Wedding Photography Pricing Calculator
Check a wedding package price against what delivering it actually costs — every hour, not just the day — and see the profit and the margin it really leaves you.
Inputs
Result
Planning estimate only. Replace assumptions with your real costs, contracts, taxes, and market conditions.
How it works
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Count every hour, not just the day
Shooting is the visible part. Editing is entered separately and both are charged at the same internal rate, which is what turns an eight-hour wedding into the twenty-plus hours it really is.
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Add the costs of delivering
Travel, prints and albums, and overhead each have a field. Anything without one — a second shooter, storage, insurance, the share of gear this wedding used up — belongs in overhead, or it silently does not get counted.
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Read the profit and the margin
Enter the package price you are considering and the tool subtracts the costs and the payment fee from it. What comes back is the profit, the margin that price achieves, and the total it costs you to deliver.
Who this is for
Building a package
Price the package from its real hours rather than matching what a competitor charges, then check what the number you had in mind actually leaves.
Costing an add-on
An engagement shoot or an extra hour has a floor. Entering it as its own small package finds it.
Quoting a destination wedding
Travel days are working days you cannot sell to anyone else, so they belong in the hours as well as in the travel cost.
Reviewing last season
Put in the hours a wedding actually took rather than the ones you quoted. The margin that comes back is the one you really worked at.
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, and the editing field is where that gets counted.
- What does the target margin field do?
- It sets the margin that the suggested package price is built to reach, shown as the price for your target margin. The margin your own package price achieves is shown beside it, so you can compare the two and see how far your price is from the one you want.
- Why is my margin negative?
- Because the costs and the payment fee together exceed the package price. The figure is shown rather than hidden on purpose — a package that loses money usually looks fine until the hours are counted honestly.
- 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, entered under overhead, 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, and the internal labour rate is the field to be honest in — it should be what an hour of your time has to earn, not what you wish it earned.
- What is the effective hourly rate?
- What the package pays you for every hour of shooting and editing once travel, prints, overhead and the payment fee are covered, before your own labor charge is counted. It is the number to compare with what you would earn doing something else with those hours, and it is usually lower than people expect once editing is counted.