It depends on what you're making and how it affects your profit margin. With the generally smallish profit margins that come with most cakes, renting wouldn't make sense unless it was a pretty low hourly rate. If you were allowed to bake everything then do all of the decorating at home that would cut down on the cost, but that would depend on what's allowed in your area. For example, say I charge $500 for a wedding cake, and my profit margin is about 50% per cake. That means that I'm making $250 on that cake after all of my expenses (including everything, advertising, insurance, food costs, etc.) If I have to pay that minimum $150 for three hours that would knock my profit down to $100, and that's assuming that I can bake there and decorate somewhere else. If I've spent the average amount of time on that wedding cake as I do on all of them (say ten hours including every email, contract-writing session, client meeting, baking, decorating, cleaning, etc)   that would mean that I've made $10 an hour, which for me is way below my target hourly rate. So for me I'd need to bake more than just that one cake while I was there to make it worth the cost. You need to figure out what makes sense for you, because if you're happy with $10 an hour, or if you're baking something other than wedding cakes, it will come out to be a different profit based on the cost of the kitchen and what you're making.

thanks.....totally makes sense.....my business partner and i have found an old bakery space for rent with almost all of the equipment in it and available for use....we were thinking about ways to supplement income to possibly help pay for the rent and we thought about maybe setting it up to rent out kitchen space when we are not using it......i was wondering what would be a good rate to charge that would make it worth our while to rent it out and make it affordable for other bakers.....

It's not very much here. Here's the website of a local kitchen rental place. She also does classes and that kind of thing out of the space, so it's not just rentals. http://kitchenthymerva.com/