Free per-word rate calculator
A per-word price is only honest when it comes from two numbers you already own: your hourly rate and the speed at which you actually produce finished words. This calculator does that one division — rate ÷ words per hour — and gives you the price per word, per 1,000 words and per page, then checks a real job and a real client’s offer against it. At $60 an hour and 500 finished words an hour, the answer is $0.120 a word; at half that speed it is $0.24. That gap is why copying another writer’s word rate is the quietest pay cut in the trade.
Build the conversion
New to the rate itself? Set it first with the hourly rate calculator — a per-word rate built on a guessed hourly rate is the same guess in smaller units. On this device, that rate is then prefilled here. If you work in one trade, the writer, translator and proofreader rate pages run this same conversion from presets built for the work.
Your per-word rate
Your $60 hourly rate at 500 finished words an hour. Change the speed and this number moves — that is the point.
| Job length | 2,000 words |
| Time at your speed | 4 hours |
| Job price at your per-word rate | $240.00 |
| Client’s offer | $0.100 a word |
| What the offer pays per hour | $50.00/hr |
Job check: 2,000 words at 500 words an hour is 4 hours of work, and at your per-word rate it pays $240.00 — exactly your $60 hourly rate across those hours, because the word rate was built from it. The figure worth sitting with is the time: a 5,000-word job at this speed is 10 hours, however quick it sounds in an email.
Offer check: $0.100 a word at your speed pays $50.00 an hour — $10.00 an hour below your $60 rate. Across a 10-hour job that gap is $100.00. Either the offer rises, or the job has to be unusually fast or unusually useful to be worth taking.
Worked example
A writer whose rate is $60 an hour and whose honest, finished pace — research, drafting and self-editing included — is 500 words an hour. These are the calculator’s starting numbers, run through it exactly as they stand:
| Hourly rate | $60.00 |
| Working speed | 500 finished words an hour |
| Per-word rate ($60 ÷ 500) | $0.120 |
| Per 1,000 words | $120.00 |
| Per page (250 words) | $30.00 |
| A 2,000-word job | $240.00 — 4 hours of work |
| A client’s offer of $0.10 a word | $50.00 an hour — $10.00 below the rate |
Read the last row twice. Ten cents a word sounds like a round, reasonable number; converted at this writer’s speed it is a $10 pay cut on every hour, and $100 across a ten-hour job. And read the job row for the time rather than the price: 2,000 words is four hours of a working day, and the 5,000-word piece a client calls “quick” is ten. The per-word rate is shown to three decimals because word rates live there — but the job price is worked out from the unrounded division, so a long document is priced on the real number, not the rounded display.
How the conversion works
- One division. Per-word rate = hourly rate ÷ words per hour. Everything else on this page is that single number scaled: times 1,000 for the per-1,000-words price, times your words-per-page for the per-page price, times a job’s word count for its price. There is no second formula to disagree with the first.
- Speed is the whole game. The rate is only as honest as the speed inside it, and speed means finished words — researched, drafted, revised and delivered — not typing speed. It differs by trade and by text: drafting original copy is slower, proofreading a clean manuscript is faster, and the same person works at two different speeds on two different documents. Measure yours on the last few real jobs, words divided by hours, and re-measure when the kind of work changes.
- Per-word punishes slow, careful work. The word count of a research-heavy feature, a dense technical translation or an error-riddled manuscript barely moves while the hours climb — and a per-word fee pays the count, not the hours. That is why experienced writers treat per-word as one unit among several, and why translators honestly quote different word rates for different texts. Work whose value is in the thinking is usually priced better by the hour or by the project.
- Check every offer backwards. A client’s per-word offer converts just as easily in reverse: offer × your speed = the hourly rate you would actually earn. The check panel above runs it for you. An offer below your floor is not automatically a refusal — a fast, simple, portfolio-worthy job can be worth taking with open eyes — but it should never be accepted by accident, on the strength of a word count that sounds large.
- Set the rate before the word rate. A per-word price inherits everything underneath the hourly rate it came from — the tax, expenses, holidays and non-billable time the rate was built to cover. If that rate was guessed, the word rate is a guess in smaller units. Build the rate properly in the hourly rate calculator, then convert it here.
The calculator finds the numbers; the documents carry them. Put the word rate and the job’s scope into a proposal, so the price the client accepted is the price on paper, and if a piece grows past its brief, the extra words are a conversation before they are a surprise. When the piece itself is a blog post, the free blog writing tools at WorkKitly Write take it from a working title to a publish-ready draft.