How Much to Charge for Voice Over Work and Voice Acting

October 31, 2026 · Freelance and creator rates

How much to charge for voice over work starts with the hourly floor your own year needs, then converts it into the units clients buy: a finished minute, a word of script, a session, and usage on top. In the illustrative example below, a voice actor with a home studio who wants $42,000 a year kept needs $73.30 per paid studio hour. With 7 studio minutes behind each finished minute, that is $8.55 a finished minute, and a 3-hour session bills $403.15 once setup, prep and editing are counted.

None of these are market rates. Every ratio, policy and multiplier belongs to one made-up voice actor. Nothing here is a union or guild scale, a rate card, or a statement of what voice acting sells for. The usage step multiplies by figures you type in yourself.

The voice over rate formula

hourly floor        = (income / (1 - tax set-aside) + costs) / paid hours
finished minute     = floor x (recording + editing minutes) / 60
per-word rate       = finished-minute rate / words read per minute
session fee         = floor x the larger of your minimum hours and
                      (mic hours + setup + prep + editing)
fee with usage      = session fee x your use, term and region factors

Step 1: the hourly floor

The example voice actor wants $42,000 kept after a 20% tax set-aside and has $4,500 a year of business costs: website, demo reel, casting site subscriptions, coaching and insurance. Studio gear is handled separately in step 6. They book 18 studio hours a week for 48 weeks, and cancellations and gaps take 10% of them.

Auditions, marketing, client email and invoicing add 14 unpaid hours a week. Of 1,536 hours worked a year, only 51% are paid, so the $42,000 spread over every hour worked is $27.34 an hour, under the $73.30 floor. Auditions are not free time; the floor is what pays for them.

Step 2: how much to charge per finished minute

A finished minute of audio is not a minute of work. The example takes 2.5 minutes of recording (takes, pauses, rereads) and 4.5 minutes of editing (cleanup, breaths, pacing, export) for each finished minute, so each one is 7 studio minutes. At the $73.30 floor, a finished minute is $8.55.

A 30-minute finished job at $8.55 a minute is $256.50, for 3.5 studio hours of work. Editing is 64% of the studio time here, more than the recording. If you price only the minutes behind the mic, you are giving the editing away.

Step 3: how much to charge per word of script

When a client sends a word count instead of a running time, you need a per-word rate: the finished-minute rate divided by your own read pace. The example reads 150 words per finished minute in this style, so the word rate is $0.0570, or $5.70 per 100 words.

A 1,200-word script runs 8 finished minutes and prices at $68.40 on the word rate. That is under the example’s $75.00 minimum for any script, so the charge is the minimum. Time your own reads: a slow, warm narration and a fast promo read do not share a pace, and the word rate moves with it.

Step 4: how much to charge for 3 hours of voice acting

A session quote has more in it than the hours at the mic. The example’s 3-hour session:

That is $134.38 per hour at the mic, against the $73.30 floor, because setup, prep and editing ride on every session. A short 0.5-hour session adds up to 1.75 hours of time, under the example’s 2-hour minimum, so it bills the minimum: $146.60. The minimum exists because the setup and prep do not shrink with the job.

Step 5: usage, term and regions at your own multipliers

What a recording is licensed for (where it runs, for how long, in how many markets) is priced on top of the recording. The pack holds no rate card for this; you set every multiplier. The example uses 1.5 for this kind of use, adds 25% of the first region for each extra region, and adds 30% of the first year for each extra year, over 3 regions and 2 years:

The multipliers combine to 2.925 times the recording fee: $1,179.21 in all, of which $776.06 is usage. Renewing for one more year at the same terms would add $272.13. Exclusivity, buyouts and union terms are not in this arithmetic; they belong in your contract.

Step 6: retakes and the home studio

Retakes are time. In the example a retake round is 20 minutes of recording and editing plus 10 of setup, 30 minutes in all, or $36.65 at the floor. Including 1 round in the quote is not free: it raises the quote from $403.15 to $439.80. The example expects 2 rounds on this client, so the 1 beyond the included one bills separately and the job comes to $476.45.

The studio itself has a cost. $1,800 of mic, interface, booth and treatment spread over 4 years, plus $240 a year of software and upkeep, is $690.00 a year, or $4.60 a job over 150 jobs. A $15.00 studio fee per job brings $2,250.00 a year, which covers that, and after software it pays back the gear in 135 jobs, about 10.8 months. If your business costs in step 1 already include the gear, do not add a fee as well.

The insight: the minute you sell is not the minute you work

Every unit a client buys hides time they never see. The finished minute hides editing; the session hides setup and prep; the included retake hides another 30 minutes; the year hides auditions. Price from the studio minute up and each of those is paid for. Price from the finished minute down and they come out of your floor.

The check is after delivery. Say a job sold at $600.00 took 6.5 hours, with $25.00 paid out on the job and a 3% payment fee ($18.00). That leaves $557.00, or $85.69 an hour against the $73.30 floor, so it cleared. The price that pays exactly the floor on those hours was $516.96, so this job had $83.04 of room. When a job falls short instead, compare its hours with step 2 to see whether your editing ratio was too optimistic.

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. The finished-minute rate is the floor times studio minutes per finished minute over 60, rounded to the cent, and a job price is that rate times the finished minutes. The per-word rate is the finished-minute rate over read pace. Billable session hours are the larger of the minimum and mic hours plus setup, prep and editing. Usage multiplies the session fee by your use multiplier, then by one plus your add-on for each extra region and each extra year. Carried figures 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 builds usage up region by region and year by year and counts the gear payback job by job, and the two agree to the cent. All inputs are illustrative, not market rates, union scale or measured studio times. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

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