Photography & events
Photography Pricing Calculator
Prices photography from the cost of doing business, where the shoot is a fraction of the hours.
Result
Overhead and margin are taken as shares of the selling price, which is why the cost is divided rather than multiplied. Adding 15% to cost does not produce a 15% margin. Gross profit is what is left after the cost of doing the job. Overhead comes out of that: the building, the office wages, the vans, insurance, software and advertising. A healthy gross margin still loses money if overhead is larger.
Get a Free Business AuditHow the calculation works
Annual business costs plus the income required, divided by the shoots realistically deliverable in a year, gives a price per shoot. The deliverable count is the sensitive input, because a shoot consumes far more hours than the time on site once culling, editing, communication, delivery and the enquiries that did not book are counted.
What moves the number
- Shoots realistically deliverable per year, not per week.
- Total hours per shoot including editing and communication.
- Business costs including equipment replacement and insurance.
- Unpaid enquiry and consultation time.
Where this one goes wrong
Pricing from the shoot hours is the error that keeps photographers underpaid, because editing a wedding or a commercial shoot takes many times the capture time and none of it is visible to the client. Count total hours. The other omission is equipment replacement: bodies, lenses and computers wear out and fail, and a price that does not fund their replacement is borrowing from a future the business will have to pay for.
Before you quote
- Price from total hours per shoot, not time on site.
- Fund equipment replacement inside the price.
- Count the unpaid enquiry time in the annual hours.
Questions
About this calculator
Why is photography pricing so much higher than the shoot hours suggest?
Because the shoot is a fraction of the work. Culling, editing, communication, delivery and the enquiries that did not book all consume hours the client never sees, and a price built on capture time alone is a fraction of what the business needs.
What is the cost of doing business?
Everything the business spends in a year: equipment replacement, insurance, software subscriptions, website, marketing, travel, accounting and tax. Divided across the shoots you can realistically deliver, it gives the floor a price has to clear.
How many shoots can one photographer deliver?
Fewer than people assume, because each one carries editing and administration. Working backwards from total hours per shoot against the hours available in a year gives a realistic number, and it is usually well below the booking calendar's capacity.
The formula
price = direct cost / (1 - overhead% - margin%)
Put this calculator on your site
Free to embed. Paste this where you want it to appear. It stays up to date automatically because it loads from BDEVY.
Please keep the attribution line. It is the only thing we ask in return.
How to use this calculator
- Labour cost ($). Burdened: wages plus tax, insurance and the vehicle, not the hourly wage.
- Materials cost ($). Enter your own figure; the page starts at $60.
- Other direct costs ($). Permits, disposal, equipment hire, subcontractors.
- Overhead rate (%). Overhead as a share of revenue. Work it out from last year's accounts.
- Target net margin (%). Enter your own figure; the page starts at 15%.
The result updates as you type, so you can try a figure, see what it does to price to quote, and change it back. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere or saved.
A worked example
These are the figures the calculator opens with. Every number in the results column below is produced by the same calculation the page runs, so you can follow it through before putting your own figures in.
What goes in
| Input | Value |
|---|---|
| Labour cost | $300 |
| Materials cost | $60 |
| Other direct costs | $0 |
| Overhead rate | 22% |
| Target net margin | 15% |
What comes out
| Result | Value |
|---|---|
| Price to quote main result | $571.43 |
| Direct cost | $360 |
| Overhead recovered | $125.71 |
| Net profit | $85.71 |
| Gross margin | 37.0% |
| Markup on direct cost | 58.7% |
Quote $571.43 to cover $360 of direct cost, recover $125.71 of overhead and leave $85.71 of net profit. That is a 58.7% markup on cost.
How sensitive the answer is
Holding everything else steady and changing only labour cost, this is what happens to price to quote. It is worth knowing which of your inputs the answer actually hinges on, and which barely move it.
| Labour cost ($) | Price to quote |
|---|---|
| $150 | $333.33 |
| $225 | $452.38 |
| $300 example above | $571.43 |
| $450 | $809.52 |
| $600 | $1,048 |
Every other input is held at the example value while this one changes, which is not how a real job behaves. Treat it as a guide to which number matters most, not as five separate quotes.
What each figure means
- Labour cost ($)
- Burdened: wages plus tax, insurance and the vehicle, not the hourly wage.
- Materials cost ($)
- A money amount, starting at $60.
- Other direct costs ($)
- Permits, disposal, equipment hire, subcontractors.
- Overhead rate (%)
- Overhead as a share of revenue. Work it out from last year's accounts.
- Target net margin (%)
- A percentage, between 0 and 80, starting at 15%.
What the results tell you
| Result | What it is |
|---|---|
| Price to quote | The headline result. A money figure. |
| Direct cost | A money figure. |
| Overhead recovered | A money figure. |
| Net profit | A money figure. |
| Gross margin | A percentage. |
| Markup on direct cost | A percentage. |
Estimating is the easy part
The jobs you never hear about cost more than the ones you mis-measure. BDEVY builds the marketing, systems and automation that bring them in.