How much to charge for a homemade pumpkin pie
One 9 inch pumpkin pie from King Arthur's recipe, with a homemade single crust, has $6.74 of ingredients in this example. Add a foil pan and a window box, 40 minutes of work at an example $15 an hour and 10% overhead, and the pie costs $20.76 to make. At a 40% margin it sells for $34.60. Cut into 8 slices, that is $4.33 a slice. Your prices will differ, so treat the numbers as a worked example and put in your own.
What one pie costs
King Arthur's pumpkin pie makes one 9 inch pie, with 30 minutes of hands-on time and 45 to 50 minutes in a 400°F oven. The page doesn't list a crust, so the example uses King Arthur's classic single pie crust (180 g flour, 46 g shortening, 71 g butter, salt; its hands-on time is 10 minutes, which I add to the pie's 30). The optional pepper and cornmeal are left out. Flour, sugar, eggs and butter use the September 2026 U.S. averages from the BLS. Purée, evaporated milk, spices, shortening and brown sugar are my own placeholder prices, marked with a star. The recipe says light cream or evaporated milk; I priced evaporated milk. The spice row adds up the recipe's ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.
| Ingredient | Used | Package | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Granulated sugar | 99 | $1.02 / 1 | $0.22 |
| Light brown sugar | 106 | $2.99 / 2 * | $0.35 |
| All-purpose flour (filling) | 1 | $0.55 / 1 | $0.01 |
| Table salt (filling) | 0.5 | $1.29 / 26 * | $0.01 |
| Ground ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves | 2.63 | $3.99 / 18 * | $0.58 |
| Large eggs | 3 | $2.27 / 1 | $0.57 |
| Pumpkin purée | 425 | $2.49 / 15 * | $2.49 |
| Evaporated milk | 283 | $1.79 / 12 * | $1.49 |
| All-purpose flour (crust) | 180 | $0.55 / 1 | $0.22 |
| Table salt (crust) | 0.5 | $1.29 / 26 * | $0.01 |
| Vegetable shortening | 46 | $5.49 / 48 * | $0.19 |
| Butter | 71 | $3.96 / 1 | $0.62 |
| Ingredients for the batch | $6.74 | ||
Packaging is $2.13: a $1.13 foil pan and a $1.00 window box. Those are my placeholders, picked to match the two prices findhomegrown.com lists for a 9 inch foil pan and a 10 x 10 x 2.5 inch window box. Open this pie in the calculator and swap in your own prices, your own crust or your own hourly rate.
Per pie and per slice
Whole pie: cost $20.76, price $34.60 at a 40% margin. Per slice: the pie price divided by 8, which is $4.33. Eight slices is my assumption; the recipe gives one pie and no slice count. If you sell by the slice, the pan and box don't carry over, so add a plate or clamshell for each slice and count the slice you cut but can't sell.
Mini pies would need their own yield, and neither source on this page gives one, so they aren't priced here.
One site's figures
The baking site findhomegrown.com writes: "Charge $22 for a 9-inch deep-dish pumpkin pie with a homemade crust, and $24 to $25 for a Thanksgiving pre-order." It reports that six bakers listed whole pumpkin pies at $15 to $25 on October 1, 2026, which it calls a small sample, and puts the cost of a pie at about $5.70 in a foil pan, or $6.69 with a window box. Those are that site's figures, from its own prices.
The price from this page is $34.60, built from $6.74 of ingredients plus pan, box, labor and overhead. My arithmetic: labor is the biggest line in this example, so your hourly rate moves the price more than any other input.
Margin and markup side by side
Same pie, three margins. The markup column is what you would add to cost to land on the same price.
| Margin | Matching markup | Price per pie | Per slice | Kept per pie |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30% | 42.9% | $29.65 | $3.71 | $8.89 |
| 40% | 66.7% | $34.60 | $4.33 | $13.84 |
| 50% | 100% | $41.51 | $5.19 | $20.75 |
Adding 40% to the cost gives $29.06, which is only a 28.6% margin. Dividing the cost by 0.6 gives $34.60, the price that keeps 40%. More on the two in markup vs margin for bakers.
A 30-pie Thanksgiving batch
30 pies at the same per-pie numbers: $202.20 of ingredients, $622.80 total cost with packaging, labor and overhead, and $1,038.00 in sales at a 40% margin, which leaves $415.20. That assumes every pie takes the same 40 minutes, 20 hours of work in all, and that pans and boxes cost the same each. If a big run changes either, change the labor and packaging in the calculator. Cottage food rules decide whether and how you may sell pies, so check your state's before you take orders.
More
Another pan that sells by the piece: how much to charge for brownies. For holiday boxes, see the Christmas cookie box page, or start from cookies per dozen.