material choices, fixings and install.

The calculator below is live from our demo store: pick the material, where the sign goes, the size and the cut, and the price moves as you change it.

How do you put these prices in front of your customers?

Calibrate them once, then let customers use them. On a SwiftSignQuote store your customers choose the material, size, quantity, sides and finishing, watch the price move, upload artwork and pay by card or check out as a quote, on your own website. The price tables behind it carry the lines on this page, calibrated with you before go-live, and they are yours to own and adjust after it. We connect pricing of quote requests that arrive by email to the same tables for you during onboarding. We serve customers in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada, Germany and the US.

See a price range on the sign price calculator, read how instant quotes work on your own site, or go back to the complete method in how to price signs. Lit faces are in the illuminated signs pricing guide, and install in sign installation costs.

Or see it live on the demo store.