Pricing wedding videos has far less to do with what your competitors charge than with what a wedding genuinely costs you to deliver. Most videographers price the shooting day and quietly treat the edit as free, which is precisely why so many of them are busy without being especially profitable. Here’s how to build a number that holds up.
Start from your real hours
Before you decide anything about price, count what a wedding actually takes. Enquiry and calls. Planning. Travel. The shooting day. Offload and backup. Fifteen to thirty hours of editing. Revisions. Delivery. On a single-shooter wedding that routinely lands between 40 and 60 hours. Take your target annual income, divide by the number of weddings you can realistically deliver at that rate, and you’ve got your floor.
How much to charge for wedding videos, in practice
The market range is wide, and mostly it reflects experience, region and deliverables rather than skill. Matching somebody else’s figure matters far less than your price covering your hours, your costs and a margin, and your being able to explain what the couple gets for it. Any price you can’t justify is a price you’ll end up discounting under pressure.
Price the deliverables, not the day
Nobody buys hours. They buy films. Build your packages around what the couple receives, a highlight or a documentary edit or speeches or a teaser, and price each addition on the editing time it costs you rather than on its runtime. It makes upsells feel natural, too: a second film cut from footage you already shot is the highest-margin thing you have to sell.
The costs people forget
Gear depreciation and replacement. Storage and backup, which only grows year on year. Music licensing subscriptions. Insurance. Software. Travel and accommodation anywhere outside your area. Second shooter fees. Tax. A price that looks healthy when the only input is time looks very different once all of that is in the spreadsheet.
The editing hours are the real constraint
Dates in a calendar limit your shooting. Evenings limit your editing. Most videographers run into the editing ceiling well before they run into the booking ceiling, which means their price is effectively capped by how many films one person can cut. Either the price goes up to reflect that scarcity, or the editing comes off your plate.
Raising your prices
Raise on new enquiries, never on clients already booked. Move in steps instead of doubling overnight. Watch your enquiry-to-booking rate rather than the raw volume of enquiries, because what you’re after is fewer and better-fitting bookings at a higher rate. And if nobody ever hesitates at your price, it’s too low.
Where outsourcing changes the maths
Paying a per-film editing cost feels like handing over margin, right up until you count what those hours were stopping you from doing. If handing off the edit means shooting four more weddings in a season, that editing fee isn’t a cost. It’s what the extra bookings cost. Run that calculation before you conclude it’s cheaper to do it yourself. You can price it directly at Love Story Editing: send a project through our wedding video editing service, or choose a teaser edit, ceremony edit, or full wedding film. The standard is on our video portfolio, or you can request a quote. For the editing half of the equation, our guide to how long wedding video editing takes puts real numbers against the hours.
The takeaway
It comes down to counting every hour a wedding really costs you, editing included. Build packages around deliverables. Put your overheads in the calculation. Raise rates on new enquiries. Treat the editing ceiling as the constraint it actually is. Price for the whole job and the season stops being busy-but-broke.