How to Price Signs: Why Most Sign Shops Get It Wrong
If you’ve ever asked how to price signs accurately, you’re not alone.
How do I price a Sign?
If you’ve ever asked, “How do I price this sign?” you’re not alone.
It’s one of the most common questions in the sign industry. From vehicle wraps to channel letters, many business owners still base their pricing on instinct.
In a recent episode of SignTracker’s Behind the Signs podcast, Joe Arenella and Liz shared firsthand experience on this topic from running a sign business. Their core message is simple:
👉 Most sign shops don’t have a pricing system—they have pricing guesses.
That’s where problems start.
Jobs are underpriced, margins shrink, and owners feel pressure to offer discounts just to close deals.
SignTracker is shop management and estimating software built specifically for sign and wrap shops, helping teams move from guesswork to structured pricing and workflow visibility.
Read on for more insights from Joe and Liz on how to fix the pricing in your sign shop.
Why Pricing Signs Is So Difficult
Pricing signs requires strong decision-making under pressure.
Every job varies, with factors like:
- Different materials
- Specific labor requirements
- Unique install conditions
As Joe points out, that’s why so many shop owners ask:
- “How would you price this?”
- “What should I charge?”
There’s no universal answer.
But the real issue isn’t pricing by job complexity, it’s the lack of a system behind those decisions.
Why Most Sign Shops Underprice Jobs
One of the biggest patterns Joe and Liz see across the industry is consistent underpricing.
Underpricing usually comes down to three things:
1. Not Understanding True Costs
Many shop owners think they know their costs but don’t see the full picture.
For example:
👉 A $20/hour employee does NOT cost $20/hour.
Once you include:
- Payroll taxes
- Insurance
- Downtime
- Overhead
That number can easily double (or more).
If you’re pricing based on wages, you’re already underpricing before you start.
2. Pricing Based on Instinct
Without a structured system, pricing relies on:
- What you charged on a previous job
- What feels “right.”
- What your customers will find acceptable
Liz points out that this is why pricing questions keep popping up in sign shop communities; there’s no consistent framework guiding decisions.
3. Reacting to Customer Pressure
A customer says:
“I can get it cheaper somewhere else.”
Without confidence in your numbers, it’s easy to:
- Lower the price
- Offer a discount
- Compromise margin
But this approach creates other problems.
Why Discounting Is Usually a Pricing Problem
Joe is very direct about this:
“Do not discount your work.”
Discounts aren’t always wrong, but they’re often a symptom of something deeper.
When pricing isn’t grounded in real numbers, you:
- Don’t know what you can afford to discount
- Don’t know where your margins actually are
- Incentivize customers to negotiate every job
As Liz explains, the real issue is simple:
“If you don’t know your true cost, you don’t know your real price.”
When Discounts Make Sense
Instead of swearing off discounts entirely, Joe shares this thought:
“Be very intentional about it.”
Discounting works when:
- You’ve already broken even
- Your team has the capacity
- The discounted job won’t cause production slowdowns
Even then, there’s a risk to offering discounts.
Lower-margin work can:
- Delay higher-value jobs
- Overwork your team
- Hamper production downstream
Pricing decisions affect your entire workflow.
Why Pricing Breaks as Sign Shops Grow
What works for a small shop changes as you grow.
In the early stages:
- The owner handles most quotes
- Pricing isn’t documented
- Decisions are fast but inconsistent
As the shop scales:
- More employees need to quote
- Severalobs are running simultaneously
- Production becomes harder to track
Without a system, pricing becomes:
- Inconsistent across team members
- Harder to control
- A bottleneck for growth
The Shift: Establishing a Pricing System
The real solution is a structured system that removes confusion.
That system includes:
- Clear understanding of costs
- Consistent pricing logic
- Repeatable quoting workflows
Instead of asking:
“What should I charge?”
The question becomes:
“What does this job actually cost, and what margin do we need?”
The Real Numbers Behind Sign Pricing
Pricing isn’t only a mindset shift, it’s also grounded in real, calculable numbers. Here’s where to start.
Material Markup
Material costs alone can wipe out a job’s profitability if incorrectly calculated. A typical starting point is marking up materials around 100%, before accounting for waste, which commonly runs 10% or more even with tight nesting of letters and shapes.
That markup isn’t one-size-fits-all. Lloyd Graves, owner of Signarama Louisville, points out that different materials carry different multipliers: vinyl is often marked up around 10 times its cost, while ACM or aluminum typically runs closer to 3-4 times. These rates shift depending on your local market, but the principle holds: material markup should reflect the material, not a single flat percentage across everything you fabricate.
A Quick Way to Test Your Formula Pricing
If your shop uses formula pricing (square footage, upright inches, or per-piece rates for simpler signs), there’s a simple way to sanity-check your numbers: order a banner from a wholesale manufacturer, double the price you paid, and divide that by the square footage. Excluding design and admin fees, that should land close to a competitive unit price. If your own formula is far off from that number, it’s worth revisiting.
Labor Burden
The first step in pricing labor correctly is understanding your labor burden, not just an employee’s hourly wage, but the full cost of that employee: payroll taxes, insurance, equipment, and training included. Shop owners who calculate this for the first time are often surprised at how low their assumed hourly rate actually was.
Rates should also vary by role. An installer running a 100-foot crane costs more to field than a graphic designer working in the shop, and pricing labor as a flat rate across every role usually means underpricing the jobs that need your most specialized (and expensive) people.
Free Tool
SignTracker’s Labor Rate Calculator walks you through this calculation directly, so you’re working from your shop’s real numbers instead of a guess.
What This Looks Like Inside a Real Sign Shop
In a structured shop:
- Quotes are built and submitted with a template
- Pricing reflects real cost inputs, material markups and labor burden included
- Jobs move from quote → production → install in a defined workflow
- The team, not just the owner, can create accurate quotes
This removes:
- Vague pricing
- Constant decision fatigue
- Reliance on memory or spreadsheets
Where SignTracker Fits In
Once pricing is understood, the next challenge is consistency.
SignTracker helps sign shops:
- Standardize pricing across the team
- Create reusable quoting templates with category-specific markup control for materials, labor, and special order items
- Connect quotes directly to job tracking and production
- Maintain visibility across the entire workflow
That consistent process turns pricing into part of a complete shop system.
Final Thoughts: Pricing as a Business Decision
Joe and Liz’s conversation highlights a simple but important truth:
Getting pricing right takes both: real numbers, and the business judgment to apply them consistently. Formulas alone don’t fix a shop that’s still guessing on labor burden or discounting out of pressure. But without real numbers behind them, business instincts alone won’t protect your margins either.
When sign shops don’t understand their numbers, they underprice, over-discount, and lose control of their margins. But when pricing is structured and intentional, everything changes:
- Quotes become consistent
- Margins become predictable
- Growth becomes manageable
Start a Free SignTracker Trial
If you’re looking for a better way to manage pricing, quoting, and production in one place,
SignTracker is built specifically for sign and wrap shops.
Start a free trial or watch a demo to see how it simplifies your workflow.
Read Our SignTracker Quoting Playbook
For a guide to calculating prices, applying markups, handling labor, and presenting quotes to customers.,
read our SignTracker Quoting Playbook
Watch the Full Behind the Signs Episode
This article is based on insights from Joe Arenella and Liz on the Behind the Signs Podcast.
Watch the full episode, Stop Guessing on Price: What Every Sign Shop Owner Needs to Know About Quoting & Profit