The fee comes off the lift as well
The first thing that goes missing when people work out a flip in their head is that the percentage fee applies to the higher price too. A piece sold as found at $60 pays a fee on $60. The same piece finished at $210 pays a fee on $210, so the $150 of extra sticker arrives at the bench smaller than it left the listing. Add a delivery that the as-is buyer would have handled themselves and it shrinks again.
The page shows both columns side by side for exactly this reason, and prints the lift twice: what it was on the sticker and what reached you. The gap between those two numbers is the part that never appears in the version of the sum done in the van on the way home.
Dividing by the hours is the whole test
Once the lift is net of everything and the materials are taken off, dividing by the hands-on hours gives a rate, and the rate is what makes different pieces comparable. A $40 gain on two hours and a $150 gain on twelve are not the same decision even though the second is a bigger number, and the first is the one that scales, because there are more small pieces in the world than large ones.
Drying time deliberately does not count as hours. It costs calendar and it costs space, both of which show up on the holding side rather than the labour side, and counting it here would make every finish with a long cure look like poor work.
The pieces that do not come out
Every bench has them: the veneer that lifts, the stain that goes blotchy, the repair that shows. The failure share field prices that honestly — those pieces still consumed the materials and still take the hours, and they end up selling at something close to the as-is price. Set it to zero if you want the arithmetic for a piece you are certain about, but a shop-wide figure of zero is not a figure, it is an omission.
The other thing the field does is show how sensitive the hourly rate is to it. Moving the share up by a few points does not move the answer a few points, because the cost of a failure includes the materials and the hours that produced nothing.
Related pages
The buy price ceiling is where the as-is number belongs on the buying side. Material cost per unit is the right way to turn part-used tins and sheets into a per-piece figure. Hourly value gives you the rate to compare against, and holding cost covers the weeks a finished piece then spends waiting for a buyer.
Questions people ask
Should drying and curing time count as hours?
No, and the field says hands-on for that reason. A finish that needs a week between coats does not occupy you for a week, it occupies a corner of the workshop, and that is a holding cost rather than a labour cost. Counting it as labour would make slow finishes look uneconomic when what they actually are is space-hungry. If the space genuinely constrains you, price it on the holding side instead, where a per-month figure belongs.
How do I price materials that came out of a can I already had?
By what this piece consumed rather than by what the container cost. Half a quart of finish from a quart tin is half the tin price, a third of a sheet of abrasive is a third of the pack price, and hardware is whatever the hardware cost. The point is to make pieces comparable to each other, and charging a whole tin to the first piece and nothing to the next five makes that impossible. The material cost per unit calculator on this site does this properly for a batch.
Why does a higher fee change the hourly rate so much?
Because the fee is charged on the finished price, which is the largest number in the calculation, while the materials and the hours stay fixed. Every extra dollar of sticker arrives at the bench reduced by the fee percentage, so the entire lift is taxed on its way to you, not just the profit. The table at the bottom shows this directly: the finished prices step evenly and the hourly column does not, because the same percentage is being taken out of each step.
What failure share should I use?
Your own, from pieces you have already done. Count how many came out well enough to carry the finished price and how many ended up going out at roughly what you paid, and use that ratio. There is no benchmark for this and there should not be — it depends entirely on what you buy, what you attempt and how long you have been doing it. What matters more than the exact number is that it is not zero, because a zero there quietly assumes a bench nobody has.
Is refinishing an old piece safe to do at home?
That is not a question this page answers and the calculator has no view on it. Old finishes and old paint can contain materials that are hazardous when sanded, scraped or heated, stripping products and solvents have their own handling requirements, and rags carrying an oil finish have started fires in empty workshops. The instructions that matter are on the product data sheet for the specific material and from the supplier who sells it, and where old paint is involved the relevant agency has its own guidance. Nothing here is a procedure.