Electronics contract manufacturers and PCB assembly services in the USA

The minimum order in electronics is one, and that is the wrong question

Every other manufacturing category on this site is gated by minimum order quantity. Cosmetics, supplements, sauce, snacks: the first question is always how many units you have to commit to, and the answer decides whether you can start. Electronics inverts it.

Screaming Circuits in Milwaukie, Oregon answers the question in one line on its own FAQ: the minimum order size is one, and it builds single board prototypes through volume runs. MacroFab in Houston puts the same promise at the bottom of its home page, next to the quote button: no contracts, no minimums. CircuitHub builds on demand and publishes price examples at low quantities as the whole point of its business.

So the number that stops founders in other categories does not exist here. What replaces it is a fixed cost that does not care how many boards you order, and most of the industry does not publish it.

The real gate is non recurring engineering, and one company publishes the figure

Non recurring engineering, almost always shortened to NRE, is what a shop charges once to make your specific board buildable. Optimum Design Associates describes it in two halves: tools, meaning stencils, artwork, jigs, fixtures and press fits, and programming, meaning the labor to set up every machine in the line, the pick and place, the selective solder machine, the reflow oven and the inspection machines.

Most of the category will not tell you what that costs. Amtech will. It publishes that US contract manufacturers typically charge $600 to $1,750 in NRE per job, and then does the arithmetic that matters: a $600 fee is $120 a board at five units, $12 a board at fifty, and $1.20 a board at five hundred.

Read that ladder twice, because it is the whole economics of a first run. The board does not get cheaper because the factory gets generous at volume. It gets cheaper because a fixed number is being divided by a larger one. Amtech puts its own bands on the product cost too: a simple two layer board at $20 to $80 each in quantities of one to ten, $10 to $40 at eleven to fifty, and $10 to $30 at fifty one to two hundred and fifty, with a wearable example running roughly $100 a board at five units and around $35 at a hundred.

Those are Amtech's published figures for its own market, not a universal price list, and complexity moves them a long way. Use them to sanity check a quote, not to replace one.

Two companies published an article about setup costs and left the cost out

It is worth being precise about how unusual Amtech is, because the absence is the finding.

Bittele Electronics publishes a blog post titled Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) and Tooling Costs. It explains that NRE depends on the physical dimensions of the board, the number of layers and the quantity ordered. It contains no dollar figure. QueenEMS publishes a post on what NRE means and how to reduce PCB setup and tooling costs, which sets out ownership principles and when tooling can be reused, and contains no dollar figure either.

Neither company is doing anything wrong. Both articles are genuinely useful on the mechanics. But a buyer who reads two articles whose headings promise a cost and finish with no number will reasonably conclude the number is unknowable, and it is not. It is $600 to $1,750 according to the one company that wrote it down, and that band is enough to build a budget around and to notice when a quote is an outlier.

The practical move is to make the first email produce the figure. Ask for the NRE broken out as a line item rather than folded into the board price, and ask whether it is charged again on a repeat order.

Amortized or broken out, the same NRE gives two very different second orders

There are two ways a shop can bill setup, and which one you agree to changes what your second order costs.

Broken out means you pay the tooling and programming as a separate line, once, up front. Amortized means it is spread across the units instead. Optimum Design Associates gives the worked example: if the unit cost is $100 per assembly, the manufacturer might charge $110 per unit, and once the NRE is paid off the per unit cost drops back to $100.

The reason this matters is that NRE is genuinely non recurring. Tooling and programming are reusable on repeat orders unless the design changes, so the second build of the same revision should not carry the charge again. If your quote is amortized and nobody says when it stops, it quietly becomes a permanent $10 on every board you ever buy.

Three questions settle it. Is the NRE broken out or amortized. At what quantity does the amortization end. And does a minor revision, a changed resistor value or a new silkscreen, reset the charge. Get those in writing before the first purchase order, not after. If the size of the first commitment is the part you are working around, our low MOQ manufacturers guide covers the same trade off across other categories.

A three day turn and a forty week wait are both true, and the gap is the bill of materials

US assembly houses advertise speed, and the speed is real. Amtech states fully assembled prototype boards in 24 to 72 hours and small production panels shipping in one to three working days when parts are stocked. CircuitHub states three day full turnkey fab and assembly by default, and publishes that it ships 81 percent of full turnkey orders within three days as standard. Pro-Active Engineering in Wisconsin states quick turnaround prototype assemblies in two to five days. Sierra Circuits in Sunnyvale publishes turn times of one, two, three, four, five and ten business days and says it can expedite a board within 24 hours.

Now read the sentence Screaming Circuits puts in its FAQ, which nobody advertises: it cannot begin assembly until all materials required for the build have been received, the receiving cutoff is noon, and the day the last material arrives by noon becomes the official assembly start date, with turn times counted on a rolling 24 hour basis.

That is the clock start, stated in writing, and it is the single most useful sentence in this category. The advertised turn time begins when the last component lands on the dock. It does not begin when you place the order.

What lands on the other side of that clock is not encouraging right now. Accuris Supply Chain Intelligence, tracking average weeks across part type categories in its monthly Lead Time Changes reports from March 2025 through March 2026, recorded semiconductor lead times reaching a 40 week ceiling in March 2026, a 67 percent jump in a single month from February, against the 20 to 25 weeks that were typical through most of 2025. The categories it named were circuit protection devices, converters, diodes, fiber optics, interface ICs, logic ICs, memory ICs, programmable logic, transistors and trigger devices. Passives stayed comparatively stable in the 10 to 20 week range.

So a 72 hour build and a nine month wait are both honest descriptions of the same project. One measures the factory. The other measures your riskiest part number. Ask for both, and ask which part is the constraint.

Turnkey or consigned, and the attrition nobody warns you about

The fork that decides most of your quote is who buys the components.

In a full turnkey build the manufacturer sources everything, bare boards and parts, and sells you a finished assembly. You pay for their purchasing power and their handling margin, and in exchange the shortage risk is largely theirs. Screaming Circuits offers this alongside partial turnkey, where you supply some combination of boards and parts and it sources the rest, and a fully customer supplied option.

In a consigned build you buy the parts. It can be cheaper, and it is sometimes the only option when you already hold inventory or have an allocation with a distributor. It also carries a cost that catches people out. Machines lose parts: components get flung off feeders, rejected by vision systems, or consumed setting up a reel. So you cannot send exactly enough. Screaming Circuits publishes attrition guidelines for precisely this and notes that leftover components, whether customer supplied or not, are returned with the completed order. MacroFab describes the same reality from the other side, offering consigned inventory shipped to its warehouse with live consumption tracking that explicitly includes manufacturing wastage.

There is a second consigned trap that has nothing to do with the assembler. Distributors sell many parts on full reels. You can order five boards, and still have to buy 2,500 of a connector because that is the packaging. CircuitHub built this into its quoting flow: its system extracts part numbers from your design files and alerts you to out of stock parts and to component MOQs as you build the bill of materials. That is the minimum order quantity that actually exists in electronics, and it sits with the distributor, not the factory.

What decides the shortlist before price does, class, certification and where the board is built

Three filters remove most of a shortlist before anyone quotes.

The first is IPC-A-610 workmanship class. Class 1 is general electronics, Class 2 covers most commercial and industrial products, and Class 3 is high reliability, for products where a failure is not survivable. If you do not state a class, you will be quoted Class 2 and compared against shops quoting Class 1, and the cheapest number will win a comparison it should not have been in.

The second is certification, and it is market access rather than a quality badge. ISO 9001 is the baseline quality system. ISO 13485 and FDA registration gate medical devices. AS9100 gates aerospace. IATF 16949 gates automotive. ITAR registration gates export controlled defense work, and it is a real differentiator: MacroFab describes itself as the only ITAR registered self service PCB assembly platform, and Pro-Active Engineering states ISO 9001:2015, ITAR registration and JCP certification together. If you sell into a regulated market, this filter comes before price, because a cheaper shop that cannot legally build your product is not cheaper.

The third is geography, and it is mostly a speed and control decision rather than a patriotic one. Amtech puts the fastest realistic offshore door to door at six to ten days against 24 to 72 hours domestically for a prototype, which is the difference between iterating twice in a week and iterating twice in a month. CircuitHub and MacroFab both build in the USA and both sell that as a feature. For the same trade off in machined and fabricated parts, our CNC machining companies and metal fabricators pages cover how enclosure and chassis work sorts by process rather than by product name, which is the part of a box build most hardware teams source separately. The wiring that connects boards to the enclosure is usually a separate purchase too, and our wire harness assembly and custom cable assembly manufacturers guide covers how those shops publish minimums, lead times and IPC/WHMA-A-620 class.