Garment Yardage Calculator

Fabric is usually 40 to 60 percent of the landed cost of a garment, which makes consumption the number with the most leverage in your costing sheet. This page explains how consumption is actually calculated on a cutting floor, why the naive estimate is always optimistic, and gives you a calculator that turns body measurements into fabric length, garment weight and total order requirement.

Two Ways to Calculate Consumption

There are only two honest answers to “how much fabric does this garment take”. The first is marker-based: you lay every pattern piece into a marker of known width and length, and the marker tells you exactly. Every professional costing eventually uses this number.

The second is dimensional estimation: you approximate each panel as a rectangle, add them up, and divide by usable width. It over-simplifies shaped panels, but it is fast, it needs no pattern, and it is accurate enough to sanity-check a quotation or size a fabric order in the early stages. That is what the calculator above does, and it is deliberately transparent about the two allowances it applies.

The Formula

Total panel area per piece, treating front, back and sleeves as rectangles:

Area (cm²) = 2 × body length × body width + sleeve count × sleeve length × sleeve width

Convert to square metres by dividing by 10,000. Then:

• Fabric length per piece (m) = panel area (m²) ÷ (usable width in metres × marker efficiency) × (1 + process allowance)
• Fabric weight per piece (g) = fabric length per piece × usable width in metres × GSM
• Net garment weight (g) = panel area (m²) × GSM — the fabric that ends up in the garment, before any waste

The gap between net garment weight and fabric consumed per piece is your cutting and process loss. On a well-nested knit marker that gap is typically 12 to 20 percent. If your calculation shows a gap near zero, an allowance is missing.

The Three Allowances People Forget

1. Usable width is not nominal width

Tubular knit fabric is slit to open width, and the slit line plus the needle lines on either side are usually unusable. Deduct 2 to 3 cm from the nominal width before you calculate. On a 185 cm roll that is a visible difference across a thousand pieces.

2. Relaxation changes the length

Knit fabric is under tension when it comes off the roll. If you cut it immediately, it relaxes afterwards and the garment shrinks in length. Standard practice is to relax the fabric flat for 24 to 48 hours before spreading. Skipping this step is one of the most common causes of garments that come out short after washing.

3. Size ratio, not the sample size

Consumption is usually quoted for the sample size, often a medium. A real order spans a size ratio, and an XXL can take 20 to 30 percent more fabric than a small. Multiply your per-piece figure by a weighted average across the ratio, or calculate the largest size and accept that you are being deliberately conservative.

Worked Example

A basic crew-neck tee: body length 72 cm, half chest 52 cm, sleeve length 22 cm, sleeve width 20 cm, two sleeves. Panel area is 2 × 72 × 52 plus 2 × 22 × 20, which is 7488 plus 880, or 8368 cm² — about 0.837 m².

At 200 GSM the net garment weight is roughly 167 g. With 180 cm usable width and 88 percent marker efficiency, fabric length per piece is 0.837 ÷ (1.80 × 0.88) = 0.528 m. Adding a 6 percent process allowance gives 0.560 m per piece, and at 1.80 m width and 200 GSM that is about 202 g of fabric consumed per piece. Across 1000 pieces you need roughly 560 m and about 202 kg of fabric.

Notice that 167 g becomes 202 g — a 21 percent increase. That difference is exactly the number that separates a quotation that makes money from one that does not.

Rough Benchmarks for Knit Styles

These bands assume standard body measurements and 85 to 90 percent marker efficiency. Oversized, drop-shoulder and cropped fits sit outside them — a deliberately oversized tee can use as much fabric as a regular-fitting sweatshirt.