Pricing for your editing time: worked examples
Most price lists are built around the day of the shoot. The day of the shoot is the smallest part of the job. This is a method for pricing the work that happens after everyone goes home: two published studies, a worksheet you fill in with your own hours, and a worked example you can copy. Not a rate card, a method.
What your price is actually buying
Ask a photographer what they charge and you get a day rate. Ask them where last week went and you get a completely different answer.
A UK survey of more than 300 wedding photographers, reported by PetaPixel, found that shooting accounted for 4 percent of working time. Editing took 55 percent. Choosing which frames to edit took another 11 percent. The survey ran in 2020, before AI selection tools were common, so read it as a portrait of a manual workflow rather than of your 2026 week. The shape of it has not changed much.
The consequence is uncomfortable. When a client pays you, they are mostly not paying for the day. They are paying for the two thirds of your working life that happens at a desk, alone, after the fact. Almost no price list says that, and that gap is where underpricing quietly begins.
How to set a rate from scratch, what to charge for a portrait session, how to build packages: all of that lives in our guide to pricing photography. This article is deliberately narrower. It assumes you already have prices, and it asks one question: are they covering post-production, or are you funding it out of your own evenings?
Where the working year actually goes
Here is the split the survey reported, ordered by size rather than by how it feels.
| Activity | Share of working time |
|---|---|
| Editing | 55 percent |
| Admin and business | 18 percent |
| Choosing the selects | 11 percent |
| Client communication | 7 percent |
| Shooting | 4 percent |
Source: UK survey of 300+ wedding photographers, 2020, via PetaPixel. It pre-dates the current generation of AI selection tools, so treat it as directional.
Now put a price next to it. The Knot's 2025 Real Weddings Study, which surveyed 10,474 US couples, puts the average wedding photographer at $3,000, with quartiles at $1,500, $2,800 and $4,700.
Take the median booking of $2,800 and apply the survey's split as a rough model. Editing and selection together are 66 percent of working time, which is about $1,850 of that invoice. Shooting is 4 percent, which is about $112. You are, on those figures, being paid roughly sixteen dollars of desk work for every dollar of camera work.
That is a model, not a measurement. It borrows one study's time split and lays it over another study's price, and the two surveys asked different people on different continents. It is useful anyway, because it points the same direction as every photographer's actual calendar.
Why you cannot just multiply the percentages
It is tempting to turn 4 percent into hours. Resist it, and here is why.
Survey respondents averaged 28 weddings a year. If a full day of coverage is ten hours, that is 280 hours behind the camera. For 280 hours to be 4 percent of a working year, the year would have to run to 7,000 hours. A calendar year only contains 8,760 hours in total, sleep included. The percentage is real as a felt proportion of effort, but it will not convert cleanly into a timesheet.
Self-reported percentages get rounded, reweighted and coloured by how a task feels. Eleven percent spent choosing photos is what it feels like from the inside. What you need for pricing is what it actually was.
So do the boring thing. For your next three jobs, log six buckets: shooting, travel and backup, choosing the selects, editing, admin and email, delivery. A note on your phone is enough. Three jobs is enough to see the pattern, and the pattern is almost always that selection and editing are larger than you thought and admin is larger than that.
A worked example, with your numbers in place of mine
Below is one wedding, logged. The hours are an example, not a benchmark. Replace every one of them with your own.
| Stage | Hours on this job |
|---|---|
| Shooting | 9 |
| Travel, backup, import | 1 |
| Choosing the selects | 4 |
| Editing | 11 |
| Admin, contract, emails | 2 |
| Delivery and gallery setup | 1 |
| Total | 28 |
Illustrative hours for one wedding. Price figures below come from The Knot's 2025 study, cited above.
Twenty eight hours. At the median price of $2,800 that is exactly $100 an hour before tax, gear, insurance, software or the drive. At the lower quartile of $1,500, the same 28 hours pays about $54 an hour. That is the number to look at, not the package price, and it is the number most photographers have never worked out.
Notice that choosing the selects is 4 of 28 hours, or 14 percent, which sits close to the survey's 11 percent. That agreement is a good sign that the example is not wildly off.
Now run one change. Suppose the selection pass drops from 4 hours to 1. The job becomes 25 hours, and at $2,800 the effective rate goes from $100 to $112 an hour. That is a 12 percent raise with no price increase, no awkward conversation, and no difference at all in what the client receives. Whether three hours is a realistic saving depends on your workflow and your shoot size, and we look at the honest range in how much time AI selection actually saves.
Four ways to fix an underpriced job
Once you have your real hourly rate, there are only four things you can pull. It is worth being clear about what each one costs you.
1. Raise the price
The cleanest lever and the only one that raises revenue rather than margin. It is also the hardest, because it needs new clients or a repositioned offer, and it takes a season to show up in the bank. Everything else on this list is a stopgap by comparison.
2. Deliver fewer photos
Typical ranges are 2,000 to 4,000 RAW frames across an eight to ten hour wedding day, with 400 to 800 images delivered. If you habitually deliver 800 where 500 would tell the story better, you have bought yourself 300 extra edits at your own expense. Clients rarely ask for a bigger gallery. They ask for a better one.
3. Change what editing means for you
Presets, batch work, or handing the pass to someone else. Outsourcing converts your hours into money at a fixed rate, which makes the arithmetic simple even when the decision is not. We covered the trade-offs in outsourcing photo editing.
4. Shorten the selection pass
This is the only lever on the list that the client cannot detect. Nobody has ever received a gallery and thought less of it because the photographer spent one hour choosing instead of four. It is also the least examined cost in most businesses, which is why we put real figures on it in the true cost of manual culling.
Levers two, three and four all improve margin on work you already have. Only lever one changes the top line. A business that pulls the other three forever and never touches the first one ends up very efficient at being underpaid.
Pricing the things that arrive after the invoice
Post-production costs do not stop when the gallery goes out. They arrive in ones and twos, by email, usually politely, and they are almost never priced.
The common ones: a rush turnaround because the couple wants images before the honeymoon, extra retouching on frames outside the package, a second round of album revisions, a request to reprocess a set in a different look. Each of these is real hours at the rate you calculated in the worked example above.
Price them from that number, not from a guess and not from what feels polite. If your real rate is $100 an hour and a retouch request is 40 minutes, it is not a favor, it is $67 of your week. Charging for it is not aggressive, it is just accurate, and a sentence in the contract makes it a policy instead of a negotiation. There is a full breakdown in how to charge for extra photo edits.
The one exception worth making
A small, fast, free favor early in a relationship often buys a referral worth more than the hour. The problem is never the first favor. It is the fourth one, three months later, when the goodwill has already been spent and the hours have not stopped.
How to say this to a client
None of the arithmetic above belongs on your price list. Clients do not buy hours, and itemizing your workload reads as either a complaint or an invitation to negotiate line by line.
What belongs on the price list is scope and time. Something like: coverage for a stated number of hours, a stated approximate number of edited images, delivered by a stated date. Three concrete promises. The pricing work you did stays behind the curtain and shows up only in the number at the bottom.
Two phrases earn their place. "Approximately 500 edited images" sets the delivery expectation that keeps lever two available to you all year. "Delivered within six weeks" turns turnaround into a commitment you priced for rather than a hope the client quietly assumes.
Both belong in front of the client before the deposit, not after. If you do not have a clean place to put them, Kepla's booking page is live now and free while we build the rest, and it will hold a date and take a deposit with your scope and turnaround written on the page.
Reviewing the number without dreading it
Pricing is not a decision you make once. It is a number you check, and checking it twice a year is enough for most photographers: once before your busy season opens and once when it closes and the data is fresh.
Three triggers should force an off-cycle review. You finished a season delivering galleries late. You took on work you did not want because you could not afford to say no. Or your logged hours per job crept up without your price moving. Any of the three means the number is out of date, whatever your accountant says about revenue.
When you do review it, look at your whole cost of delivery, not just your time. Software subscriptions have a way of accumulating in the background, and the cost calculator is a fast way to see what your stack actually runs a year. If the selection tools on that list are what you are weighing up, we costed the honest cheap end of the market in culling software on a budget.
The goal is not a perfect number. It is a number you can defend to yourself at 11pm when a job goes long, which is exactly when the temptation to under-quote the next one is strongest.
FAQ
How much of a photography price should cover editing time?
There is no fixed percentage, but the proportions are lopsided. A UK survey of over 300 wedding photographers found editing took 55 percent of working time and choosing the selects took 11 percent, against 4 percent for shooting. Applied to a median booking, roughly two thirds of the price is buying desk work rather than camera work. Log your own hours on three jobs and use those instead.
How do I work out my real hourly rate as a photographer?
Take one recent job. Add up every hour attached to it: shooting, travel, backup, choosing the selects, editing, admin, emails and delivery. Divide the package price by that total. The figure that comes out is usually well below what people assume, because the shoot itself is a small share of the hours. Do it for three jobs before you trust the answer.
Should I charge extra for a rush turnaround?
Yes, and price it from your real hourly rate rather than instinct. A rush means reordering your queue, which pushes other clients back and often costs an evening. Put a rush fee in the contract so it is a stated policy rather than an awkward conversation. Clients who genuinely need the images quickly almost always pay it without complaint.
Is it better to raise prices or work faster?
Raising prices is the only change that increases revenue. Working faster increases margin on work you already have. Both are worth doing, but a business that only ever gets more efficient becomes very good at being underpaid. Use speed gains to buy back your evenings first, then raise the price when your calendar and your portfolio can support it.
How many photos should I deliver from a wedding?
Typical ranges are 400 to 800 edited images from a day that produced 2,000 to 4,000 frames. If you habitually deliver at the top of that range, you are absorbing hundreds of extra edits nobody asked for. Set the expectation in writing before the booking, using a phrase like approximately 500 edited images, and it stays your decision all year.
Does faster culling actually change my pricing?
It changes your effective hourly rate rather than your price. In the worked example above, cutting the selection pass from four hours to one took a 28 hour job to 25 hours and moved the rate from $100 to $112 an hour. The client sees no difference at all, which is what makes it the least painful of the four levers.
Get paid for the hours nobody sees.
Kepla for Mac clears the obvious misses from a card, names the reason on every frame it sets aside, and leaves the choosing to you. Nothing is ever deleted, moved or renamed. Free through the private preview · the first hundred photographers keep it at $99 a year.