Tempered Glass Cost Calculator

The formula is holeCost = holeCount × (5 + thicknessMm × 0.8), so each hole carries a $5 base charge plus a per-millimeter-of-thickness surcharge. This reflects that drilling holes in tempered-ready glass must happen before tempering, and drilling through thicker stock takes longer and dulls tooling faster, so the per-hole labor cost scales with how much material the drill bit has to pass through.

The calculator applies a fixed 2.5x multiplier (temperingMultiplier) to the raw glass cost looked up for your thickness, representing the cost of running finished-cut glass through a tempering furnace — heating it near its softening point and rapidly cooling the surface to put it into compression. That's separate from edge work, holes, and heat-soak testing, which are all priced as their own line items on top of the tempered glass cost.

Heat-soak testing doesn't make the glass stronger — the 170 MPa vs 40 MPa strength figures already reflect ordinary tempered glass. Its purpose is to catch a specific defect: rare nickel-sulfide inclusions that can cause a tempered panel to spontaneously shatter months or years after installation. The EN 14179 process (priced here at $2 per square foot) bakes finished panels at 290°C for two hours to force any unstable inclusions to fracture in the factory rather than in the field.

The discount is tiered on quantity: 5% at 20+ panels, 10% at 50+ panels, and 15% at 100+ panels, applied to the full pre-discount total (glass, tempering, edge work, holes, and heat-soak testing combined) rather than to glass cost alone. Because it's a cliff rather than a gradual scale, ordering one panel below a threshold — say 49 instead of 50 — means missing out on the higher discount tier entirely.