Wholesale T Shirts: Real Per-Unit Costs From 42 Lots (2026)

The $6.05 to $48.39 Spread That Decides Whether a Shirt Lot Pays

Last updated: August 2026

Bottom line: across 42 shirt lots live on the Closo Wholesale marketplace right now, landed cost per unit runs from $6.05 to $48.39 with a median of $22.38 — a spread of nearly eight times, driven almost entirely by brand rather than by quantity. That single range is the whole economics of wholesale t shirts in one line, and it explains why two buyers can follow identical advice and reach opposite outcomes.

We measure this from our own live inventory rather than from market averages, because averages hide the thing that matters. A 24-piece Hanes crewneck assortment prices at $9.00 per unit. A 36-piece Lacoste polo assortment on the same marketplace prices at $48.39 per unit. Both are legitimate buys.

They are simply different businesses: one competes on volume and thin margin, the other on brand recognition and resale ceiling.

Why quantity is the weaker lever

The intuition most new buyers bring to wholesale t shirts is that bigger lots mean cheaper units. Our catalogue does not support that. A 48-piece DC Shoe co. screen tee assortment lands at $8.48 per unit; a 24-piece Columbia short-sleeve tee assortment lands at $12.00.

The larger lot is cheaper per unit, but a 30-piece Lacoste crew tee assortment sits at $36.30 — four times the DC price at a comparable count. Piece count moved the needle by a few dollars. Brand moved it by twenty-eight.

This has a practical consequence for anyone sizing a first order. Buying a larger lot to chase a per-unit discount is the wrong optimisation when the brand tier you choose swings cost by 4x to 8x. The right question is which resale channel you are feeding and what that channel will bear, and only then how many units to take.

The second consequence is about risk. At $9.00 per unit a 24-piece lot puts $216 at risk; at $48.39 a 36-piece lot puts $1,742 at risk. Those are not the same decision and should not carry the same amount of due diligence.

Buyers who apply identical care to both are either over-thinking the small lot or, far more commonly, under-thinking the large one.

Three Real Lots Costed Line by Line, From $216 to $1,742

Bottom line: on a $552 DC Shoe co.

lot of 48 tees, the goods are $11.50 per unit but the resale-ready cost lands closer to $14.30 once shipping, platform fees and the dead-stock allowance are counted — roughly 24% above the sticker. Every honest model of wholesale t shirts has to carry those three lines, because all three are certain and none of them appear on the lot page.

The table below costs three lots that are live on our marketplace right now, chosen to span the brand tiers rather than to flatter the maths.

Parcel shipping is the flat rate the supplier publishes; the marketplace fee is modelled at a common 13% resale platform take; the dead-stock allowance assumes 10% of units never sell at target price, which is conservative for assortments and generous for single-SKU lots.

Read the last row against what each item actually sells for. A Hanes crewneck has to clear roughly $19 to break even — achievable, but not on a channel where blank tees sell for $12. A Lacoste polo has to clear roughly $78, which is comfortably inside its resale range on most platforms.

The cheap lot is not automatically the safe lot; it is the lot with the least room between break-even and market price.

The line everyone forgets

Dead stock is the line that turns a modelled profit into a real loss, and it is the one buyers most often set to zero. In an assortment lot you do not choose the size curve.

A 48-piece run arrives with the sizes the supplier had, which in practice means a tail of XS and XXL that moves slowly or not at all.

Costing wholesale t shirts without an allowance for that tail is the most common arithmetic error we see, and 10% is a mild assumption — buyers moving mixed-size apparel on a single channel often see 15% to 20%. , according to U.S. wholesale trade data from Census Bureau

Where the sticker price misleads by the most

Inbound shipping distorts small lots disproportionately. A flat $17 parcel charge is 7.9% of a $216 Hanes lot and under 1% of a $1,742 Lacoste lot. Buyers testing a new category with the smallest lot available are paying the highest relative freight in the catalogue, which is a reason to test with a mid-size lot rather than the smallest one.

It is also the reason per-unit comparisons between wholesale t shirts lots of different sizes are misleading until shipping is folded in.

What the acceptance window is worth in money

Closo Wholesale lots ship under escrow with a five-business-day acceptance window and per-line disputes, and that mechanism has a direct cash value that belongs in the model.

On the $1,742 Lacoste lot, a single misdescribed line — wrong sizes, wrong condition, short count — is recoverable rather than absorbed, which is the difference between a 10% dead-stock allowance and a 40% loss. On unmanifested pallets bought elsewhere, that same discrepancy is simply yours.

Buyers pricing wholesale t shirts across suppliers should treat the acceptance window as a line item, not a nicety: it is the only part of the transaction that pays you back when the goods are wrong, and it is worth more on expensive lots than on cheap ones precisely because the sum at risk is larger.

Quick tangent — I use the Closo Seller Hub to track what is actually moving right now, which saves me about three hours a week of manual search. Worth a peek before your next haul.

Four Ways a 24% Margin Becomes 6%, With the Numbers Behind Each

Bottom line: the four leaks below — irregular grading, size-curve blindness, single-channel pricing and untracked returns — each remove between four and twelve points of margin, and a lot carrying three of them at once turns a modelled 24% into single digits. None of them are visible at the point of purchase, which is exactly why they persist.

We see the same failure pattern repeatedly among buyers moving apparel. Attention concentrates on negotiating the lot price, which on wholesale t shirts is the line least available to negotiation and least responsible for the outcome. The four leaks below are all downstream of the buy, and all of them are controllable.

Leak one: reading past the grading

Condition codes carry money. A Levi's t-shirt assortment on our marketplace is listed as CLEAN IRR at $604 for 48 pieces — $12.58 per unit. IRR means irregular: a manufacturing defect that is usually cosmetic and often invisible, but which must be disclosed on resale and which caps the price a marketplace listing will hold.

Buyers who model that lot against first-quality resale prices are overstating revenue on every unit. The lot is not mispriced; the modelling is. The same discipline applies to shelf pulls, customer returns and store stock, each of which sells into a different price band.

Leak two: the size curve nobody chose

Assortment lots arrive with the supplier's size distribution, not the market's. A 48-piece run typically clears its middle sizes quickly and leaves a tail. If 10% of units sit unsold at target price, effective cost per sellable unit on that DC Shoe co.

lot moves from $11.50 to $14.45 — a 26% increase absorbed entirely by the units that do sell. At 20% the same lot lands near $16, and the margin that looked comfortable at purchase is gone.

This is the single largest and most predictable leak in wholesale t shirts, and the only defence is to price the allowance in before buying rather than discovering it in month three.

Leak three: one channel, one price

A $9.00 Hanes crewneck and a $48.39 Lacoste polo do not belong on the same channel. Blank and basic tees compete against new retail at aggressive prices and need volume channels with low per-unit fees. Branded polos carry recognisable value and reward the platforms where buyers search by brand.

Buyers who list everything in one place are pricing half their inventory against the wrong competition. Splitting the catalogue by brand tier across channels is usually worth more than any purchase-side saving available on wholesale t shirts. , according to SBA wholesale business resources

Leak four: returns that never enter the model

Apparel returns at a rate no other category matches, because fit is unverifiable before purchase. A 10% return rate on a unit sold at $23 costs the outbound shipping, frequently the return shipping, and the handling time — commonly $6 to $9 per returned unit, against a gross margin of perhaps $8.

Two returns can erase the profit on ten sales. Buyers tracking gross margin but not return-adjusted margin are measuring a number that does not exist, and the gap widens precisely as volume grows.

Taken together these four explain most of the distance between the arithmetic done at purchase and the bank balance at quarter end. None require better sourcing to fix. They require the model to carry lines that the lot page will never print.

The 9-Point Check That Runs Before You Spend $216 or $1,742

Bottom line: nine checks, none taking more than a minute, separate a lot that clears at 24% margin from one that clears at 6%. Run them in order — the first four kill bad lots before you spend time on the rest.

1. Read the condition code before the price. New with tags, shelf pulls, store stock and IRR sell into different price bands. A Levi's assortment marked CLEAN IRR at $12.58 per unit is a fair buy priced against irregular resale, and a bad one priced against first quality.
2. Divide price by piece count yourself. Do not trust the impression a lot price creates. $552 for 48 DC Shoe co. tees is $11.50 per unit; $1,089 for 30 Lacoste tees is $36.30. The lot prices look comparable in a list and are not remotely comparable per unit.
3. Add inbound shipping before comparing lots. A flat $17 parcel charge is 7.9% of a $216 lot and under 1% of a $1,742 one, so per-unit comparisons across lot sizes are wrong until freight is folded in.
4. Set a dead-stock allowance and write it down. Ten percent is mild for mixed-size apparel. That single line moves a 48-piece lot from $11.50 to $14.45 per sellable unit.
5. Name the channel before you buy. Decide where these specific units will list. Blank tees and branded polos do not belong in the same place, and choosing after the goods arrive means pricing against whatever competition happens to be there.
6. Compute break-even resale price. Landed cost plus platform fee plus outbound shipping. If that number sits above what the item actually sells for, the lot is not cheap regardless of its price.
7. Check the size curve if it is published. Where an assortment lists its distribution, read it. Where it does not, assume the tail and price accordingly rather than hoping.
8. Confirm the acceptance window and what it covers. Escrow with a five-business-day window and per-line disputes is the only mechanism that pays you back when goods are wrong. Know the deadline before the box lands, not after.
9. Have your resale certificate on file. Buying inventory for resale without one means paying sales tax you never owed, on every order, permanently.

The two that get skipped

Steps four and six are the ones buyers drop under time pressure, and they are the two that decide the outcome. Every other check on this list protects against a bad lot; those two protect against a good lot bought at the wrong price.

Buyers who run only those two on every purchase of wholesale t shirts still capture most of the benefit of the full sequence.

Shorts: the summer half of the basics shelf

Shorts run on the same economics as tees with the calendar reversed — demand climbs from April, peaks June through July, and stops abruptly in September. Cases arrive in the same 24 to 100 piece formats, branded stock lands in the $6 to $15 range, and the size curve behaves like any bottoms category, meaning waist sizes matter and the extremes sit.

Two specifications carry the price. Fabric first: cotton twill and chino styles sell as everyday wear at higher prices, while polyester athletic shorts move faster at lower ones. Inseam second — a detail buyers filter on and sellers routinely omit, which costs sales quietly because a listing without an inseam measurement is one the buyer skips rather than queries.

The useful pairing is with tees: identical buyer, identical season, identical parcel. Sellers who stock both from the same supplier in June get a second item on a meaningful share of orders, which is what makes a low-ticket summer category worth the shelf space at all.

Run One Lot Through the Model Before You Run Ten

Bottom line: take a single mid-priced lot — the $552 DC Shoe co.

run of 48 tees is a reasonable test at $11.50 per unit — and carry it all the way to sold, tracking landed cost, sell-through and returns against the model you built before buying. One completed cycle tells you more than ten modelled ones, because it prices your channel, your size tail and your return rate rather than the market's averages.

The reason to test with a mid-priced lot rather than the cheapest is arithmetic. On a $216 Hanes lot the $17 inbound parcel charge is 7.9% of the purchase and distorts every per-unit number you derive from it.

On the $552 lot the same charge is 3.1%, close enough to the ratio you will see at working volume that the lessons transfer. The cheapest lot is the worst teacher.

What to record while the lot sells

Three numbers, and only three. Actual sell-through at ninety days, which sets your real dead-stock allowance instead of the 10% placeholder. Actual return rate, which apparel buyers consistently underestimate and which costs $6 to $9 per returned unit.

And the median days-to-sale, which tells you how much capital a lot of this size ties up and therefore how many you can run at once. Those three convert a generic model of wholesale t shirts into your model, and they are the only inputs that will not transfer from anyone else's experience.

From there the decision widens rather than repeats. Our marketplace currently carries 42 shirt lots spanning $6.05 to $48.39 per unit, and the tier that works for one operator routinely fails for another — a $48.39 Lacoste polo needs a brand-searching channel to clear its roughly $78 break-even, while a $9.00 Hanes crewneck needs volume.

The Closo blog covers the surrounding decisions in depth: liquidation auctions against direct wholesale, manifested versus unmanifested lots, and the platform fee structures that set the break-even in the first place.