How to Start an Upholstery Business

How do you start an upholstery business from scratch?

Start by learning to strip and rebuild real pieces cleanly, register your business, get your state bedding or upholstery license, buy a walking-foot machine and a pneumatic stapler, then take three paid jobs at your real price.

Upholstery is a hands trade before it is a business, and the order matters. A beautiful cover pulled over a bad frame or dead springs comes back to you, and a job that comes back eats the profit from two more.

• Learn on real pieces first. Strip, rebuild and cover at least five items before you charge full price. A season pulling staples and sweeping somebody else's shop teaches more than any video.
• Pick your lane. Furniture reupholstery is the steadiest work. Independent auto shops bill $50 to $80 an hour and restoration specialists $100 to $150, the highest published rates in the trade. Marine carries the biggest tickets: $3,500 to $9,000 for a full boat re-trim.
• Register the business, then check your state. California requires a Custom Upholsterer license before you operate. Ohio makes reupholsterers register, label and sanitize. Virginia licenses each place of business separately.
• Buy the two machines that matter: a walking-foot sewing machine and a pneumatic fine-wire stapler with a compressor. That is $1,038 new. Everything else can wait or be bought used.
• Set up a clean, dry, lockable space. Customer furniture lives in your shop for weeks, and a leaking roof or a curious dog is a claim you may not be covered for.
• Buy general liability plus bailee's coverage. A standard property policy protects your stuff, not the client's sofa sitting in your bay.
• Build a numbered price and yardage list with photos, so a customer points at the piece that looks like theirs and sees the hours and yardage already attached to it.
• Take three paid jobs at your real price. Photograph every one before, during and after, and ask for the referral out loud while you are unloading.

How much does it cost to start an upholstery business?

A home shop opens for roughly $2,000 to $4,000, and $1,038 of that is the Sailrite and the Fasco stapler. A leased shop runs about $20,000. Rent dominates everything after that.

The cheap start is real, and it is smaller than most people guess. The two pieces of hardware that do the actual work are a Sailrite Ultrafeed LSZ-1 at $895 and a Fasco F1B 80-16 pneumatic fine-wire stapler at $142.99, which is $1,038 together. Add a small compressor, a used C.S. Osborne hand set, $540 to $960 of materials for the first piece and $686 for a year of general liability, and a garage shop opens somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000.

What separates a hobby from a shop is not the machine. It is the rack of fabric, the lease and the bailee's policy. The only published estimate for that version of the business is about $20,000 all in, and a shop paying $1,000 to $5,000 a month in rent is committed to billing every month whether the phone rings or not.

What licenses, registrations and insurance do upholsterers need?

Requirements vary by state. There is no contractor license for upholstery, but 31 states require law labels and 13 require registration on top. California charges $420 every two years. Virginia charges $25 yearly.

This trips up almost every new upholsterer. People search for a contractor license, find none, and assume they are clear. What actually binds you is your state's bedding and upholstered furniture rules. Most states that regulate it want a Uniform Registry Number printed on the law label of every piece you send out, tied to the facility that did the work.

The federal rule is separate and applies everywhere. 16 CFR Part 1640, the CPSC flammability standard that codifies California TB 117-2013, covers furniture manufactured, imported or reupholstered on or after June 25, 2021. Since June 25, 2022 the label has been required on commercial reupholstery, and it must read "Complies with U.S. CPSC requirements for upholstered furniture flammability", affixed conspicuously and permanently. That obligation lands on you, the reupholsterer, not on whoever built the frame in 1974.

On insurance, the closest published benchmark to a furniture repair shop is furniture retail: general liability averages $57 a month, $686 a year, and a Business Owner's Policy $106 a month, $1,273 a year. Neither one covers the customer's furniture sitting in your bay. That takes bailee's customers coverage, a form of inland marine insurance for goods in your care, custody and control. No premium for it is published, so get real quotes, and read the exclusions before you sign: wear and tear, vermin, employee theft, and damage you cause through faulty workmanship. Botch the job and you pay for the job.

• No national certification is required to work as an upholsterer, and none exists that a customer will ever ask for. The National Upholstery Association is the trade body, with tiers for professionals, students, educators and industry partners. Its dues sit behind the application.
• Most states switch on workers' compensation at your first employee. Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri wait until five. Florida waits until four for general work but one for construction. Texas is the only state where private employers can skip it entirely.
• If you do secondhand or estate work, check whether your state has a separate sanitizing requirement. Ohio explicitly does, and it is written into the same rule as the registration.
• No state surfaced a bond requirement for reupholstery. If a filing service tries to sell you one, ask which statute it satisfies.

What should you charge for upholstery work?

Most shops bill labor at $50 to $100 an hour and hand the customer one flat quote per piece. A full sofa averages about $1,800. Urban shops push past $125 an hour.

Say Denise brings in a three-seat sofa in plain, mid-weight fabric with sinuous springs. The plain estimate is 12 yards. Add 15 percent for cutting error, flaws and mistakes and you buy 14. At $45 a yard that is $630, plus $120 for foam, batting, dacron, staples and twine, so $750 in materials. Bill 16 hours at $75 and the quote is $1,950. Materials out, $1,200 is left to cover rent, insurance, tax and your own pay.

Now check that against the market instead of against your feelings. The average sofa goes out at $1,800. Take the same $750 of materials out and $1,050 is left for labor, which is exactly 14 hours at $75. So 14 hours is what the average price in this trade actually pays for. If a sofa takes you 22 hours, you are not delivering a premium, you are eating eight hours. Time your first five jobs with a real stopwatch before you argue with that number.

Two things move the hours hardest. An 18 inch pattern repeat adds roughly 20 percent to total yardage, and a 14 inch repeat on a 15 piece sofa adds three to five yards over the plain estimate, because every piece rounds up to the next full repeat and the fabric between is scrap. Quote from a repeat chart, never by eye. Suspension sets the rest: a sinuous spring fix is 1 to 2 hours, but a full eight-way hand-tied retie on a large sofa is 3 to 4 hours with jute or nylon twine. Price those as two different jobs or you will eat the difference every time.

How do you get your first upholstery customers?

Go where furniture already changes hands. Interior designers, antique dealers, estate sales, marinas and restaurant managers send repeat work. Claim your Google Business Profile, post before and after photos weekly, and quote within a day.

Run a $300 test before you touch paid ads. Two thousand flyers carrying one honest before and after photo cost about $180, and $120 of gas plus an afternoon walks them into two antique malls, three design studios and the marina office. One job pays it back. Marcus wants four dining chairs recovered, you quote $220 each with the set discount, so $880. Four yards at $45 plus $60 in foam and staples is $240 of materials, and twelve hours of bench time leaves $640. That is $53 an hour against a $75 target, which is what a volume discount really costs you. Give it only when the set is four or more and the whole set comes off one bolt.

The single highest-value relationship in this trade is an interior designer. Designers buy fabric at trade, hate sourcing labor, and hand out the same job ten times a year. One designer who trusts you is worth more than any ad budget. Show up with three finished pieces, a yardage chart, and a promise you will call the day a delay happens instead of the day after the deadline.

• Claim and fill your Google Business Profile with 20 real photos. Furniture work is judged with the eyes, and the photos are the sales pitch.
• Walk into every antique mall, consignment shop and estate liquidator within 30 minutes and leave a numbered price list. They get asked for an upholsterer constantly and they hate not having a name.
• Call restaurant and bar managers in January and February. Booth seats get torn all year and nobody wants to close a dining room in July to fix them.
• Post one before and after per week. Same angle, same light, no filter. The consistency is what makes people believe the work is yours.
• Quote in 24 hours with a written scope, a yardage figure and a deposit that starts the clock. Speed beats price more often than new shops expect.

What tools and equipment does an upholstery shop need?

A walking-foot machine and a pneumatic fine-wire stapler, which is $1,038 for a Sailrite and a Fasco. Then webbing stretchers, regulators, staple lifters, foam stock and a numbered price list.

Buy the machine and the stapler new, and buy everything else used. Estate auctions and closing shops are where hand tools and foam saws go cheap, and a C.S. Osborne stretcher from 1985 works exactly as well as the one Rochford ships today. Hand tool prices are the one thing no supplier publishes, which is another way of saying you find out what they are worth at the auction.

What should your first 90 days as an upholsterer look like?

Weeks 1 to 2 you register, insure and set up the shop. Weeks 3 to 6 you build a photo portfolio on cheap pieces. Weeks 7 to 12 you sell to repeat referrers.

The mistake in month one is waiting until everything is perfect to take work. The mistake in month three is still charging portfolio prices. Move the price up the week the photos get good.

What mistakes kill new upholstery businesses?

Underpricing and never recovering, skipping the COM fee on customer fabric, guessing yardage instead of using a repeat chart, taking rotten frames when desperate, and assuming your property policy covers customer furniture.

• Opening low and planning to raise prices later. If the low price never generates enough profit, that day never arrives. Customers also read a cheap upholstery quote as cheap work.
• Taking any job when you are hungry. New upholsterers accept filthy, pet-soaked, broken-frame pieces on bad terms just to have work, and those jobs consume the hours a paying customer was going to fill.
• Estimating yardage by eye. Use a repeat chart and add 10 to 20 percent over the plain estimate for pattern matching, cutting error and flaws. Being three yards short on a discontinued fabric is a job you cannot finish.
• Railroading fabric that has a nap, a direction, or a pattern that reads wrong turned 90 degrees. You end up adding seams to the sofa back you were trying to keep seamless.
• Not charging a COM fee on customer-supplied fabric. That is $10 to $15 per yard, or 15 to 20 percent of labor, and skipping it strips the entire fabric margin out of the job.
• Not tying the clock to the deposit. One shop owner told a customer up front that everything was special order. The customer sat on the estimate three months, paid the deposit, then called the next day wanting the seats back. The vinyl was still a week out in transit.
• Failing to sell reupholstery against buying new. If you cannot explain why a solid hardwood frame recovered beats a $900 store sofa, you lose every quote on price.
• Assuming your business property policy covers the customer's sofa in your shop. It does not, and bailee's coverage still excludes damage you cause through faulty workmanship.
• Ignoring the chemistry change. EPA finalized a ban on most uses of methylene chloride in April 2024. It sits in paint strippers, cleaners, adhesives and sealants, it has killed at least 88 people through acute exposure since 1980, consumer uses phase out inside a year and most commercial uses inside two, and EPA proposed extending those dates in May 2025. Read the label on your spray adhesive.

Is an upholstery business worth it in 2026?

Industry revenue works out near $106,000 per business, and a fully booked solo year bills about that. Well-run shops net 10 to 15 percent. The field is shrinking, not dying.

Run the arithmetic on one fully booked week. Five billable hours a day, five days a week, at $75 an hour is $1,875 of labor. Add $500 of materials marked up 30 percent, which the customer pays $650 for, and the week bills $2,525. Material cost out, $2,025 is yours. Subtract $250 of shop rent, $25 of insurance and $75 of staples, thread, twine and power, and you keep $1,675. Forty weeks like that bills $101,000 and leaves $67,000.

That $101,000 is the tell. Industry revenue is about $2.0 billion across roughly 18,834 businesses, which is arithmetic landing near $106,000 of revenue per business. The average shop in this trade is one person with a full calendar. Year one will not be that. Book half those weeks and you bill about $50,500 and keep about $33,500, which is just under the $36,940 median wage of an employed upholsterer. Year one you are buying the shop, not out-earning a job.

Do not confuse the two profit numbers either. The 10 to 15 percent net figure describes established businesses that pay wages out of revenue first. As a solo owner your $1,675 a week is wage and profit combined, so a shop that looks wildly more profitable than the industry average usually just has not hired anyone yet.

The margin mechanics behind all of it are simple. A 2x to 3x markup on total cost produces a 50 to 67 percent gross margin, with materials landing at 25 to 35 percent of price and labor at 20 to 30 percent. Build your hourly rate by dividing monthly overhead by billable hours, adding the wage you want, then adding 20 to 35 percent profit on top. Fabric markup of 20 to 40 percent over cost is standard, and it is the first thing new shops give away.

• Business count fell 1.1 percent last year and about 2.2 percent a year from 2019 to 2024, employment slid about 2.0 percent a year, and the occupation is projected to shrink while the national workforce grows. Every shop that closes hands its customers to somebody.
• Employed upholsterers earn a median near $36,940 a year and averaged about $40,449 in 2023. Owning the shop is what moves you past that number, not the sewing.
• What a crew changes is not documented anywhere useful. What is certain is the cost step: in most states, employee number one turns on workers' compensation.
• Commercial work smooths the year. Restaurant, hotel and office seating comes in batches with purchase orders, and it does not care whether homeowners feel wealthy this month.

How do you charge for customer-supplied fabric?

Charge a COM fee of $10 to $15 per yard, or 15 to 20 percent of the labor total. Without it you lose the 20 to 40 percent fabric margin that pays your overhead.

COM stands for customer's own material, and it is where new shops quietly lose money. On a 14 yard sofa, a $15 per yard COM fee is $210, which is roughly what the 20 to 40 percent markup on $630 of fabric would have paid you. The labor is identical, and the risk is worse: you did not pick the fabric, you cannot reorder it if you come up short, and if it is a loose weave or a directional print that fights the frame, the complaint still lands on you. Charge the fee, write the yardage requirement into the quote, and make the customer sign that a shortage is on them.

When is upholstery work busiest during the year?

October and November are the documented residential peak, ahead of holiday hosting. Marine work fills fall and winter because owners order off season. Everything else tracks local housing more than the calendar.

Be careful with seasonality in this trade, because almost none of it is actually measured. One pattern is documented: October and November peak, as people get chairs and sofas back before they host. The January and February slump is real for consumer services generally but has never been measured for upholstery specifically, and the widely repeated claim that auto and convertible work peaks in spring has no data behind it at all. Industry performance tracks local housing activity, consumer sentiment and discretionary spending, so a neighborhood full of home sales sends you work in February.