A customer calls Thursday afternoon: they need forty machined brackets by Tuesday, and the drawing only just landed in your inbox. You can do it — but it means bumping two scheduled jobs, paying a Saturday shift, and putting expedited material on a credit card. The question is not whether you can. It is what the speed is worth, and most shops answer it badly, either waving the rush through for free or pulling a "plus 25%" out of thin air. Rush order pricing is the discipline of putting a defensible number on speed instead of guessing, so the premium actually covers what the hurry costs you.

The principle is simple: a rush is not the same part quoted with a bigger markup. It is a different job, with real extra costs and a real opportunity cost, and the surcharge should reflect both. This guide breaks down what to charge, how to structure the premium, and how to say it on the quote without losing the customer.

What a rush order actually costs you

Before you name a percentage, list what the speed genuinely consumes. A rush touches four cost buckets, and only the first is obvious.

• Overtime and shift premiums. Saturday hours, a second shift, or a machinist staying past close. If your fully burdened rate assumes straight-time labor, overtime at 1.5x materially raises the labor portion of that job. See machine shop hourly rate calculation for the base number this sits on top of.
• Expedited material and freight. Next-day stock often carries a price premium plus express shipping. Outside processes like heat treat or plating may charge their own expedite fee to jump their queue.
• Disruption to scheduled work. This is the cost shops forget. To insert the rush you push other jobs back, and those customers were promised dates too. The risk of a late penalty or a lost repeat order elsewhere is a real cost of saying yes here.
• Error risk. Compressed timelines skip the slack that catches mistakes — a rushed setup, no first-article pause, programming done under pressure. Scrap and rework get more likely exactly when you have no time to absorb them. Reducing quoting errors matters double on a rush.

Add these up for a typical rush and the "real" premium is rarely the 10% shops instinctively reach for. It is usually more.

Build the premium from the lead-time compression, not a flat percentage

A flat "rush fee" punishes the wrong jobs. Cutting a 4-week job to 3 weeks is trivial; cutting a 3-week job to 4 days is brutal. Tie the premium to how much you are compressing the schedule, not to the order value alone.

Start from your honest standard lead time — the date you would quote with no pressure, built the way manufacturing lead time estimation describes. Then measure the requested date against it:

Requested vs. standard lead time	Compression	Typical premium on the job total
At or beyond standard	None	0% (standard price)
~75% of standard lead time	Mild	10–15%
~50% of standard lead time	Moderate	20–35%
~25% of standard lead time	Severe (overtime, bumped jobs)	40–75%
Next-day / drop-everything	Extreme	75–150%+

These are working ranges, not rules. The point is that the surcharge scales with the pain, so a small nudge stays cheap and a true drop-everything emergency is priced like one.

A simple formula you can defend

When a customer asks "why so much?", a number you can decompose beats a number you pulled from memory. Build the rush price as the standard price plus the incremental costs, plus a premium for the disruption and risk:

1. Standard price — what the job costs at normal lead time, full stop.
2. Plus incremental hard costs — overtime hours × the premium portion of the rate, plus expedited material and freight, plus any outside-process expedite fees. These are receipts you can show.
3. Plus a compression premium — a percentage from the table above applied to the standard price, covering disruption risk and the opportunity cost of the schedule slot.
4. Rush price = standard + hard costs + compression premium.

Worked example. A bracket job prices at €3,200 standard. To hit the date you need 6 hours of Saturday overtime at a €30/hr premium (€180), next-day plate stock adds €140 over normal, and express freight is €90 — €410 in hard costs. The schedule is compressed to roughly half, so a 25% compression premium on €3,200 is €800. Rush price: 3,200 + 410 + 800 = €4,410, about a 38% uplift. Every euro of it traces to something real.

One caution on the math: apply the premium correctly. If you work in margin rather than markup, adding "25%" to a price is not the same as a 25% margin — see margin vs markup before you bolt a percentage onto a sell price.

When NOT to charge a premium

Speed is leverage, but a clumsy surcharge burns goodwill. Skip or soften the premium when:

• You created the delay. If your quote sat in a drawer for a week, the customer should not pay rush rates to recover time you lost.
• The "rush" costs you nothing extra. If the machine is idle, the material is in stock, and no other job moves, there is no overtime and no disruption — charging a fat premium on a job that slotted in painlessly is just opportunism, and customers remember it.
• It is a strategic account. For a customer who feeds you steady repeat work, an occasional free favor on a tight date buys loyalty worth more than one surcharge. Track it, mention it ("no rush fee this time"), and bank the goodwill.

The discipline is charging for speed when speed is genuinely expensive, and not pretending it is when it is not.

Put it on the quote as a line item

How you present the premium matters as much as the number. Burying it in an inflated unit price invites a fight over the part cost. Instead, break it out so the standard price and the rush stand side by side:

Line	Amount
40 × bracket, machined (standard)	€3,200
Expedite: overtime + expedited material/freight	€410
Rush premium (50% lead-time compression)	€800
Total — delivery Tuesday	€4,410

Now the customer sees exactly what speed buys and what it costs. It also gives them a lever: many will happily take the standard date and the standard price once the rush is priced honestly — which frees your schedule and is a perfectly good outcome. A clear expedite line is part of a complete quote; see what to include in a manufacturing quote.

Make rush pricing a policy, not a mood

The worst version of rush pricing is the one that changes with how busy or annoyed you feel that day. Write the policy down — even a single page — so every estimator quotes the same way:

• Define your standard lead time per process so "rush" is measured against a real baseline.
• Set the compression tiers and their premium ranges (your version of the table above).
• List the hard costs that always pass through at cost: overtime, expedited material, express freight, outside expedite fees.
• Decide who can waive the premium and for which accounts.

Consistency is the whole game. When two estimators quote the same rush the same way, the premium reads as policy rather than punishment, and customers stop trying to negotiate it case by case.

Pricing the rush straight from the drawing

Rush jobs are exactly when pricing discipline collapses — the clock is ticking, so the estimate gets rushed too, and that is where the margin leaks. QuoteBuddy takes the pressure off the part-cost half of the equation: upload the drawing, and it interprets the features, applies your fully burdened machine rates, material, and markup, and returns a defensible standard price in minutes. With the standard number solid, layering on a compression premium and the hard expedite costs is quick arithmetic instead of a panicked guess — even on a Thursday afternoon with a Tuesday deadline.

If your rush quotes are inconsistent because the underlying estimate takes too long, that is the part to fix first. See the plans and pricing to start a 30-day trial, or read more shop-floor guides on the blog.