What to charge for custom baking

Last updated 19 August 2026 · Practical guidance, not accounting advice. The arithmetic here is yours to check against your own costs.

Cost the ingredients first, and cost them exactly

The sum is pack price divided by pack size, times the amount you used. A $12 bag holding 2 kg of flour is 0.6 cents a gram, so the 500 g in your cake is $3.00. Do that for every line, including the ones that feel too small to bother with. Vanilla, gel colour and good chocolate are exactly the ingredients people wave off, and they're the expensive ones per gram.

One trap worth naming, because it quietly produces wrong numbers: you can't convert cups into grams. Not because the arithmetic is hard, but because it isn't arithmetic. A cup of flour and a cup of honey differ by more than a factor of two, so a cup is a question about the substance, not about the unit. If your bag is priced by weight, measure by weight. Anything that offers to convert one to the other for you is guessing, and a guess in the ingredient line becomes a confident wrong price at the other end.

"Three times ingredients" means three times, not plus three times

This sounds pedantic and it costs people real money. Markup means the multiplier to most bakers and the added portion to most accountants, and the two differ by exactly one times your cost. If your ingredients are $12, "3x" is $36 and "plus 300%" is $48. Pick whichever you like, but know which one you're saying, because copying a number off someone else's post without knowing which they meant is a third of your price either way.

What the multiplier is actually covering

It isn't profit. The gap between ingredients and price has to pay for your time, the oven, the box, the board, the ribbon, the parchment, the electricity, the drive, the trip to the shop, and the one that failed and went in the bin. Profit is whatever's left after all of that.

This is why you shouldn't charge labour and then multiply. If you add up your hours, add overhead, and then apply a 3x markup on top, you've counted your time twice and priced yourself out of a job you'd otherwise have got. Pick one method. The multiplier is the simpler one and it's what most bakers already use.

The sum most bakers skip

Here's the one that changes minds. Take the price, subtract the ingredients, and divide by the hours.

A two-tier birthday cake: $12 in ingredients, priced at 4x, so $48. That leaves $36. If the cake took you six hours across shopping, baking, chilling, ganaching and decorating, you earned $6 an hour, and that's before the box and the electricity. Most people doing this have never done that division, and it's the whole reason the niche undercharges.

Now run it backwards, which is the useful direction. If you want $25 an hour, that cake needs to be $12 plus six hours of your time, so $162. That's thirteen and a half times ingredients. Not four.

So is the rule of thumb wrong?

Not wrong. Just built for a different product. A multiplier works when ingredients are a big share of the cost and time is a small one: a loaf, a tray of cookies, a dozen cupcakes you can make on autopilot. Custom decorated work is the reverse, cheap ingredients and enormous time, and a multiplier on cheap ingredients gives you a cheap price no matter how big you make the multiple.

Which leads somewhere uncomfortable and worth saying plainly: sometimes the number the hourly sum gives you is more than your market will pay. That's real information, not a reason to ignore it. It means that product, at that speed, in that area, doesn't support the wage you want. Your options are to get faster at it, to simplify the design, to sell a different thing, or to decide you're doing that one for love. What it isn't is a reason to keep quietly funding someone else's party out of your own time.

The things that get left out

• Packaging. Boxes, boards, dowels, ribbon, cellophane, cake drums. Per cake it's small, per year it isn't.
• The shopping trip. An hour and a tank of petrol is an hour and a tank of petrol whether or not you counted it.
• Failures. The buttercream that split, the tier that slid. If one in ten goes wrong, every other cake is carrying a tenth of one.
• Delivery. Especially a tiered cake, which means slow driving and a passenger footwell, and often two hours gone.
• Consultation and design time. The forty messages before the order. That's work, and it's the part a form does instead of you.

Raising a price on people you already have

Almost everybody's first price is too low, because the first customers were friends and the first cakes were practice. Putting it up is a separate skill and mostly a nerve problem rather than a numbers one. The short version: change the price for new inquiries first rather than announcing an increase, honour anything already quoted, and don't apologise in the message. A price list that arrives without a defence attached rarely gets argued with.