There is no open, citable standard for harness labour times. A published expert table gives 6.9 s to lay a wire on the board, 7.4 s to lay a connector end and 120 s for a visual check; almost everything else in circulation is a vendor claim or an estimate. Use estimates to start, then time your own bench.
Default times per operation
| Operation | Unit | Default | Range | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cut and strip both ends by hand | per wire | 25 s | 15–40 s | estimate |
| Cut and strip on a bench machine | per wire | 4 s | 2–8 s | estimate |
| Crimp with a hand tool | per termination | 20 s | 8–36 s | estimate |
| Crimp on a bench press | per termination | 6 s | 3–9 s | estimate; press stroke under 0.4 s (TE), handling dominates |
| Fit a single-wire seal by hand | per seal | 8 s | 4–15 s | estimate |
| Insert a terminal into a cavity | per contact | 7 s | 4–14 s | estimate |
| Crimp a splice | per splice | 30 s | 20–60 s | estimate |
| Solder joint | per termination | 70 s | 40–120 s | estimate near a vendor study's 71 s per solder cup |
| Lay a wire on the board | per wire | 7 s | 5–15 s | expert table, 6.9 s |
| Place a connector end on the board | per connector | 7 s | 5–15 s | expert table, 7.4 s |
| Spot tape by hand | per piece | 6 s | 4–10 s | estimate; expert table 6.8 s |
| Cable tie | per piece | 10 s | 6–17 s | estimate |
| Automatic continuity test | per circuit | 3 s | 1–5 s | estimate |
| Manual continuity test | per circuit | 20 s | 10–30 s | estimate |
| Visual inspection | per harness | 120 s | 60–300 s | expert table, 120 s |
| Applicator change | per changeover | 300 s | 120–900 s | estimate |
| Formboard build (NRE) | per part number | 3,600 s | 1,800–14,400 s | estimate |
A personal, fatigue and delay allowance of 15 % is added on top by default (typical shop range 10–20 %, our estimate). No learning curve is applied by default.
How to time your own operations
- Pick the operations that carry most of your labour: usually crimping, inserting and laying wires.
- Time ten repetitions by a trained operator at normal pace, from picking up the part to putting it down, and divide by ten.
- Do it again on another day and with another operator; keep the higher of two close results.
- Write the time in your labour table with the date and who measured it.
- Re-quote one recent job with the new times and compare with what the job actually took.
In Zorowire
The default table is loaded with every value labelled estimate, third-party or shop-measured. Replace a value and the quote uses yours; until then, the quote lists each default it still relies on.
Questions
How long does it take to crimp a terminal?
On a bench press the stroke itself takes under 0.4 s (TE's figure for its AMP 3K/40); handling makes it several seconds — our default is 6 s, an estimate. With a hand tool our default is 20 s.
Is there a standard for harness labour times?
We found no open, citable one. Classic studies such as Ong & Boothroyd (1991) are paywalled; IPC/WHMA-A-620 sets acceptance criteria, not times.
What is a PFD allowance?
A percentage added to measured work time for personal needs, fatigue and unavoidable delay. Our default is 15 %, an estimate.
Sources
- Zorowire default labour table: 55 operations, 52 of them labelled estimates — Zorowire test or research, 2026-10-30
- Abonyi & Ruppert, 'Monitoring Activity During Wire Harness Assembly', ASSEMBLY, 2020-01-14 (expert estimates) · retrieved 2026-10-30
- TE Connectivity, AMP 3K/40 and 5K/40 terminators (press cycle under 0.4 s) · retrieved 2026-10-30
- Smiths Interconnect, HyperGrip termination time study (vendor study) · retrieved 2026-10-30
- Hooha Wire & Cable, 'How to estimate wire harness assembly time' (marketing blog, weak evidence) · retrieved 2026-10-30
- Komax KTB 50 E Plus spot taping (about 1.8 s per spot tape, vendor claim) · retrieved 2026-10-30
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