Ask a potter how they price a mug and most will say something like "clay cost times three." That formula ignores the two biggest costs in ceramics: kiln time and your own hours at the wheel. Both are real, both are significant, and both are almost always left out of the price.
This guide breaks down every cost in a piece of handmade pottery so you can price with actual numbers instead of a rough multiplier.
Stoneware clay typically runs £1.20–£1.80 per kg bought in 12.5kg bags; buying by the pallet brings this down. A standard mug uses 350–450g of clay before trimming, and a mid-size bowl 600–900g. Budget for 10–15% wastage from trimming, wedging and the odd piece that doesn't survive throwing.
Commercial glaze costs £8–£18 per litre depending on finish, and a dipped mug uses roughly 80–120ml. Mixed-from-raw-materials glazes are cheaper per litre but carry set-up and testing costs that only pay off at volume. For a small studio, £0.70–£1.50 in glaze per piece is a realistic range.
A bisque firing to 1000°C and a glaze firing to 1200–1280°C together use a significant amount of electricity — commonly £15–£35 per firing for a mid-size electric kiln, depending on your kiln's capacity and local electricity rates. A full kiln load might hold 25–40 mugs, which puts firing cost at roughly £0.80–£1.40 per piece if the kiln is genuinely full. A half-empty kiln firing the same volume of clay costs the same in electricity — so firing cost per piece can easily double if you're not batching efficiently.
A skilled potter can throw a simple mug in 5–8 minutes, but that's only the throwing stage. Add trimming (3–5 minutes once leather-hard), handle pulling and attaching for a mug (3–5 minutes), glazing (2–4 minutes), and loading/unloading the kiln allocated across a batch. Realistically, a mug takes 20–30 minutes of your total active time from wet clay to glazed and fired. At a modest studio wage of £15/hour, that's £5–£7.50 in labour — usually more than the clay, glaze and firing combined.
Wheel maintenance, glaze testing materials, studio rent or a share of home utilities, breakages during firing (a genuine cost — expect 3–8% loss even with a well-tuned kiln), and packaging for a fragile product all add up. A reasonable overhead allocation is £1.50–£3.00 per piece for a small home studio.
| Cost Element | Simple Mug | Decorated / Altered Mug |
|---|---|---|
| Clay (400g + wastage) | £0.65 | £0.80 |
| Glaze | £0.90 | £1.40 |
| Kiln firing (full load) | £1.00 | £1.00 |
| Labour (25 min @ £15/hr) | £6.25 | £10.00 |
| Overhead & breakage allowance | £2.00 | £2.00 |
| Total cost | £10.80 | £15.20 |
| Retail price (40% margin) | £18.00 | £25.33 |
A simple thrown mug needs to sell for around £18 to leave a proper margin once your time is counted. That number surprises a lot of potters who have been selling mugs for £10–£12 — at that price, most of the "profit" is actually unpaid labour.
Kiln cost per piece is the one lever you control most directly: it's fixed per firing regardless of load size, so a full kiln is dramatically cheaper per piece than a half-full one. Planning production around kiln capacity — rather than firing whenever a handful of pieces are ready — is one of the highest-leverage changes a small pottery business can make.
Tracking this precisely, batch by batch, rather than estimating a flat "kiln fee," is the difference between knowing your actual margin per piece and guessing at it.
Calculates exactly what to charge — clay cost, kiln firing, your time, overhead and gallery commission — for every piece you make. Instant download, works offline.
See PotteryPrice Pro — £15 →Know which channel a piece is destined for before you set its price — a number that works at a craft fair often loses money on consignment without adjustment.