ARDOTOOLS

Wedding Photography Pricing Calculator

Estimate a profitable wedding package from shooting, editing, travel, print, overhead, fees, and margin.

Inputs

Result

Planning estimate only. Replace assumptions with your real costs, contracts, taxes, and market conditions.

How it works

  1. Count every hour, not just the day

    Shooting is the visible part. Editing, travel, calls and admin are the rest.

  2. Add the costs of delivering

    Second shooter, albums, prints, storage, insurance, gear you are using up.

  3. Set the margin you need

    What is left has to cover the weeks you are not shooting.

Who this is for

Building a package

Price the package from its real hours rather than matching what a competitor charges.

Costing an add-on

An engagement shoot or an extra hour has a floor. This finds it.

Quoting a destination wedding

Travel days are working days you cannot sell to anyone else.

Reviewing last season

Work out what you actually earned per hour, then decide what to change.

Questions

How many hours does a wedding really take?
Culling and editing commonly run two to three times the hours shot, before albums. An eight-hour day is rarely under twenty-five hours of work end to end.
Should I charge for travel time?
It is a working day either way. Whether you show it as a separate line or build it into the package is a presentation choice; leaving it out entirely is not.
What about gear?
Bodies, lenses and drives wear out and get replaced on a schedule. Treating a share of that replacement as a per-wedding cost is more honest than pretending gear is free until it breaks.
Why does my hourly rate look low?
Almost always because the invisible hours are not counted. That is the point of doing the arithmetic.