How Much Does DTG Printing Cost Per Shirt? 2026 Guide

DTG printing costs roughly $5 to $20 per shirt for most small-business orders, and unlike screen printing, that price barely moves whether you order 5 shirts or 50. There are no screens to burn and no per-color setup, so a full-color photo costs the same as a one-color logo. The trade-off is that DTG never gets dramatically cheaper in bulk the way screen printing does. This guide breaks down the real cost drivers, what changes the number on your quote, and exactly when DTG is the cheapest way to put your logo on a shirt.

One thing up front: exact direct-to-garment pricing depends on your garment, your design, and your quantity, so the ranges below are honest published estimates, not a fixed price list. For your actual number, request a quote with your logo and rough quantities. Arklavo prints DTG in-house with no minimums, so the figures here reflect how we actually quote small orders.

What does DTG printing cost per shirt?

DTG printing cost per shirt is the all-in price of a single direct-to-garment printed shirt, typically $5 to $20, covering the blank garment, the ink, pretreatment on dark fabrics, and labor. Because the process is digital, there are no screen fees and no per-color charges, so the price is driven by the garment, the print size, the shirt color, and the quantity rather than the number of colors in your art.

That flat curve is the whole story with direct-to-garment. A screen printer has to recover the cost of burning screens, which is why a small screen-print order feels so expensive per shirt and a huge one feels cheap. The digital method carries none of that overhead, so the per-shirt cost on five shirts looks a lot like the per-shirt cost on fifty. You pay close to the same rate either way, which is great news for a small team and less exciting for someone ordering a thousand.

The published ranges back this up. Printful, one of the largest print-on-demand fulfillers, lists direct-to-garment fulfillment in the single-digit dollars per shirt before retail markup, with the printed garment landing in the low double digits at retail depending on the blank.¹ Decoration guides put a finished print anywhere from about $5 on a basic light tee to $20 or more on a premium dark garment with a large front-and-back print.³ Your quote depends on which of those levers you pull, so let's walk through them.

DTG cost per shirt by quantity

DTG holds a nearly flat per-shirt cost across quantities because there is no setup to amortize, so the price you pay on a handful of shirts is close to the price on a few dozen. Screen printing does the opposite: it starts high and falls fast as volume climbs. That single difference is what makes the digital method the value pick for small orders.

Estimated finished-shirt ranges drawn from published decoration-industry guides, not retail quotes.^3,1 Garment choice, shirt color, and print size move every row. Your quote will reflect your exact order.

Read the table by your own order, not the average. The reason the price stays roughly flat is that the bulk of its cost is the blank shirt and the per-print labor, both of which scale one-for-one with quantity. There is no fixed fee to spread thinner over more pieces. Screen printing, by contrast, is mostly setup on a small run, so going from 12 to 250 shirts spreads those screen fees across far more garments and the per-shirt number drops steeply.

The practical line: under a couple dozen shirts, direct-to-garment almost always quotes cheaper, especially on full-color art. Through the middle, the two methods trade blows and the color count tips it. Once you are ordering well into the hundreds of a simple design, screen printing's bulk economics are hard for the digital method to match. We dig into exactly where that crossover sits a little further down.

Why dark garments cost more with DTG

Dark shirts cost more to print with DTG because the printer has to lay down a white ink underbase and the garment has to be pretreated first, which adds ink, a heat-curing step, and labor to every single piece. On a white shirt, none of that is needed, so light garments are consistently the cheapest option.

Here is what actually happens. The inks are semi-transparent, so colors printed straight onto a black shirt would look muddy and dim. To fix that, the printer first prints a layer of white ink as a base, then prints the color design on top, the same way an artist primes a dark canvas before painting. That white underbase uses a meaningful amount of ink, and white ink is the most expensive ink in the machine.³

Pretreatment is the second cost. Before a dark shirt can take white ink, it gets sprayed with a pretreatment fluid that lets the white bond to the fibers and stay bright. The shirt then has to be heat-pressed to cure the pretreatment before printing even starts. That is an extra fluid cost plus an extra labor step on top of the underbase, and it is why a black tee can cost a few dollars more than the identical white tee with the identical design.

For a buyer, the takeaway is simple. If your budget is tight and your design works on a light background, a white, ash, or light-heather shirt is the cheapest way to run the print. If your brand needs black or navy, that is completely fine, just expect the quote to run a little higher, and know that the extra cost buys you bright, full-color art that holds up on a dark garment. When you compare apples to apples, ask for both a light and a dark garment price so you can see the difference for yourself.

DTG vs screen printing: where the cost crossover happens

Direct-to-garment is the cheaper method on small, colorful runs, and screen printing takes over once the order grows large enough to spread its setup fees thin, with the crossover commonly landing somewhere in the low hundreds of shirts.³ The exact tipping point moves with your color count: more colors push it later, simpler art pulls it earlier.

The mechanics are the mirror image of each other. Screen printing charges a setup fee per color, often $15 to $25 a screen, before a single shirt runs.² On a small order those fees dominate the price. On a big order they vanish into the per-shirt math and the press runs cheaply all day. The digital method has zero setup, so it starts cheap and simply stays there. Plot both on a graph and the lines cross: to the left, it is lower; to the right, screen printing is lower.

Color count is the lever that shifts the crossover. Because screen printing pays for one screen per color, a four-color logo carries four times the setup of a one-color logo, which pushes its break-even point much higher up the quantity scale. The digital method does not care how many colors are in your file, so for full-color or photographic art the crossover sits considerably later, sometimes well past a few hundred shirts. For a single-color mark, screen printing catches up sooner. This is the same trade-off we map in our DTF vs screen printing guide, since DTF and DTG share the no-setup, unlimited-color advantage.

If you are weighing the two digital methods against each other rather than against screens, our DTG vs DTF printing comparison covers the feel and fabric differences, and our what is DTG printing explainer walks through how the process works step by step. For a broader look at what a custom shirt should cost across every method, see our custom t-shirt pricing guide.

What makes DTG cheaper: the levers you control

You can lower a DTG quote by choosing a light garment, keeping the print area reasonable, picking an affordable blank, and printing one location instead of two, none of which sacrifice quality. The colors in your art are free, so the savings come from the physical choices around the print, not from simplifying the design.

Garment color. As covered above, a light shirt skips the white underbase and pretreatment entirely. If your design reads well on white, ash, or a light heather, that is the single biggest lever on the quote.

Print size and placement. A small left-chest logo uses far less ink than a full-front graphic that fills the shirt. If you do not need a huge print, a left-chest or pocket-size mark cuts ink cost on every piece. Printing one location instead of front-and-back roughly halves the print labor too.

Blank choice. The shirt itself is a big chunk of the cost. A standard cotton tee costs less to start than a premium ringspun or a fashion blank, so if budget leads, a value blank brings the whole number down. If feel leads, spend there knowingly. Our sizing guides like the Gildan size chart help you lock the right blank and sizes before you order.

No minimum, no waste. The quiet cost-saver with direct-to-garment is that you do not have to over-order to hit a minimum. With screen printing's 24-to-72-piece floors, a small team often buys shirts it does not need just to qualify. The digital method lets you order exactly what you need, even one piece to approve the logo first, so you are never paying for inventory that sits in a closet. Across our recent orders, full-color printing edges ahead for tees while embroidery leads on polos and caps, and the no-minimum model is a big reason small teams reach for print first.

How Arklavo prices DTG printing

Arklavo prices DTG as an all-in number per shirt, blank plus print, with no setup fee, no per-color charge, and no minimum order, so a single full-color tee is quoted the same fair way as a fifty-piece team run. We print it in-house alongside embroidery and heat press, which means we quote the method that actually fits your order instead of forcing everything through one machine.

Our pricing reflects the levers above. A light garment with a left-chest logo sits at the low end of the range; a dark premium blank with a large full-color front print sits at the high end. There is no hidden art fee for adding colors, because the process does not charge for them. The honest part is that we will not pretend it is cheapest for every order. If you are ordering a few hundred shirts of a one-color design, we will tell you screen printing or DTF would price lower and point you the right way.

The ordering model is built for small teams. There are no minimums, so you can order a single piece to check the logo size and shirt color before committing to a run. Shipping is free on US orders over $150, and new customers can take 15 percent off a first order with code FIRST15. That no-minimum approach matches how our customers actually buy: across our recent custom-apparel orders the average order is under six pieces, and about one in five business customers comes back for another order once they have seen the first one in hand. Start from the custom apparel collection to pick your blanks, or send a quote request with your logo and quantities for current lead times and an exact price.

What I tell buyers about DTG pricing

I started this business on Etsy in 2023 and rebranded it as Arklavo in 2025, and in that time I have quoted apparel for more than 1,000 U.S. businesses. The number one thing buyers get wrong about direct-to-garment cost is assuming a colorful design will be expensive. It will not. The colors are free. What actually moves your quote is the shirt color and how big the print is, not how many colors sit in your logo.

The second thing I tell people is to stop forcing a small order through a screen printer. If you need 15 shirts with a full-color logo, screen printing's setup fees and minimums will quote you a painful per-shirt price, and you will end up buying extras you do not want. The digital method was built for exactly that order. Most of the orders I see are 10 to 50 pieces, and at that size direct-to-garment or embroidery beats screen printing almost every time on price and hassle.

And here is the move that saves the most money long term: order one shirt first. A single sample costs you a few dollars and shows you the real logo size, the real shade of the garment, and the real print on the real fabric before you commit to fifty. That one sample catches the mistakes that turn into expensive reprints. It is the whole reason we never set a minimum.

DTG printing cost FAQ

Sources

1. Printful, DTG Printing: What It Is and How It Works: printful.com
2. ThatShirt, Screen Printing vs Digital Printing: thatshirt.com
3. Ricoma, DTG vs Screen Printing: Cost, Quality and Quantity: ricoma.com