Free tool
Unpaid tattoo studio hours planner
Add up your reply time, drawing time and studio admin to see how much of the working week you are genuinely paid to be tattooing.
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Tattoo deposit and no-show calculator
Put in your inquiry volume, booking rate and deposit amount to see what empty chair time costs and how much of it your deposit policy brings back.
A no-show is not one lost hour. It is the drawing time you already put in, the chair hour nobody else could take at short notice, and the supplies you set out on the tray. Deposits are meant to cover that, and they usually cover a smaller share of it than artists assume.
This calculator turns your own numbers into that share. Enter how many inquiries you get a month, how many reach the chair, what a session is worth, how often clients fail to show, and how much of the deposit you actually keep when they do not.
Your result
Booked sessions a month
15.0
How many inquiries reach your chair with a date attached.
Chair value lost to no-shows
$1,755
The session value sitting behind every booked slot that empties.
Value held back by deposits
$162
What forfeited deposits return against that lost chair time.
Share of the loss your deposit covers
9.2%
How much of the empty chair cost the current deposit rule offsets.
These figures assume the lost chair time could not be refilled on short notice.
Why the recovered share is usually low
Deposits are normally set at what feels reasonable to ask a stranger for, not at what an empty session costs. On a piece worth several hundred dollars in chair time, a deposit sized for comfort covers only a slice, and that slice shrinks again every time you roll a deposit forward instead of keeping it.
Raising the amount is one answer. The other is cutting how many bookings reach the calendar without real intent, which is what a proper screening step does. Both move the same figure, and screening is usually the easier one to change this month.
What to do with the number once you have it
Compare the lost chair value against a month of studio overhead. If the loss is running close to your booth rent, the deposit rule is the cheapest thing in the studio to fix, and fixing it means written terms that survive a chargeback rather than a verbal understanding at the counter.
Then run it again with a larger deposit and a lower no-show rate and watch the gap close. That second figure is your target, and it tells you whether to spend the next free evening rewriting terms or tightening how inquiries get screened before they are given a date.
Questions about this calculator
What counts as a no-show here?
Any booked session that did not happen and whose chair time you could not resell in time. A cancellation with two weeks of notice that you refilled is not a loss. A cancellation the night before almost always is.
Should I include late cancels that rescheduled?
Only if the original slot went unused. If the client moved to a date you would otherwise have sold to somebody else, count it. If your calendar had room that week anyway, leave it out of the number.
Is a bigger deposit always the answer?
Not on its own. A deposit large enough to sting will cost you some genuine bookings, and one taken through the wrong payment channel is hard to keep in a dispute. Screening and clear written terms usually do more than the amount alone.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The custom tattoo intake sheet template
A one page sheet you fill in for every custom inquiry, so nothing about size, placement, budget or terms is still vague when you start drawing.
That figure is empty chair time
The number on this page is what an unscoped booking costs once drawing hours, a set out tray and a slot nobody could refill are counted. StencilIntake asks for the reference set, the placement photo, the size and the deposit against written terms before a stencil is ever drawn, which is where that number actually moves. Ask for a demo and we will run it against one of your own commissions.