Video editor hourly rate calculator
This free calculator works out the hourly rate a video editor should charge, starting from the income you need — not from the per-minute price a job board suggested. It adds the licence, stock and storage costs editing quietly carries, and divides by the hours clients actually pay for, with revision rounds and render time counted in the thinking.
The pricing reality for freelance video editors
Editing gets priced in more units than almost any other trade: per finished minute, per video, per day, per hour — and the units are not interchangeable. Per finished minute is the worst of them, because the finished length is the one thing that tells you nothing about the work: a tight one-minute cut from a single clean take and a one-minute video assembled from nine hours of footage carry the same price tag and wildly different weeks. Project fees hide the revision rounds — two are quoted, six arrive. Day rates hide the difference between a rough assembly, which flows, and a notes-heavy polish day, which does not.
The invisible work in editing is structural. Ingesting and organising footage, syncing audio, hunting for the right stock clip or music track, building the graphics package, exporting in five aspect ratios, uploading, re-exporting when a platform rejects a file — clients see the timeline; they do not see the scaffolding around it. Even so, editing is desk work with a high sellable share, which is why the preset below starts billable time at 60%: more of an editor's week genuinely lands on a project than in most trades, and the leak is concentrated in revisions and machine time rather than everywhere.
The numbers below are starting presets, not a survey: a $72,000 target income, $6,000 a year of expenses — a realistic shape for editing licences, stock footage and music, storage and an accountant — and 60% billable time. With those starting numbers the calculator lands near $99 an hour. Change any figure to match your own books; the point is not the preset, it is that every cost gets counted before the project is quoted, not discovered at the sixth revision round.
Your numbers — video editor presets
Your recommended rate
| Income + expenses needed | $0 |
| Grossed up for tax | $0 |
| With profit margin | $0 |
| Working weeks | 0 |
| Total working hours | 0 |
| Billable hours | 0 |
Your rate is saved on this device only, so the Proposal Generator can show it when you price a project.
Costs video editors forget to put in the rate
- Licences and stock. The editing suite, the plugins, the stock footage, the music library, the font for the titles — each renews separately, and the track a client falls in love with often needs a licence tier your subscription does not include.
- Storage. Raw footage is heavy and clients expect it kept. Working drives, backup drives and cloud archive space grow with every project and never shrink.
- The rendering machine. A workstation powerful enough to edit and render modern footage is a serious purchase on a replacement cycle, and every hour it spends rendering is an hour it cannot do anything else.
- Revision rounds. Notes that arrive as a week of scattered messages instead of one consolidated round quietly double a job. Uncapped revisions are the most common way editing quotes stop matching editing reality.
- Project archives. The client who returns eighteen months later wanting one graphic changed expects the project to open exactly as it was left — keeping it that way is storage, organisation and time.
How this calculator works
Start with the hours you can genuinely sell. Take 52 weeks, subtract your vacation weeks, multiply by your hours per week, then multiply by your billable percentage. With the video editor presets — four weeks off, 40 hours a week, 60% billable — that is 1,152 billable hours a year, against the 2,080 hours a salaried job is counted on. That gap is why dividing a target salary by 2,080 always underprices editing work.
Next, work out what those hours must bring in. Add your desired income and your annual business expenses together, gross the total up for tax by dividing by one minus your tax rate — at a 25% estimate, divide by 0.75 — then add your profit margin and divide by your billable hours. That final number is the rate below which the year stops adding up.
Use it as the engine inside your project fees, too. A project quote is really an honest estimate of the edit hours — assembly, polish, revisions, exports — multiplied by this rate, plus the licence and stock costs that belong to that job. A day rate is this figure times eight. And when a client asks for a per-minute price, you can translate your hourly number into one if you must — but estimate from the footage and the brief, never from the finished length alone.
Video editor rate questions
Rates differ by trade — the same maths runs with different presets for graphic designer rates, freelance writer rates, web developer rates, marketing consultant rates, photographer rates, virtual assistant rates and social media manager rates, or start from the general freelance hourly rate calculator.