Free tool
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.
Free tool, no sign up
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.
Custom tattooing hides a second job inside the first one. Every booked piece carries message threads, sketching, revisions and stencil prep, and the studio itself carries sterilization logs, aftercare sheets and permit paperwork that nobody ever bills for.
This planner adds those hours together and shows what share of your week is needle time. Most artists land well below the number they expected, and it explains why an hourly rate that looks healthy on paper still leaves the month feeling tight.
Your result
Hours a week on inquiry replies
2.2
Time spent on messages before any of them becomes a booking.
Total unpaid hours a week
18.8
Reply time, drawing time and studio admin added together.
Share of the week that is paid chair time
Chair hours as a share of everything the studio asks of you.
Unpaid hours behind each piece
3.8
What one custom piece costs you outside the chair.
Chair hours here mean needle time you charge for, not hours spent at the shop.
Reply time is the hour nobody counts
Nine minutes on a message thread feels like nothing. Fifteen threads a week is over two hours, and most of those threads never reach the chair at all. That is an unpaid shift spread thin enough across the week that it never looks like a problem worth solving.
Screening moves that work to the front and onto the client. When the reference set, the placement photo, the size in inches and the budget range arrive before you reply, the threads that remain are shorter and a far greater share of them turn into booked sessions.
Turning unpaid hours into a rate
Divide your monthly costs by paid chair hours rather than by hours worked and the true cost per chair hour climbs sharply. That is the number your hourly rate has to clear, and it is why two artists charging the same rate can finish the month in very different positions.
Use the unpaid hours behind each piece as a check on quoting. If a piece carries close to four hours outside the chair, a session priced as though it were pure needle time is a session you are partly donating to the client.
Questions about this calculator
Do consultations count as reply time or chair time?
Count a scheduled consultation in admin hours when it is unpaid, and in chair hours only when you charge for it. Many studios credit a paid consultation against the first session, which makes it paid time either way.
What if my drawing time varies a lot by piece?
Use an average across a normal month, then run it again using your longest pieces to see the worst case. Large script, portrait and cover up work usually sit well above a small blackwork average.
How do I bring the unpaid share down?
Cut reply time first, because it is the least skilled hour in your week. Standard intake questions, a written price band and a deposit step remove most of the back and forth before it ever starts.
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.