Wedding photographer pricing calculators
Wedding photography is the clearest example of a job where the visible work is a fraction of the total. A ten-hour wedding day commonly carries twenty or more hours of culling, editing, retouching, client communication and delivery behind it.
Price the edit, not just the day. These calculators let you enter post-production hours explicitly so your day rate stops flattering the real return.
Calculators for wedding photographers
Costs that belong in every booking
- Shooting hours
Coverage on the day, plus travel to and from the venue.
- Editing and culling
Usually the largest single time cost; enter it honestly per wedding.
- Second shooter
Their fee, travel and any meals, treated as a variable cost of that wedding.
- Kit depreciation and renewal
Bodies, lenses and lighting have finite shutter counts and lifespans.
- Albums and products
Trade cost of albums, prints and USB or gallery delivery.
- Storage and backup
Cloud storage, drives and the archive obligation you carry for years afterwards.
- Insurance and software
Public liability, kit cover, editing suites and gallery hosting.
- Marketing and fayres
Wedding fayre stands, advertising and website costs allocated per booking.
Common pricing mistakes
- Quoting a day rate with an invisible edit
If twenty hours of editing are unpriced, your headline day rate is roughly a third of what it appears.
- Selling albums at trade cost plus a little
Album design time is skilled labour and should be priced as hours, not absorbed.
- Forgetting the archive
Storing and re-supplying images for years after delivery is a real, ongoing cost.
- Discounting off-season without a floor
Discounts should be tested against your minimum viable price, not offered from instinct.
Worked example
Illustrative example — a £2,200 full-day wedding. These figures are an illustrative walk-through of the formulas below — they are not survey data, benchmarks or a real customer result.
| Package price | £2,200 |
|---|---|
| Shooting hours | 10 hrs |
| Editing and album design | 22 hrs |
| Enquiry, meetings, adminTotal: 38 hrs | 6 hrs |
| Second shooter | £300 |
| Album trade cost | £180 |
| Travel (120 miles @ £0.45) | £54 |
| Kit depreciation£13,500 kit ÷ 150 expected weddings | £90 |
| Storage, insurance, software allocated | £70 |
| True cost excluding owner time | £694 |
| Contribution before owner pay | £1,506 |
| Effective hourly rate£1,506 ÷ 38 hrs | £39.63 |
A £2,200 wedding is not a £220 hourly day. Once editing and admin are counted, it is under £40 an hour before tax — which is the number that should drive your package pricing.
How the figures are calculated
- Total hours = shooting + travel + culling + editing + album design + admin.
- Contribution = package price − variable costs − allocated overheads.
- Effective hourly rate = contribution ÷ total hours.
Frequently asked questions
- How many hours should I allow for editing?
- Time one full wedding end to end rather than estimating. Most photographers find the true figure is meaningfully higher than their assumption, and every downstream price depends on it.
- How should I price a second shooter?
- Their fee plus travel is a variable cost of that booking. If the package price does not rise when a second shooter is added, the margin on that package falls.
- What is a good profit margin for wedding photography?
- We do not publish an industry benchmark, because credible figures would need consented data we do not yet have. Set a target margin that pays your target hourly rate and covers your overheads, then use the calculator to test whether your packages reach it.
Related guides and tools
Results are planning estimates based on the figures you enter. They are not financial, accounting or tax advice.