What does an hour of your work actually cost - and did you calculate that, or guess?
For most freelance video editors, a price gets picked this way: look at a few similar profiles on a marketplace, land somewhere in the middle, maybe shave it down a bit "just to make sure they say yes." Six months later, income barely covers expenses, and nobody ever counted the hours.
That's not a math error. It's the absence of math: the price was chosen on instinct, not calculated. And instinct works against you here - the fear of "losing the job" almost always pulls the number down, never up.
Why the market spread isn't a benchmark
On freelance marketplaces, a price for editing a video can start well under $20 for beginners and climb past $500 for experienced editors on a similarly sized project. That spread doesn't tell you what you should charge:
- The listed price often doesn't include taxes. Many editors post a take-home number and forget a chunk of it is owed to the government
- The price doesn't account for real hours. A five-minute video might take three hours to cut, or it might take fifteen, depending on how much footage and how many revisions come with it
- A low price on someone else's profile might be a beginner's underpricing, not a market benchmark - copying it means copying someone else's mistake
- A high price from an experienced editor includes years of built-up speed and reputation that you don't have yet - and that's fine, but copying the number without the context behind it doesn't make sense
The benchmark should come from your own expenses and your own time, not from someone else's profile.
How to calculate your minimum rate
Your minimum rate is the hourly price below which the work stops paying for itself. It's a three-step calculation.
1. Add up your living expenses
Total your required monthly costs - rent, food, transport, phone and internet, equipment and its depreciation. This is the minimum amount your work needs to bring in for you to keep doing it, without going into debt or putting off a new drive or lens indefinitely.
2. Add taxes
Add whatever percentage goes to taxes under your local freelance or self-employment status on top of the number from step one, so you know what you need to earn before taxes, not what you want left over after them.
3. Count your real billable hours
Subtract time spent finding jobs, emailing clients, handling revisions that weren't in the original scope, and days with no work at all from your working month. Most freelancers end up with noticeably fewer billable hours per month than hours spent at the computer - usually 60-70% of total time, not the 100% it feels like when you're starting out.
Divide your total costs plus taxes by your real billable hours - that's your minimum hourly rate. Anything you charge below it doesn't cover your own life, which means the work is effectively being subsidized by another source of income or by debt.
A worked example
Say your living expenses run $2,000 a month, and taxes add another 10%, so you need to bring in roughly $2,200 before taxes. Out of a 160-hour working month, 65-70% ends up billable - about 105 hours, with the rest going to finding jobs, client emails, and unplanned revisions.
$2,200 divided by 105 hours gives a minimum rate of about $21 an hour. If a video takes five hours to cut, the floor price for that job is around $105, before any revision buffer. That's a floor, not a recommended price - your actual rate should sit higher once project complexity and your reputation are factored in.
From hours to a project price
Do the math in hours, but invoice the client for the whole project. Hourly pricing punishes speed: the faster and more experienced you get, the less you earn for the same result, because it takes you fewer hours to produce it. A project price works differently:
- Estimate the hours at your minimum rate, based on the type of video and how much footage you're working with
- Add a buffer for one round of revisions beyond what's agreed - revisions past that buffer get billed separately, and that's worth stating upfront, not after the fact
- Round the total to a number you can say out loud to a client without hesitating
A project price is also simpler for the client - they see one number for a result, instead of counting the hours you'll spend on their video or trying to track the process minute by minute.
A common mistake at this stage is setting one flat price for everything: "video editing - $75," no qualifiers. A five-minute vlog with a single take and a thirty-minute interview with ten speakers take wildly different amounts of time, and therefore deserve different prices. A price list with ranges by video type and complexity holds up better than one universal number, and it saves you the awkward "why is this one more expensive" conversation.
When and how to raise your prices
Raise your price based on signals from the market, not on a schedule:
- No open slots for the next two to three weeks - demand already exceeds supply at your current price
- Clients keep arriving through referrals with no effort on your part - trust is already built, and you don't need to re-justify the price
- Your portfolio has grown to the point where your old samples no longer reflect your current level of work
Raise prices by 15-20% at a time, and apply the new rate to new clients first, keeping current clients on the old terms for one or two more projects with a heads-up about the change ahead. A sudden across-the-board price hike with no warning is a common reason loyal clients walk away - clients you could have kept with a simple message ahead of time: "starting next month, rates for new projects are changing; your current terms still apply for one more job."
Track time, not instinct
Calculating your minimum rate only works if you actually know how many hours a project takes, rather than estimating it after the fact based on how tired you feel. Tools like Basalt let you log real time spent on each project, so a few months in you're looking at an actual number instead of a vague sense of "I work a lot" - a number you can use to recalculate your rate and see which types of projects are genuinely worth it and which only look that way.
Checklist: you're underpricing yourself if...
- Your price was picked by eyeballing other profiles, not calculated from your own expenses
- You don't know how many billable hours you actually have in a month
- Taxes aren't factored into your price
- Revisions beyond the agreed scope aren't billed separately
- Your price hasn't changed since your first client, even as your portfolio has grown
- You have no open slots, but your price is the same as it was six months ago
If at least three of these are true, recalculate your rate this week - don't wait for the next project.
Related reading
- How to Find Your First Clients as a Freelance Video Editor - if you have fewer clients than you'd like, this one covers where to look for them
Summary
The right price isn't a number borrowed from a competitor's profile - it's the result of a simple calculation: expenses plus taxes, divided by billable hours. Recalculate that number as you grow, instead of holding onto it forever just because clients keep saying yes. Start with one step - add up your real monthly expenses - and your minimum rate stops being a mystery.