Where a shirt comes from
Screen print, DTG or DTF: which, and what does each cost?
Screen printing is the cheapest way to print a design once it is made in dozens, and DTG and DTF are cheaper for single shirts and short runs, because a screen has to be made for every colour before the first shirt is printed. On price lists read in October 2026, a white tee with a one-colour screen print cost £7.11 at ten shirts and £2.73 at 250, and the same tee printed singly by DTG cost £6.88.
A shirt is two purchases
A printed shirt is two things, bought separately and joined: a plain garment, called a blank, and the decoration put on it. Each has its own price, and the two behave differently. A blank gets a little cheaper in quantity. A print can cost several times more on a short run than on a long one, depending on how it is done.
So two questions settle most of what a shirt costs. Which blank is it? And how many of one design are being made at once? This chapter takes them in turn, from the price lists that printers publish. The prices are in pounds and before VAT unless it says otherwise.
Blanks
A blank is chosen by its fibre, its weight and its cut. The cheapest tees are plain cotton. Dearer ones are ringspun or combed cotton, a smoother yarn that one decorator describes as giving a clean surface for print, or organic cotton. Weight is given in grams per square metre, written gsm. A tee of about 150 gsm is light and soft. Gildan’s Heavy Cotton is 180 gsm, and a tee sold as heavyweight is 220.
A4 Apparel, a UK decorator, publishes the plain price of every garment it prints on, in eight bands of quantity. Six of its t-shirts show the range.
| Blank | Fabric | Weight | Each, for 10 | Each, for 100 | Each, for 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gildan Heavy Cotton (5000) | Cotton | 180 gsm | £3.35 | £3.18 | £2.41 |
| Gildan Softstyle (64000) | Ringspun cotton | 153 gsm | £3.60 | £3.33 | £2.48 |
| Bella+Canvas 3001 | Ringspun combed cotton | 145 gsm | £4.33 | £4.16 | £3.28 |
| Stanley/Stella Rocker (STTU758) | Organic ringspun combed cotton | 150 gsm | £5.17 | £4.41 | £3.70 |
| Anthem Organic Heavyweight (AM015) | Organic ringspun combed cotton | 220 gsm | £8.75 | £7.60 | £6.54 |
| Stanley/Stella Creator Vintage (STTU831) | Organic ringspun combed cotton | 155 gsm | £11.47 | £10.25 | £8.38 |
One decorator’s plain prices for a coloured shirt, before VAT and before any print. Larger sizes may cost slightly more.
Filed or disclosedThe price chart on each product page. · Source: A4 Apparel, Gildan Heavy Cotton T-Shirt, A4 Apparel, Gildan Softstyle Ringspun T-Shirt, A4 Apparel, Bella+Canvas Unisex Crew Neck T-Shirt, A4 Apparel, Stanley/Stella Rocker Essential T-Shirt, A4 Apparel, Anthem Organic Heavyweight T-Shirt, A4 Apparel, Stanley/Stella Creator Vintage T-Shirt · checked
Three things in that table are worth noticing. The dearest blank costs more than three times the cheapest, so the choice of blank moves the price of a shirt more than anything a printer does to it. Quantity moves it far less: buying 1,000 in place of ten takes 24 to 31% off. And weight is not the whole story. The dearest shirt in the table is one of the lighter ones.
Colour costs as well. On the same list the Softstyle in white is £2.16 where a colour is £3.60. Printers also prefer to supply the blank themselves. A4 Apparel adds 20% to its print prices on garments a customer brings, and Fifth Column, a London printer, charges 50p a garment to handle them.
Filed or disclosedSource: A4 Apparel, Gildan Softstyle Ringspun T-Shirt, A4 Apparel, Screen printing, Fifth Column, Our prices · checked
Screen printing
To screen print a design, the printer separates it into its colours and makes a screen for each one: a fine mesh stretched on a frame, blocked wherever ink should not pass. Ink is pulled across the screen with a squeegee and goes through the open mesh onto the shirt. One colour is laid at a time.
Filed or disclosedSource: Fifth Column, Screen printing · checked
The screens are the cost that matters. They are made before the first shirt is printed, and they cost the same for 50 shirts as for 5,000. Fifth Column charges £30 a colour for a standard screen and A4 Apparel £20. Conquer Printing, in California, charges $30. A light ink on a dark shirt needs a coat of white beneath it, called an under-base, and that is a screen of its own. White on black is priced as two colours.
Filed or disclosedSource: Fifth Column, Our prices, Fifth Column, F.A.Q.s, A4 Apparel, Screen printing, Conquer Printing, Screen printing and embroidery prices · checked
Once the screens exist, printing is fast. Fifth Column says its studio can turn out 600 printed pieces an hour. That is why the price of each print falls so steeply. On A4 Apparel’s list a one-colour print costs £2.95 a shirt for 10 to 24 shirts, £1.05 for 100 to 174 and 70p for 1,000 or more. Conquer Printing’s list, effective from July 2026, has the same slope in dollars: $4.10 a piece for 12 to 36 pieces and $1.95 for 289 to 499, with the garment priced separately.
Filed or disclosedSource: Fifth Column, Screen printing, A4 Apparel, Gildan Softstyle Ringspun T-Shirt, Conquer Printing, Screen printing and embroidery prices · checked
Every extra colour is another screen and another pass through the press. Fifth Column prints up to 12 colours on a white shirt and 11 on a dark one, and rates screen printing as limited for photographs. Most printers set a minimum. It is 50 shirts a design at Fifth Column and ten at A4 Apparel, whose list offers no more than two colours below 25 shirts and no more than six below 100.
Filed or disclosedSource: Fifth Column, F.A.Q.s, A4 Apparel, Screen printing, A4 Apparel, Gildan Softstyle Ringspun T-Shirt · checked
The ink changes how the print feels. Plastisol, the standard ink, sits on the fabric as an opaque layer with a slightly plastic texture, and it lasts. Water-based ink soaks in and cannot be felt after the first wash, but fades a little. Metallic, reflective and glow-in-the-dark inks are extras: Fifth Column adds 75p a colour for them.
Filed or disclosedSource: Fifth Column, F.A.Q.s, Fifth Column, Our prices · checked
DTG
DTG stands for direct to garment. It is an inkjet printer for cloth. The shirt is treated and pressed flat, the design is printed straight onto it in water-based ink, and the ink is fixed with heat. Nothing is made beforehand. So there are no screens, no set-up charge and no minimum, and a design can use any number of colours.
Filed or disclosedSource: Fifth Column, HD digital (DTG) printing, A4 Apparel, Direct to garment printing, Fifth Column, F.A.Q.s · checked
The price barely moves with quantity. Fifth Column says a DTG-printed tee can cost as little as £4.00, for a print up to 32 cm high, and that there is no bulk discount: the price remains the same. Printful, a print-on-demand network, prints by DTG to order. In the UK it prices a finished Softstyle tee at £6.88, in the colours it has in stock there. It takes a discount off orders of 25 or more of one product, and puts the ceiling for t-shirts at around 32%.
Filed or disclosedPrintful prices by the visitor’s region. This is its price with the region set to the United Kingdom, before VAT and delivery. · Source: Fifth Column, HD digital (DTG) printing, Printful UK, Unisex Basic Softstyle T-Shirt, Gildan 64000, Printful, Bulk orders · checked
The limits come from the ink, which soaks into the fibre. DTG generally needs a cotton shirt, and A4 Apparel rules it out for polyester. Fifth Column says the colours are slightly less vivid than a screen print’s, that an exact Pantone match is not available, and that artwork has to be at 300 dpi or better. A4 Apparel advises against DTG for large runs, because of the cost, and for one-colour designs.
Filed or disclosedSource: Fifth Column, HD digital (DTG) printing, A4 Apparel, Direct to garment printing · checked
DTF
DTF stands for direct to film. The design is printed onto a sheet of film and not onto the shirt, with a layer of white behind the colours. The print is coated with a powdered adhesive, cured, and pressed onto the garment with heat. The film is then peeled away and the image stays.
Because the image is made away from the shirt, it can go onto almost anything. Fifth Column lists cotton, polyester, blends and nylon, any colour of shirt, and positions that are awkward to print. It sets no minimum, and it says the finished print often feels much like a screen print.
Filed or disclosedSource: Fifth Column, Direct to film (DTF) printing, Fifth Column, F.A.Q.s · checked
The film can be bought by itself, which gives DTF the one published price found for this chapter. Future Transfers, a supplier in Milton Keynes, sells an A4 transfer ready to press for £3.70 singly and £1.90 each for 200 or more, including VAT. A printer adds the blank and the pressing. Fifth Column, A4 Apparel and Conquer Printing all offer DTF, and none of them publishes a price for a DTF-printed shirt. Each quotes it job by job, and Conquer Printing says that is because the price depends on the size of the artwork and the quantity.
Filed or disclosedA transfer supplier’s price table, and each printer’s own page. · Source: Future Transfers, A4 DTF transfer sheets, Conquer Printing, Screen printing and embroidery prices, Fifth Column, Direct to film (DTF) printing, A4 Apparel, Direct to film printing · checked
Printful, which sells its own version of DTF, says those prints are generally more durable than DTG ones, which may fade slightly with repeated washing. That is one company’s account of its own process, and no independent wash test was found for this chapter.
Filed or disclosedSource: Printful, DTFlex · checked
Embroidery
Embroidery is not a print, and it is priced differently. The artwork is first digitised, which means turned into a file of stitches for the machine. A4 Apparel charges roughly £15 for plain text and £20 to £25 for a logo on the left chest, paid once. After that the price follows the number of stitches and not the number of colours. A 5,000-stitch design costs £2.60 a garment for 10 to 24 pieces and £1.50 for 250 to 499. Conquer Printing puts a typical left-chest logo at 4,000 to 8,000 stitches.
Filed or disclosedSource: A4 Apparel, Embroidery, A4 Apparel, Gildan Softstyle Ringspun T-Shirt, Conquer Printing, Screen printing and embroidery prices · checked
Cost by quantity
Put the blank, the print and the screens together and the methods can be compared on one shirt. Take a sample order: a white Gildan Softstyle with a print in one position. The screen-printed prices are A4 Apparel’s, and each is the blank, plus the print, plus £20 a screen shared across the run. The DTG price is Printful’s UK price for the same tee, made singly.
- Screen print, one colour
- Screen print, four colours
- DTG, made singly
The figures
| Shirts in the run | Screen print, one colour | Screen print, four colours | DTG, made singly |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | £7.11 | — | £6.88 |
| 25 | £4.61 | £8.41 | £6.88 |
| 50 | £3.91 | £5.91 | £6.88 |
| 100 | £3.25 | £4.30 | £6.88 |
| 175 | £2.96 | £3.61 | £6.88 |
| 250 | £2.73 | £3.27 | £6.88 |
A sample order, before VAT and delivery. Each point is the first quantity of a price band on the printer’s list, and the lines between them are drawn straight. Four colours are not offered below 25 shirts. The DTG price is for the colours in stock in the UK, white among them, before the network’s discount on 25 or more.
Filed or disclosedTwo companies’ published prices, added up for one shirt: A4 Apparel’s blank, print and screen charges, and Printful’s UK price for the same tee printed to order. · Source: A4 Apparel, Gildan Softstyle Ringspun T-Shirt, A4 Apparel, Screen printing, Printful UK, Unisex Basic Softstyle T-Shirt, Gildan 64000 · checked
Read it from the left. At ten shirts the screen is £2.00 of the £7.11, and DTG is cheaper. By 25 shirts the one-colour print is £4.61 and has passed it. Four colours take longer, because there are four screens to share out: £8.41 at 25 shirts, still above the DTG price, and £5.91 at 50, below it. At 1,000 shirts the one-colour tee is £2.21 and the four-colour one £2.52. So the number of colours nearly doubles the price of a short run and hardly shows in a long one.
The bands matter as much as the slope. On this list, 24 one-colour shirts cost £142.64 in all and 25 cost £115.25, because the 25th shirt moves the whole order into a cheaper band. A quote is worth asking for at the next band up.
Filed or disclosedWorked from the same price list as the chart. · Source: A4 Apparel, Gildan Softstyle Ringspun T-Shirt, A4 Apparel, Screen printing · checked
Prices differ from printer to printer, and the slope does not. Printshop, a screen printer in Leeds, publishes prices with the set-up, a Gildan tee, the printing and VAT all included. One colour is £150 for 20 shirts and £1,080 for 200, which is £7.50 a shirt falling to £5.40. Four colours are £285 and £1,600, or £14.25 falling to £8.00.
Filed or disclosedSource: Printshop, Prices · checked
The two sides of the chart are not quite the same thing. Printful’s price includes checking each shirt and packing it for the customer who ordered it, and nobody has paid for a shirt that does not sell. A screen-printed run arrives in boxes, already paid for, and what is left unsold belongs to whoever ordered it. Choosing between selling from stock and printing to order takes in more than the print, and Print-on-demand vs bulk works through it.
Filed or disclosedSource: Printful, Pricing · checked
When each is right
- Screen print
- A design made in dozens or more at once, in few colours: stock for a tour, or a bulk order for a store. Fifth Column sets its minimum at 50 a design and counts 500 or more as bulk.
- DTG
- One shirt at a time or a short run, in any number of colours, on cotton. Fifth Column recommends it for 1 to 50 garments and for photographs.
- DTF
- Short runs on polyester, blends and sportswear, on dark shirts, and in positions that are awkward to print.
- Embroidery
- Small logos on caps, jackets, bags and workwear, where a print sits badly and a stitched design lasts.
Filed or disclosedOne printer’s own guidance on which method suits which job. · Source: Fifth Column, F.A.Q.s, Fifth Column, Bulk wholesale t-shirt printing, Fifth Column, Direct to film (DTF) printing, Fifth Column, Embroidery · checked
The methods are stages as much as rivals. Printful prints digitally to order, and offers screen printing on some garments once an order reaches 500. A design can be sold one at a time until it has shown what it sells, and be screen printed in bulk after that.
Filed or disclosedSource: Printful, Bulk orders · checked
Whichever method it is, a printer prices the same few facts: the blank by its brand and style code, its colour, the number of shirts of each design, the number of ink colours and the number of print positions. Finding and vetting suppliers sets out the whole request.