Hourly, Day Rate or Per Project: How Editors Actually Charge
Answers video editor day rate vs hourly vs project
Every billing model creates an incentive, and two of the three common ones point the wrong way. Understanding which is which protects both sides of the arrangement.
Hourly
The incentive: work more hours. Not dishonestly, just structurally: the editor who finishes early earns less for the same result.
What it is good for: work whose scope genuinely cannot be estimated, such as exploratory editing where the client wants to see options before committing to a direction. Also fine for small additions to an existing project.
What it is bad for: anything repeatable. An editor who has cut eighty brand films is faster than one who has cut four, and hourly billing charges the faster one less for a better result. That is backwards.
The tell that you are being overcharged: if you are billed hourly and the first three hours are spent finding the files.
Day rate
The middle ground, and the most common. A rate for a day of attention rather than a unit of output.
The incentive: be present. Slightly better than hourly, because a finished day is a finished day.
What it is good for: work that arrives in blocks, like a shoot day that needs cutting the following morning, or a retainer where a client needs capacity rather than a deliverable.
What it is bad for: projects where the deliverable is clear, because you end up paying for days rather than for the film, and a well-run job finishes faster than the estimate in a way that only benefits the client if the quote is fixed.
The tell: the quote is in days and the scope is in outputs.
Per project
A fixed figure for a described deliverable.
The incentive: work efficiently. The editor who finishes in three days gets paid the same as the one who takes six, so the good one is rewarded rather than penalised.
What it is good for: anything with a definable end. Which is most commercial work, and effectively all advertising.
What it is bad for: a client who cannot describe the scope, and a project where the client's own decisions are still moving. A fixed price is only fair if the thing being priced is fixed, and the four things that move the price are worth naming in writing for exactly this reason.
The tell: you are paying for a project and being asked to approve days.
What to put in the quote whichever model you use
- The model, named
- What counts as included: how many versions, how many revision rounds
- What starts a new charge: a change to the scope, a change of direction, a new deliverable
- What the client has to provide and when, since a late handover moves every date
Which one to ask for
If you have a clear deliverable and a deadline, ask for a project price. If the piece is exploratory and you genuinely do not know what you want yet, pay by the hour and accept that the exploration is the product. If you need someone to be available rather than to produce, buy days.
Mixing them is where quotes go wrong. A project price with the scope still open is an argument waiting to happen, in both directions, and the argument is always about which of the four pricing factors moved.
The contact page quotes per project for described work and says so when a job is too open to price that way.