Pricing Your Work
Pricing your work can be very complicated and a controversial subject with lots of different views! Some say just do two or three times the cost of materials, which is fine if you just need to cover the cost of materials with a little extra thrown in.
This doesn’t work if you want your creative work to be your job, pay you a salary, pay your bills or just make a decent (or any) profit!
On this page are a range of calculators to help you see what you should be charging to make a profit on your creative works.
Hourly Labour Rate
This calculator will show you what you need to charge per hour to achieve the salary you put in the first field.
Calculator Field details
Earn Per Year – this field is where you put the amount of money per year you want to earn ie. £30,000
Weeks you work – everyone needs a holiday, so start with a full 52 week year and take out as many weeks as you want for holidays. In the UK we average 4 weeks holiday a year, so in this field you would put 48, that’s how many weeks you would work in a year with 4 weeks holiday.
Hours per week – How many hours per week do you want to work or need to work. A full week would be something like 40 (5 days x 8 hours per day).
Admin hours – We all have to do admin for our business. These admin hours need to be covered by the product you are selling. So the hours you put in here are removed from the making hours that will be your earning hours. A starting point is 25%, for a 40 hour week that would be 10 hours.
SUMMARY
Making hours – This is your Hours per week minus Admin hours. It gives you a total of hours each week that you have to make money from your work.
Earn per week to reach salary – This figure is the yearly salary divided by the weeks you work. It gives you an idea of how much money you need to make each week to achieve the salary you have put in.
Hourly charge for your time – This is probably the most important figure! This is the amount you need to charge per hour for your time when pricing a piece of work to sell in order to make the salary you want.
Pricing Calculator for artwork
This calculator will show you what you should be charging for your piece.
Calculator Field details
Earn Per Year – this field is where you put the amount of money per year you want to earn ie. £30,000
Weeks you work – everyone needs a holiday, so start with a full 52 week year and take out as many weeks as you want for holidays. In the UK we average 4 weeks holiday a year, so in this field you would put 48, that’s how many weeks you would work in a year with 4 weeks holiday.
Hours per week – How many hours per week do you want to work or need to work. A full week would be something like 40 (5 days x 8 hours per day).
Admin hours – We all have to do admin for our business. These admin hours need to be covered by the product you are selling. So the hours you put in here are removed from the making hours that will be your earning hours. A starting point is 25%, for a 40 hour week that would be 10 hours.
SUMMARY
Making hours – This is your Hours per week minus Admin hours. It gives you a total of hours each week that you have to make money from your work.
Earn per week to reach salary – This figure is the yearly salary divided by the weeks you work. It gives you an idea of how much money you need to make each week to achieve the salary you have put in.
Hourly charge for your time – This is probably the most important figure! This is the amount you need to charge per hour for your time when pricing a piece of work to sell in order to make the salary you want.