The hourly rate, with sources rather than guesses
We do not publish an hourly rate, so the numbers below are other people's, named so you can check them.
- Get It Made, a UK manufacturing service, cites around £30 per hour as a UK benchmark, against £10 to £21 per hour in China.
- Parallel Precision, an ISO 9001 machining subcontractor in Gloucestershire, reports from benchmarking that UK ISO 9001 accredited competitors typically charge £50 to £65 per hour for 3-axis milling, while publishing its own rates from about £26 per hour.
- Rotec Aerospace publishes a cost guide in the same territory at the entry end of that range.
Notice what the spread is telling you. The same country, the same process, and published figures that differ by a factor of two. A 5-axis machine costs several times what a 3-axis machine costs and its hour is priced accordingly. Accreditation, inspection capability and region all move the number. For context, Payscale puts an early-career UK CNC machinist at £11.55 per hour, so the rate you pay is mostly machine, overhead and capability rather than wages.
The conclusion is not "find the £26 shop". It is that the hourly rate cannot be compared between shops without knowing what each includes, and it is a weak predictor of what your part will cost. Here is what actually sets the price.
The five inputs that set a part price
| Input | What drives it | How to reduce it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Material | Grade, stock size and current mill prices; exotic alloys and large billets multiply it | Standard grades, stock sizes, and design that wastes less of the billet |
| 2. Setup and programming | Fixed hours before the first chip: CAM programming, fixturing, first-off proving | Batches. The same setup spread over 20 parts costs a twentieth per part |
| 3. Cycle time | Geometry, number of setups per part, tolerance and surface finish demanded | Tolerance only what matters; avoid features that force a fourth setup |
| 4. Finishing and treatment | Anodising, plating, painting, heat treatment; external processors with minimum lot charges | Batch to meet minimum lots; ask whether the spec needs the treatment at all |
| 5. Inspection and documentation | FAIR, material certificates, CMM reports; each is real labour | Specify what you need at RFQ, not after the price is agreed |
The pattern across all five: quantity and specification decide more than the rate does. A part with twenty minutes of cutting can still carry hours of setup, a minimum lot charge at the anodiser, and an inspection report, which is why a one-off is never twenty minutes times an hourly rate.
Quantity changes the price more than negotiation ever will
Setup and programming are paid once per batch. On a one-off they land on a single part. Across twenty parts they nearly vanish from the unit price. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why the cheapest thing you can do is often to order the quantity you will actually use this year rather than this month.
Two practical moves follow. Ask for quantity-break pricing, 1, 5, 20, 50, in the RFQ, so you see the curve before you decide. And put the breaks in the RFQ rather than the purchase order, a point we make in the quote turnaround guide, because a supplier who knows the real annual usage quotes the job differently.
The same logic is why remanufactured obsolete parts are bought as small batches: the one-time cost spreads, and the shelf spares are nearly free by comparison.
Tolerance is a price dial, and it turns fast
A commonly quoted standard tolerance for machined features is ±0.127 mm, the ±0.005 inch default cited by Protolabs and by machining references such as WayKen. Precision work runs to ±0.025 mm and beyond. The difference on the drawing is one digit. The difference in the shop is slower cutting, more frequent tool checks, tighter process control and more inspection time, on every feature you tighten.
The expensive habit is a title-block tolerance applied to the whole drawing, which quietly makes every non-critical face a precision face. Tolerance the features that seal, locate or rotate, and let the rest live at standard. A good supplier will query over-toleranced drawings at the DFM review stage; that conversation routinely takes real money off a quote before any negotiation starts.
The China question, answered honestly
The hourly-rate gap is real: £10 to £21 against roughly £30 and up, on Get It Made's figures. For stable, high-volume, well-documented parts with forgiving tolerances, that gap survives freight and duty, which is why so much volume work went east.
What the rate comparison hides is everything that scales with distance. Freight and duty on every batch. Minimum order quantities that turn a 50-part need into a 500-part buy. A reject cycle measured in weeks and time zones instead of a van to Manchester. Quality that must be inspected on arrival because recourse is hard. For low-volume, tight-tolerance, urgent or frequently-revised parts, the UK price is very often the lower total cost, and for regulated sectors the traceability requirement settles the question by itself.
Price the landed part and the failure case, not the hour. A fuller UK-versus-overseas comparison is coming later in this series.
How to get a price you can actually trust
Three habits separate buyers who get reliable prices from buyers who get surprises.
Send a complete RFQ pack. Drawing with revision, CAD file, material and finish spec, quantity breaks, certification requirements, delivery expectation. Anything missing gets priced as risk or comes back as a question, and either way you pay in money or days.
Compare scope before price. A quote far below the others usually excludes something: the material grade actually specified, the certificates, the finishing, or the delivery term. Our buyer guide series covers this pattern at length, because it is the single most common way a cheap quote becomes an expensive part.
Check validity and surcharge terms. Metal prices move, and quotes have shelf lives. Ask how long the price holds and what triggers a surcharge, before you win the argument on price and lose it on the reorder.
Where TrueNorth stands on price
TrueNorth Engineering coordinates machining, fabrication, finishing and inspection through a vetted UK network, and we charge a coordination margin for owning the handovers and the defect risk. We would rather say that plainly than hide it in an hourly rate.
What we commit to instead of a rate card: a free DFM review before every quote, which is where over-toleranced and over-specified features get caught. Quotes inside 48 hours with quantity breaks when you ask for them. Prices valid 14 days and held firm unless raw material moves more than 10 percent. Dimensional inspection and a traceability pack on every order, already in the price rather than an extra. And a quarterly part price report on active accounts, so reorder prices move in the open rather than by surprise.
If your part is a fit for a £26-per-hour direct relationship with a single shop, that route exists and we said so in our comparison of the seven ways to buy machined parts. Where multi-process parts, documentation and delivery risk are the real cost, the quote we send is the whole price of the outcome.