When Laying Out a Flat Pattern, Should a Hole's Position Account for Bend Deduction the Same Way Flange Lengths Do?

Yes, but not because the hole itself deducts anything. It's because the flat pattern length the hole sits on is already shortened by bend deduction, and if you dimension the hole from the wrong reference you'll place it in the wrong spot once the part folds up.

Why the confusion happens

Bend deduction exists because a bent part's flat length isn't the sum of its flange faces. The material at the bend stretches on the outside and compresses on the inside, and the neutral axis shifts. Bend deduction is the correction factor that turns "sum of flange faces" into "actual flat blank length." Once you accept that the blank is shorter than the naive sum, every feature on that blank, holes included, has to be located against the corrected flat length, not against where you'd expect it if you just added up finished dimensions.

A hole doesn't move relative to the bend the way a flange edge does. It sits at a fixed distance from an edge or another hole in the flat state. The problem is entirely about which reference you used to build the flat pattern.

Where it actually goes wrong

Most of the time this bites people in one of two ways.

Someone dimensions a print in the formed state, hole to formed edge, say 25 mm, and hands it to a person building the flat pattern by hand instead of in CAD. If that person adds up flange lengths without subtracting bend deduction, the flat blank comes out too long. Every hole located from the far end lands off by the deduction amount, once per bend between the hole and that reference edge.

Or a flat pattern gets built correctly in CAD, bend deduction and all, but someone later moves a hole by editing the flat sketch directly instead of the formed model. The hole's position in the flat file no longer matches where the parametric model would put it, and nobody notices until the part comes off the brake with a hole 0.3 mm from where it should be.

What to actually do

Locate holes in the formed state whenever the part passes through more than one bend before the hole. Let the CAD sheet metal module handle the deduction. SolidWorks, Inventor and every other real MCAD package computes bend deduction automatically from the material's K-factor and radius, and it places a hole correctly in the flat pattern based on where you put it in the 3D model. You shouldn't need to hand-calculate a hole's flat position unless you're building the DXF by hand, which you shouldn't be doing for anything with more than one bend.

If you're handed a flat DXF with no 3D model behind it and have to place a hole yourself, locate it from the nearest bend line rather than a far edge across multiple bends. Every bend line you cross introduces another chance for deduction error to stack up. One bend's worth of error is a rounding issue. Three bends' worth, compounded, is a hole that misses its mating fastener.

Build the part in a real sheet metal model. Dimension holes to formed features on the drawing. Let the flat pattern be a derived output, not something anyone edits directly. The DXF that goes to the laser should come out of that same model, no manual flat-pattern surgery, which is also why we ask for STEP or DXF exported straight from the model instead of a hand-drafted flat.