Photography Session Pricing Calculator

What this tells you

Photography pricing fails because shoot time is the smallest part of the job. Add editing, travel, admin and gear depreciation, divide by the sessions you can genuinely deliver in a month, and price so the total covers your income target, not just the hours holding a camera.

Pricing · free tool

Photography pricing calculator

2 h

Time on location

4 h

Culling, retouching, export

1 h

Door to door

1 h

Enquiries, contracts, delivery

$60

What you want an hour to earn

$40

Depreciation, insurance, storage

20%

Above your own pay

At those numbers

Total hours per session
8.0 h
Cost of delivering it
$520
Charge this per session
$650
Effective rate per shoot hour
$325

This is arithmetic on the numbers you entered, nothing here is a forecast or a promise about results.

The formula

total hours = shoot + editing + travel + admin · cost = hours × target rate + gear per session · price = cost ÷ (1 − margin)

How to read the result

  • Editing usually exceeds shoot time. Photographers who price by shoot hours are working for roughly half their intended rate.
  • Gear depreciation is a real per-session cost. Bodies and lenses wear out on a schedule regardless of how you feel about it.
  • If the price looks high against local competitors, check whether they are counting editing at all.
  • Editing usually takes longer than shooting. Photographers who price the shoot are working for roughly half the rate they think they are.

Frequently asked questions

Enough to cover shoot time, editing, travel, admin and gear depreciation at your target hourly income, plus a business margin. Editing alone typically doubles the hours a session really costs.

Because they price the shoot rather than the job. Culling and retouching regularly take twice the time spent shooting, and neither shows up in an hourly rate quoted for the session.

Packages let you price by outcome and bundle deliverables rather than competing on an hourly figure that hides most of the work.

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