You Need To Know How To Price Your Photography

When you're starting your photography business, one of the most frustrating things is figuring out how to price your photography. 

How To Price Your Photography

Pricing your photography doesn't have to be frustrating. You can use the following three-step-formula to figure it out. Of course, it does take a bit of work. That said, knowing how to figure it out is a lot better than asking around or guessing.

Set Your Prices In Three Steps

As I explain in the video above there are three steps to figuring out how to price your work. First, you need to understand what you want/need to earn to make a living through photography. Second, you need to understand how many hours you can bill for. Finally you need to make sure the market you're in can provide those hours and that clients will pay those rates.

Determine Your Budget

The most important step is the first. Determine your budget. What amount of money do you need to earn to survive? Additionally, how much do you need to make to live the life you want to live? Chances are great that your income can fall somewhere between these with a bit of hard work. Of course that depends on the market in your area. However, we'll talk about that soon enough.

How To Determine Your Budget

Your photography business is just like any other business. Therefore, you need to know what you want and expect to make from your business. Here is how to figure that out:

1. Calculate what you need to pay all of your personal bills
   1. Rent or mortgage
   2. Car payment
   3. Health Insurance
   4. All of your bills
   5. Retirement fund
   6. Rainy Day fund
2. Now do the same for business expenses
   1. Equipment costs
   2. Are you renting a studio?
   3. Insurance (Equipment and Liability)
   4. Taxes
   5. Accountant or anyone else you need to hire

Budget Break Down

At this point I prefer to break things down by month. That said, you can do it however you'd like. Break things down by week or into whatever is easiest for you. I prefer looking at what I need by the month. After all, most bills are paid monthly.

Make sure you set your income goals higher than what you need to survive. After all, you likely want to take some vacation time and need to keep some extra money for unforeseen expenses. Plus, survival is stressful. Instead, pad your budget and aim for a higher amount to make life more enjoyable.

By-the-hour vs. by-the-job

There are multiple ways to structure how you bill. Ultimately some of this depends on the type of photography job you're doing. However, some photographers are very passionate with their opinions about billing by the hour or the job. No matter which way you do it, you need to understand how many hours you can work (and thus bill for). To do so, let's calculate your billable hours.

Calculate Billable Hours

Now, calculate how many hours you can bill for. What are billable hours? These are the amount of time you can spend working which you can charge clients for. An easier way to think of them is what amount of your time are jobs which you're being paid for taken up?

To understand billable hours you can also think about what aren't billable. Time you spend with your accountant isn't billable. In addition, the time you're banking, blogging, posting to social media, etc. are not billable.

Photographer's Billable Hours

To be able to price your photography you need to understand how many hours per week you're going to be doing non-billable stuff. In addition, you should expect to take some time for yourself and your family life. Vacations might not be affordable in the first or second year. However, you still need rest.

Additionally, you can't work 7 days a week 52 weeks per year. You will burnout doing that.

What Type of Photographer Are You?

What type of photographer are you? If you're photographing weddings you can expect to do most of those over the weekends. Since there are 52 weeks in a year, even if you worked every week, doing 2 weddings per week at 12 hours per wedding, your billable hours are going to be high.

After all, you've got to edit the photos, you're also meeting with the clients. This is time you can account for when charging them but typically isn't itemized on their bill. So your billable hours might be close to 40 in this example. Add in all the tasks you need to do that are not billable. Now you see how this is not sustainable. This is why wedding photographers typically don't do 2 weddings a week or work 52 weeks out of the year.

Avoid Photographer Burnout

Let's assume you have expenses of $5,000/month. Don't try to do 2 weddings a week, maybe try to do 1 per week or 52 per year. Then you only need to charge $1,250 per wedding. At a price like that you could really clean up in most any market in 2024.

Of course you won't land one wedding per week. That's because fewer people get married in the winter.

Be Realistic

Let's assume you take on that one wedding per week schedule for 9 months out of the year. In order to cover your $5k in expenses per month you need to bring in nearly $7k in those 9 months. Now you're charging $1,750 per wedding. Doing that will also give you an extra three-thousand.

Realistically, in most markets nobody is charging that little for weddings. At least, nobody who isn't trying to burn themselves out. It's more realistic to do closer to 20 weddings per year.  As you need $60,000 per year to pay your bills, ($5,000/month x 12 months), the math is easy. You need to charge $3,000 per wedding to survive.

Are you starting to see why many wedding photographers charge $5,000 and up?

Wedding photography is probably the simplest type of photography to calculate. This is because the times when you can photograph a wedding are largely dictated by the subject. However, you can adjust this process to every type of photography. Plus, you can contact me if you're stuck.

Understanding Your Photography Market

The final step to figuring out how to price your photography is understanding your market. If you're in a small town finding 25 wedding clients a year or dozens of families might be challenging.

Further, they might not be able to afford to pay what you'd like. Sadly, there is nothing you can do about that other than expand your service area, adjust your expectations, or move.

What Are Others Charging

Price fixing is illegal. However, it's not illegal to ask others what they're able to charge. Where you can get in trouble is by agreeing to set your prices at a specific amount to harm customers. Asking what ten other photographers charge isn't price fixing.

Understanding what they charge is step one. The next step is assessing how they're doing. Do they live in a nice house, drive a nice car, go on great vacations? Or, are they driving an old car, dressed shaby, always looking burned out?

Remember, this is only about understanding the market. You don't want to charge what others are charging. You want to charge what you need to in order to have the life you want. Therefore, it's important to know if the market will provide that for you.

How To Price Your Photography For A Joyful Life

Being a photographer is hard work. It puts a strain on your body and mental status. Therefore, make sure you're pricing your photography so that you can have a joy-filled life. Ultimately, what you charge is up to you. However, if you want to have happy clients, it helps for you to feel happy too. If this post or the video helped you please let me know by dropping a comment on the video or sending me a message. Good luck! If you use this method I don't think you'll need luck but it's never a bad idea to wish for it anyhow!