How Much to Charge for Photography: Price the Job, Not the Shoot

October 14, 2026 · Freelance and creator rates

To work out how much to charge for photography, find the hourly rate your year needs, then multiply it by every hour the job takes - shooting, culling and editing, travel and admin - not just the hours behind the camera. In the illustrative example below, the rate the year needs is $94.69 an hour. A wedding with 10 hours of shooting takes 47 hours in all, so it has to be priced at $4,450.43. Price the shooting hours alone and you quote $946.90, which works out to $20.15 for each hour you actually spend on the job.

The photography pricing formula

hourly floor = (take-home target / (1 - tax rate on profit) + overhead)
               / billable hours a year

job hours    = shooting + editing + travel + admin for that client

job price    = job hours x hourly floor

The first line is the same floor-rate calculation any service business uses. The second line is where photography pricing goes wrong: the shoot is the only part the client sees, and it is a fraction of the work.

Step 1: the hourly rate your year needs

These inputs come from the kit linked at the bottom and are illustrative. They are not typical figures for photographers in any market.

The camera line is $2,600 a year because bodies and lenses wear out whether or not they are booked; it is the replacement cost spread over their life, not the purchase price. The 25% tax figure is a placeholder, not a real rate - use the one your accountant gives you.

Billable hours. 6 weeks off leaves 46 working weeks. At 40 hours and 45% job time, that is 828 hours a year that can be charged to a client. The rest is marketing, enquiries that never book, bookkeeping, gear maintenance and portfolio work.

Revenue needed. Keeping $55,000 after a 25% tax on profit takes $73,333 of profit. Add $5,070 of overhead and the business has to bring in $78,403.

Floor. $78,403 / 828 hours = $94.69 an hour.

How much to charge for wedding photography

Here is one illustrative wedding. The editing figure is an input, not a fact about weddings: it is the number you should replace with your own, timed from your last few jobs.

Shooting is 21% of the job. Priced at the floor for its full 47 hours, the wedding is $4,450.43 - 4.7 times the $946.90 you get from the 10 shooting hours alone. The gap, $3,503.53, is the editing, travel and admin given away for free.

Put another way: if you prefer to quote by the hour of coverage, each shooting hour has to carry $445.04, because each one brings its share of editing and overhead with it.

The year shows the same thing. 828 billable hours fit about 17.6 weddings like this one. Priced at the full $4,450.43, they bring in exactly the $78,403 the year needs. Priced at the shooting hours only, the same weddings bring in $16,682 - less than a third of it, for the same amount of work.

How much to charge for a photography session

The same arithmetic on an illustrative one-hour portrait session:

One hour of shooting is 17% of a 6-hour job. The session has to be priced at $568.14 to pay the floor rate, 6.0 times the one-hour figure of $94.69. Short sessions have the worst ratio, because travel and admin do not shrink with the shoot. Charge $94.69 for that hour and the job pays $15.78 an hour.

The insight: editing hours set the price

Hold the wedding’s shooting, travel and admin fixed and change only the editing:

Going from 15 to 40 hours of editing moves the price the job needs from $2,841 to $5,208 - a swing of $2,367, bigger than the entire shoot-only price. Every five extra hours of editing adds $473.45. Even at the low end of this table, shooting is only 33% of the job, falling to 18% at the high end.

That is why the editing figure has to be measured, not borrowed. The time it takes depends on your style, how many images you deliver, how much retouching you promise and how fast your culling is. No published rule of thumb can tell you that, including this table. Time three or four real jobs from first import to gallery delivery and use your own number.

Two practical consequences follow:

• An extra hour on the day is not one hour. In this example every shooting hour carries 3.2 hours of editing, so an extra hour of coverage is 4.2 hours of work and should be priced at $397.70, not $94.69.
• Fewer delivered images is a real cheaper tier. A package with less editing costs less to produce, so a lower price on it is honest rather than a discount on the same work.

None of this says what your market will pay. If the price you get is well above what clients near you accept, that is useful: the target, the overhead, the editing time or the market has to change. Working below the number without knowing it is the one option that cannot last.

How to use this on your own numbers

1. Write down the take-home income you need for a year, after tax.
2. List a year of business costs, with gear as replacement cost per year.
3. Get your effective tax rate on profit from an accountant.
4. Work out your billable hours: working weeks x hours a week x the share of hours that belong to a booked job.
5. Time a few real jobs end to end: shooting, culling and editing, travel, and the calls, contract and invoicing for that client.
6. Multiply job hours by the floor rate. That is the price the job needs.

How these were calculated

The floor rate is (target / (1 - tax rate) + overhead) / billable hours, with billable hours = (52 - weeks off) x hours a week x billable share; tax falls on profit, so overhead is added after grossing up. A job’s price is its total hours times the floor. Every figure on this page was computed twice: once by the code behind the kit below, and once by an independent program that searches for the rate at which a year of billable hours leaves exactly the target after overhead and tax, prices each job hour by hour, and confirms that a year made only of that job brings in exactly the revenue needed. The two agree to the cent. All inputs, including every job-hour figure, are illustrative; the tax rate is a placeholder; and none of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

If you want this worked on your own numbers with a blank worksheet, plus scripts for the conversations that follow a quote (the RAW-files request, an extra hour on the day, raising prices), the kit below covers exactly that.