How Much to Charge for Translation Per Word, Per Page and Per Hour

October 31, 2026 · Freelance and creator rates

How much to charge for translation per word comes from two numbers you already own: the hourly floor your year needs, and how many finished words you produce in an hour. Divide the first by the second and you have a per-word rate; multiply by the words on a page and you have a page rate. In the illustrative example below, a translator who wants $48,000 a year kept needs $53.14 per paid hour, finishes 384 words an hour once review is counted, and so charges $0.13839 a word, or $138.39 per 1,000 words.

None of these figures are market rates. Every speed, cost and share belongs to one made-up translator, and none of it says what translation sells for, how fast anyone translates, or what a certified translation requires.

The translation rate formula

revenue needed   = income to keep / (1 - tax set-aside) + business costs
paid hours       = booked hours a week x (1 - share lost) x weeks
hourly floor     = revenue needed / paid hours
finished words/h = words drafted an hour / (1 + review share)
per-word rate    = hourly floor / finished words an hour
per-page rate    = per-word rate x words you define as a page

Step 1: translation rate per hour

The per-hour rate is the floor: what a paid hour has to earn so the year works. The example translator wants $48,000 kept after a 20% tax set-aside, has $6,000 of business costs (software, dictionaries, insurance, a computer), and books 30 hours a week of paid work for 46 weeks. Gaps and cancellations take 10% of those hours.

On top of the paid hours sit 8 unpaid hours a week of quotes, client email, invoicing and marketing. That makes 1,748 hours worked a year, of which only 71% are paid. Spread the income over every hour worked and the translator keeps $27.46 an hour, under the $53.14 floor. That gap is why the floor, not the take-home figure, is what each paid hour must be priced at.

Step 2: how much to charge for translation per word

The example translator drafts 480 words an hour, and self-review, terminology checks and reading against the source add 25% on top of drafting time. So 1,000 words take 2.60 hours from start to finished, and the finished speed is 384 words an hour.

At the $53.14 floor that is $0.13839 a word, or $138.39 per 1,000 words. Rounded up to a whole cent, the per-word price on a quote would be $0.14. Every later step carries the 1,000-word rate.

Your speed moves this directly. Same floor, same review share, three drafting speeds:

At 360 words an hour the 1,000-word rate is $184.51; at 600 it is $110.71. Time yourself on your own kind of text, because a legal contract and a marketing brochure will not draft at the same speed.

Step 3: how much to charge for translation per page

A per-page rate is a per-word rate with an assumed number of words on the page. The example assumes 250 words a page, so the page rate is the 1,000-word rate times 250 over 1,000, rounded to the cent: $34.60. The trap is that real pages are not all 250 words.

Take a 40-page document the translator counts at 8,600 words, which is 215 words a page:

Here the pages are light, so the per-page quote bills 10,000 words for a document that has 8,600, and per page pays $193.85 more. On a dense document the same arithmetic runs the other way and per page pays less. Count the words before you choose, and write your page definition into the quote either way.

Step 4: a minimum fee for small jobs

Every job, however short, has fixed time: intake, file prep, delivery and the invoice. The example puts that at 30 minutes, which is $26.57 at the floor before a single word is translated.

A 180-word job priced as fixed time plus words would be $51.48. The example’s policy is a minimum of 250 words, so the minimum fee is the fixed time plus 250 words ($34.60): $61.17. Since 180 words is under the minimum, that is the charge, and it works out to $0.3398 a word, about 2.5 times the per-word rate. That is not overcharging; it is what the fixed time costs when it is spread over very few words.

Step 5: rush and specialist text

The example job is 6,000 words of specialist text. At 2,400 finished words in a normal day it needs 2.5 working days, and the client gives 2, so the example’s 20% rush surcharge applies. A 15% specialist surcharge and 2 hours of research and glossary work, priced at the floor, are added too:

Both surcharge shares are the example’s own policy, not a convention. The rush test is mechanical: the surcharge applies only when the days given are fewer than your own pace needs.

Editing, proofreading and a whole book

A separate editing pass is priced on hours, not on the translation rate. The example edits 1,200 words an hour against the source and proofreads 3,000 an hour, so 6,000 words take 5 hours of editing and 2 of proofreading: $371.98, or $62.00 per 1,000 words, about 45% of the $138.39 translation rate. That share comes from the two speeds, not from a rule of thumb.

For a 72,000-word book, the words at $138.39 per 1,000 come to $9,964.08, and 12 hours of author or publisher queries at the floor add $637.68: $10,601.76. At 2,400 words a day, 5 days a week, that is 6 weeks of work. A 25% deposit is $2,650.44, then 3 payments of $2,650.44, for example one per batch of chapters. Rights, royalties and credit lines belong in the contract.

The insight: price the finished word, then check the job

A per-word rate looks like a property of the text. It is really your hourly floor divided by your own finished speed. Unpaid admin pushes the floor up; review time pushes the finished speed down. Skip either and the year comes up short.

The check that catches it is after delivery. Say a job sold at $1,250.00 took 22 hours, with $90.00 paid out on the job and a 3% payment fee ($37.50). That leaves $1,122.50, or $51.02 an hour against the $53.14 floor, so it fell short. The price that pays exactly the floor on those hours was $1,298.02, $48.02 more. When that happens, look at step 2 first: your real words per hour on that kind of text may be lower than the speed you priced at.

How these were calculated

Revenue needed is the income to keep divided by one minus the tax set-aside, plus business costs. Paid hours are booked hours less the lost share, times working weeks, and the floor is revenue over paid hours. Finished words an hour are drafting speed divided by one plus the review share, and the per-word rate is the floor over that, shown to five decimal places so that times 1,000 it gives the 1,000-word rate. The page rate is the 1,000-word rate times words per page over 1,000, rounded to the cent, and the per-page quote is that times the pages. Carried figures (the floor and the 1,000-word rate) are rounded half-up to the cent, as the spreadsheet shows them, before the next step uses them. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that counts paid hours week by week and builds the per-word rate from the hours 1,000 words take, and the two agree to the cent. All inputs are illustrative, not market rates or measured speeds. The tax set-aside is a share you choose, not a tax calculation. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own year, speeds and policies, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from the hourly floor to a check on whether a finished job paid.