Photography Pricing Calculator

This calculator prices a photography session the way a freelancer actually bills: as labor plus overhead, with a markup layered on top. Shoot Duration and Editing Time are added together into total billable hours, then multiplied by your Target Hourly Rate to produce Labor Cost — the dollar value of your own time, since editing routinely eats more hours than the shoot itself and is easy to under-price if you only think about time on location. Equipment Cost per Shoot and Travel Cost are summed separately into Overhead Cost, covering gear depreciation, rentals, consumables, mileage, and gas. Labor and overhead together form the Cost Subtotal, and the Profit Amount is that subtotal multiplied straight through by your Profit Margin percentage — so a 30% margin adds 30% on top of costs, rather than targeting 30% of the final retail price (those are different numbers, and mixing them up is the single most common markup mistake).

Subtotal plus profit gives the recommended Session Price. The math is intentionally simple and cost-driven: it has no awareness of what your local market will bear, how in-demand your style is, or what competitors charge, so treat the output as a pricing floor rather than a ceiling. It also won't catch hidden costs you forget to enter — a second shooter, prop rentals, license fees for music or fonts in a video add-on — so audit your actual expenses before trusting the number for a specific job type like weddings or full-day commercial shoots, where overhead tends to run far above the defaults. Because editing time is the input photographers most often lowball, run a few real sessions through a time tracker before locking in that figure; a rate built on optimistic editing estimates will chronically underprice your work no matter how carefully you set the profit margin.