Most shops carry one machine rate in their head and apply it to everything — mills, lathes, the old chucker in the corner. That single number is where turning quotes start to drift. A CNC turning hourly rate is not the same animal as a milling rate, because the machine that makes the part, the operator's share of the cycle, and the hours the spindle actually runs are all different on a lathe. Use the mill rate on a turned part and you are either too dear on the simple jobs or quietly bleeding on the unattended runs.

This guide builds a turning hourly rate from the ground up — machine cost, floor, labour, overhead, divided by real billable hours — and then shows why a Swiss-type, a fixed-headstock chucker, and a manual-load two-axis lathe each deserve a different number even when they make the same diameter.

Why turning needs its own rate, not the mill rate

The temptation is to set one shop-wide rate and move on. It feels simpler, but it hides two facts that matter on every turned part.

First, the labour content per spindle hour is wildly different across lathe types. A manual-load lathe needs an operator standing at it for almost every cycle; a bar-fed Swiss machine can run a tray of parts overnight with nobody watching. Same hour of spindle time, very different labour cost folded into it.

Second, the capital and floor cost per machine swings hard. A new sliding-headstock Swiss with a bar feeder and sub-spindle is a far larger investment than a used two-axis lathe, and it earns its keep by removing the operator — not by being cheap per hour. Average those two machines into one rate and you overprice the cheap iron and underprice the expensive automation, losing both ways. The disciplined fix is the same as the general machine shop hourly rate calculation: build a separate fully burdened rate per machine.

The five blocks of a turning hour rate

A defensible rate is the sum of five annual cost blocks, divided by the hours that machine will actually bill. Walk them in order:

1. Machine cost. Depreciation on replacement value spread over useful life, plus maintenance, spindle service, way oil, and consumables. A new Swiss lathe at €220,000 over 8 years is ~€27,500/year before maintenance; a used €45,000 two-axis lathe over 6 years is ~€7,500.
2. Tooling. Perishable inserts, collets, guide bushings, and live-tool holders prorated to the year. Turning eats inserts faster than many mills, so do not bury this in overhead.
3. Floor and facility. The machine's footprint — envelope, bar feeder length, chip conveyor, coolant tank — times your occupancy cost per square metre. A Swiss with a 3-metre bar feeder consumes real floor.
4. Power. Spindle, sub-spindle, drives, coolant and chip handling. A mid-size CNC lathe under load pulls roughly 10–25 kW; multiply by your industrial kWh rate and run hours.
5. Labour and overhead. The operator's fully burdened wage scaled by how much of the cycle they actually attend, plus that machine's share of front-office, estimating, quality, and software cost.

The formula is simply:

Hourly rate = (machine + tooling + floor + power + burdened labour + overhead allocation) ÷ annual billable hours

Every block is annual; the divisor is the part most shops get wrong, so it gets its own section.

Billable hours: the divisor that makes or breaks the rate

A lathe is on the floor 8,760 hours a year. It is paid-for far fewer. After you subtract nights and weekends (unless you run lights-out), holidays, setup that you absorb rather than bill, maintenance downtime, and the plain gaps between jobs, a single-shift lathe often bills somewhere between 1,400 and 1,900 hours a year.

That divisor is where rates quietly go wrong. Divide the same annual cost by 2,000 hours instead of 1,500 and your rate drops 25% — and now every quote off that machine is short. Use a realistic, slightly conservative billable-hours figure based on last year's actual spindle-on time, not the theoretical capacity printed in the machine brochure.

Machine cost basis	If you divide by 1,500 h	If you divide by 2,000 h
€60,000/year	€40.00/h	€30.00/h
€90,000/year	€60.00/h	€45.00/h
€120,000/year	€80.00/h	€60.00/h

The right-hand column only holds if the machine genuinely runs 2,000 billable hours — which usually means automation, not optimism.

Machine class changes everything

This is the lathe-specific heart of the matter. The same 25 mm steel shaft can be quoted off four different machines, and the burdened hourly rate that comes out of the formula above legitimately differs for each. The ranges below are typical, fully burdened, single-shift figures — treat them as illustrative, then run your own books.

Lathe type	Typical burdened rate	What drives it
Manual-load 2-axis lathe	€35–55/h	Cheap capital, but operator attends every cycle
Fixed-headstock CNC chucker	€55–80/h	Higher capital, semi-attended, re-chuck for back
Swiss sliding-headstock	€70–110/h	High capital + live tooling, but near lights-out
Twin-spindle / multi-axis	€90–140/h	Most capital, but collapses ops into one cycle

The headline rate is misleading on its own. The Swiss looks expensive per hour, but it makes a complete part in one cycle with no operator, so its cost per part on a long run is often the lowest of the four. The manual lathe looks cheap per hour and is the most expensive per part once you add load/unload labour every cycle. Always carry the rate of the specific machine the job will run on — the same point the turning quoting guide makes about matching cycle time to the machine.

Lights-out and the bar feeder: the rate cut nobody quotes

The single biggest lever on a turning rate is whether the operator is in the cycle. A bar-fed machine that runs unattended converts a manned operation into a lights-out one: the machine cost, floor, and power blocks stay the same, but the labour block per spindle hour collapses because one operator now tends three or four machines, or none overnight.

In practice this means a bar-fed Swiss can carry a labour allocation a third of a hand-fed lathe's, even at a higher headline rate. Shops that quote every lathe at the same labour content miss this entirely and leave the quantity discount — the one customers actually expect on a bar-fed run — sitting on the table. If you have the data, build two rates for an automated machine: an attended rate for short runs and short setups, and a lights-out rate for the long unattended batches that justify the machine.

A worked turning rate

Take a fixed-headstock CNC chucker, single shift, annual figures:

1. Machine — depreciation €14,000 + maintenance €4,000 = €18,000
2. Tooling — inserts, jaws, prorated = €6,000
3. Floor — 9 m² × €700/m² = €6,300
4. Power — 14 kW × 0.45 load × 1,600 h × €0.22/kWh = €2,217
5. Labour + overhead — burdened machinist €52,000 × 0.7 attendance + €9,000 overhead = €45,400
6. Total annual cost = 18,000 + 6,000 + 6,300 + 2,217 + 45,400 = €77,917
7. Billable hours — 1,600 → rate = 77,917 ÷ 1,600 = €48.70/h

Now drop labour attendance to 0.35 for a bar-fed lights-out version and labour falls to ~€18,200; total becomes €50,717 and the rate drops to €31.70/h — the same machine, a different number, because the operator left the cycle. That is the spread a single blanket rate erases. From here, the rate feeds the cycle and material cost like any CNC machined part, and the margin step on top uses the same margin-versus-markup logic.

From hourly rate to a quoted part

A correct CNC turning hourly rate is only useful if the cycle time you multiply it by is honest, and that means reading the drawing completely — bar diameter, every turned feature, the secondary operations the geometry implies, and which machine should actually run the job.

QuoteBuddy reads the technical drawing and surfaces those features automatically, then assembles material, cycle, setup, and your per-machine burdened rate into a unit price the same way every time. You set the rate per machine once; the cost engine applies the right one to the right job instead of leaning on a single number carried in someone's head.

Start a 30-day trial, set up your turning rates per machine, and run a few real turned-part drawings through it — from upload to an itemized quote PDF — to see whether the price it builds matches what you would have quoted by feel, with the margin landing exactly where you set it.