Welding Cost Calculator

Four direct buckets: filler metal, labor, shielding gas and electricity. Labor usually dominates the total, so on most jobs a faster technique or less rework saves more money than shaving the price of the electrode.

You pay for the whole electrode, but only the deposited fraction becomes weld metal. Spatter, slag, fume and stub loss all consume filler you never see in the joint, so purchased weight equals deposited weight divided by efficiency. At 0.9 efficiency, depositing 2 lb means buying about 2.22 lb.

Solid MIG wire often sits near 0.90 to 0.95, flux-cored around 0.80 to 0.90, and stick electrodes about 0.60 to 0.70 once stub loss is counted. The 0.9 default is a fair mid value; set it to match your process for a truer filler figure.

No. Leave a gas or power pair blank and that line counts as zero, which is exactly right for stick welding that uses no shielding gas or for a quick estimate where energy cost is negligible.

Multiply your flow rate in cubic feet per hour by the arc-on time in hours. A 35 cfh flow running for a total of about 1.4 arc hours uses roughly 50 cubic feet, which you then enter with your gas price per cubic foot.

No. It stops at filler, labor, gas and power. Contact tips, nozzles, grinding discs, machine depreciation, shop overhead and profit margin are not included, so add them before quoting a customer price.

Indirectly. Work out the deposited filler weight and labor hours for a known length of weld, run the calculator, then divide the total by that length. The tool itself totals a single job rather than a per-foot rate.

It is currency-neutral: the dollar sign is display only, so the numbers work for any currency as long as you stay consistent. Weight is in pounds, gas in cubic feet and energy in kilowatt-hours.

Yes. All arithmetic runs in your browser with no server call, so your rates, weights and pricing never leave your device.