Most shops carry one waste number in their head and apply it to everything. It is usually 10%, it is usually applied to the whole job, and it is usually wrong in both respects — because waste is not a property of the job, it is a property of the material and the parts you are cutting from it.
Waste belongs on materials, not on the price
Adding 10% to the finished quote and adding 10% to the material cost are different numbers, and only one of them is honest. Waste is timber you bought and did not sell. It has no relationship to your labour, your overhead or your margin, so applying it after those have been added inflates all three.
The order
materials + waste → add labour → add overhead → apply margin. Waste enters at the first step, on the material lines only.
Typical ranges by material
These are working ranges, not standards. Your own completed jobs are better evidence than any table, which is exactly why the number is worth recording rather than assuming.
| Material | Typical waste |
|---|---|
| Sheet goods, large parts | 8–12% |
| Sheet goods, many small parts | 15–25% |
| Dimensioned solid stock | 10–15% |
| Rough-sawn stock, straight-line ripped | 20–30% |
| Rough stock with defecting or figure matching | 30%+ |
| Veneer and edge banding | 10–20% |
Why small parts waste more
A sheet cut into four large panels wastes the perimeter trim and little else. The same sheet cut into thirty small components wastes the trim, the kerf on every one of the cuts between them, and whatever geometry is left when the last part will not fit. Kerf alone is not negligible: a 3.2mm blade across forty cuts removes more than 128mm of material — over a tenth of a metre of sheet, before any offcut is counted.
This is why a nesting layout is worth doing before quoting rather than after. The difference between a good and a careless layout on the same parts is routinely several percent of the material bill, and on sheet goods that is real money.
Offcuts change the number
Waste assumes the leftover is thrown away. If you keep usable offcuts and actually check the rack before ordering, some of that material is not waste at all — it is stock you have already paid for. Shops that track offcuts honestly tend to find their effective waste on sheet goods drops several points, because the second job absorbs what the first one left.
The catch is that an untracked offcut pile is not an asset. If you cannot answer "do I already own a piece 600 by 400?" in a few seconds, you will buy a new sheet, and the pile becomes storage rather than savings.
Measure yours instead of guessing
The number that matters is your own. Record what you bought against what the finished job consumed, on a handful of jobs, and the gap is your real waste factor for that kind of work. Most shops discover two things: it is higher than the figure they had been quoting, and it varies far more by job type than they expected.
- 01Record the material you bought for a job, by sheet or board foot.
- 02Record what the finished piece actually contains.
- 03Subtract any offcut you genuinely returned to stock and later used.
- 04The remainder, divided by what you bought, is your waste for that job type.
Do that five times and you will have a defensible number per material — which is worth considerably more than a rule of thumb, because you can show a customer where it came from.