A dress shirt takes about 2 to 2½ yards of shirting — roughly 2 to 2.4 yards at 58 or 60 inches, or 2.1 to 2.5 at 54. Order 2½ yards for a standard size and you will have collar, cuffs and plackets covered. For an exact figure from your own measurements, use the calculator.
A shirt has more separate pieces than people expect. Beyond the body and sleeves there is a yoke cut twice, a collar, a collar band, two cuffs and a front placket — small pieces, but they all have to come out of the same length.
| Size | 60″ | 58″ | 54″ |
|---|---|---|---|
| 36 | 2.0 yd | 2.0 yd | 2.1 yd |
| 38 | 2.0 yd | 2.0 yd | 2.3 yd |
| 40 | 2.1 yd | 2.1 yd | 2.4 yd |
| 42 | 2.2 yd | 2.4 yd | 2.5 yd |
| 44 | 2.4 yd | 2.4 yd | 2.5 yd |
Plain cloth. Sizes here are chest measurements, not collar sizes. The step between 42 and 44 is real rather than a rounding artefact — at that point a piece stops fitting across the width and moves onto a new length.
These are standard sizes on default settings. Bespoke work rarely is — for your client’s actual measurements, your cloth’s repeat and your own style options, run it through the calculator, which also draws the cutting layout.
A dress shirt back has no centre-back seam. It is drafted as a half piece and laid against a fold in the cloth, so the fabric is doubled and one cut produces a full symmetric back.
This matters when you order: the back needs its full unfolded width of cloth even though the pattern piece looks half-size. It is a common way to under-order — the piece measures 11 inches across on paper and needs 23 inches of cloth.
Shirting is patterned more often than suiting, and stripes on a shirt are unforgiving: they need to run true across the front placket, match at the yoke, and align where the sleeve meets the body.
| Cloth | Size 40 at 60″ | Extra |
|---|---|---|
| Plain | 2.13 yd | — |
| Stripe | 2.45 yd | +15% |
| Check / plaid | 2.66 yd | +25% |
Enter the actual repeat in the calculator if you know it — a large check costs considerably more than these flat rates suggest.
Allow about ⅓ yard of fusible for the collar, collar band and cuffs. A shirt needs no lining and no canvas.
The panel widths behind these numbers were cross-checked against Winifred Aldrich's Metric Pattern Cutting for Menswear and Alan Poulin's Tailoring Suits the Professional Way, then laid out piece by piece across the chosen cloth width to see how many lengths the layout actually needs.
They are estimates and should be treated as such — seam allowances, house style and a cutter's own habits all move the number. What they will not do is guess: every figure here comes from an actual arrangement of actual pattern pieces.
Calculate your exact yardage →