How to Price Tattoos: Hourly vs. Flat Rate (and When to Switch)

How to Price Tattoos: Hourly vs. Flat Rate (and When to Switch)

Pricing is the one shop decision that touches everything else — how many hours you book, how fast artists burn out, whether the front desk can quote without checking with you. Most shops pick a model in year one and never revisit it, then wonder why a full calendar still ends the month tight.

Here is the honest version of the hourly-versus-flat argument, and the numbers that decide it. If you have already run the five numbers that decide whether your shop makes money, you have the inputs sitting in front of you.

What each model actually rewards

Hourly pays for time. It protects the artist on long, detailed, high-risk work, and it is the only fair model when a piece can grow mid-session. Its weakness is that it punishes speed: the artist who has spent ten years getting faster earns less per piece than the one still figuring it out.

Flat rate pays for the result. The client hears one number, agrees, and stops watching the clock — which is worth real money in booked conversions. Its weakness is the overrun. Quote a sleeve at eighteen hours, spend twenty-five, and you just worked a week for free.

Most well-run shops end up hybrid: flat rate on anything predictable and repeatable, hourly on custom, cover-ups, and multi-session work where scope moves.

Set your shop minimum first

Before you pick a model, set the floor. Your minimum should cover setup, breakdown, sterilization, the station time, and the front-desk labor that booked the appointment — not just the needle time. Take your true cost per chair per month, divide by the number of billable hours that chair realistically produces, and you have your break-even hourly cost. Your minimum has to clear it, or small work quietly subsidizes itself out of your margin.

A shop with $1,150 in monthly cost per chair and 70 realistic billable hours is carrying about $16 an hour in fixed cost before anyone gets paid. Price like that number does not exist and every walk-in flash piece costs you money to accept.

Quoting flat rate without eating the overrun

Three rules keep flat-rate work honest.

Quote a range, confirm at consult. Give a range on the phone or in DMs; commit to a number only after you have seen placement, size, and skin. The consult is not a formality — it is the underwriting.

Define the scope in writing. The quote covers a specific design, size, and placement. Additions get re-quoted. One line on the deposit form prevents the entire argument.

Cap the session, not the project. Multi-session work should be flat-rate per session with a stated session length. That way an ambitious piece stretches across more sessions instead of stretching your day for free.

Raising rates: the 90-day script

Rates go up. Supplies went up, rent went up, your artists got better. The shops that struggle are the ones that hold a 2023 minimum into 2027 and try to make it back on volume.

Announce a new rate 60 to 90 days out. Honor existing quotes and booked deposits at the old number. Tell clients once, plainly, without apology: “Starting November 1, our shop minimum is $X and hourly is $Y. Anything already booked is locked at your quoted price.” Almost nobody leaves over a fair increase communicated early. They leave over surprises at the counter.

Pricing and the price on the card

One piece of the pricing conversation gets skipped constantly: the cost of getting paid. Traditional processing runs 3–4% of card sales. On a shop doing $40,000 a month on cards, at 3.5% that is roughly $1,400 a month — about $16,800 a year that never shows up in your pricing model but comes straight out of the same margin you just spent an afternoon defending.

With dual pricing, the price you post is the card price, and clients who pay with cash or debit get the cash price instead. Same posted number on the wall, same quote at the counter, and the processing cost stops being a silent line item against every ticket you price. Revify shops also earn Monthly Cash-back of 0.75% of card sales — on that same $40,000 month, another $300 back.

Assumes 3.5% traditional processing (typical range 3–4%), card-present. Estimate only.

Do this week

Pull last month’s numbers and calculate your true cost per chair-hour. Compare it against your minimum. Then take your last ten flat-rate pieces and mark the actual hours against the quoted hours. If more than three ran long, your quoting process is the problem — not your model.

Next in this series: how much to take as a deposit, and how to make it stick.