What are labour standards and rate cards?
A labour standard is a time allowance for a specific operation; a rate card is the cost or price per hour, or per operation, by work centre. Together they turn a feature or operation count into hours and a price. The value of a quoting tool here is applying them the same way every time, not owning or inventing the numbers.
Key facts
- Category
- Choosing a tool
- Applies to
- Sheet metal and fabrication
- Owned by
- The shop, always; never invented or overridden
- Last verified
- August 28, 2026
What is a labour standard, and what is a rate card?
A labour standard is a time allowance for a specific operation: setup time for a bend, run time per hole, wiring time per terminated point. A rate card is a cost or price per hour, or per operation, broken out by work centre or process. A quote's labour cost is the standard's time multiplied by the rate card's rate, repeated across every operation on the job.
Why does consistent application matter more than the specific numbers?
Because the actual cost of manual estimating is not usually that the numbers are wrong, it is that two estimators pricing the same job reach different answers by applying the same standards slightly differently, or forgetting one. A quoting tool's job is to remove that variance: the same feature count, run through the same standards, should produce the same hours regardless of who submitted the RFQ.
How does a tool apply standards without flattening real differences?
By matching the specific operation, feature and quantity on the job to the standard that actually applies to it, rather than reaching for one blanket per-part number. Every computed hour should show its working, which standard was applied, to which feature, at what rate, so a reviewer can check it the same way they would check their own spreadsheet.
Who owns the numbers?
The shop, always. A quoting tool applies labour standards and rate cards; it does not set them, invent them, or override them with a vendor's own assumption about what an operation should take. Change the shop's rate card and every future quote reflects the change immediately.
AI Summary
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Sheet metal and fabrication
Your run rates, applied consistently to what a drawing says.
ERP integrations
How a finished quote reaches the system a shop already runs, and what is not claimed about it.
Solutions
Company
customiser