Video Editing Rates: Freelance Video Editor Rates, Video Editor Hourly Rate and Video Editing Rates Per Minute
Price from what it takes to earn a US wage, not from the global marketplace median. Put your hourly rate and your hours per finished minute in the builder and it prices a short, a five-minute video and a ten-minute YouTube edit, then shows what you keep after the platform takes its cut.
BLS May 2025 wages and Upwork's own rate data. Runs in your browser.
| Deliverable | Finished min | Your price | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
On , a five-minute edit costs your client and the platform keeps across both sides.
The short answer
Video editing rates on Upwork run $10 to $60 an hour at the median, with entry-level editors at $15 to $30, intermediate at $30 to $60 and experts at $60 to $150 or more. Employed US editors earn a median of $75,420 a year, $36.26 an hour (BLS, May 2025). A US freelancer who wants to take that home has to bill about $100 an hour on an 8% platform, or $114 on Fiverr. At $100 and Upwork's own one to four hours per finished minute, a 60-second short is $100 to $400, a five-minute video $500 to $2,000 and a ten-minute YouTube edit $1,000 to $4,000. The $35.76 employed average, billed full time as a freelancer, nets about $19,000 a year.
Video editor hourly rate
Freelance video editor rates, by source and sample
Every row names where the number came from and how many people sit behind it. Federal and Indeed figures are employed wages; the Upwork rows are what freelancers on that platform list, across every country.
| Source | Rate | What it measures | Sample and date |
|---|---|---|---|
| BLS, film and video editors, lowest 10% | Under $19.37/hr | Employed, under $40,280 a year | Federal survey, May 2025 |
| BLS, film and video editors, median | $36.26/hr | Employed, $75,420 a year | Federal survey, 39,400 jobs |
| BLS, film and video editors, highest 10% | Over $71.42/hr | Employed, over $148,550 a year | Federal survey, May 2025 |
| Indeed, video editor | $35.76/hr | Average of job postings, range $15.36 to $83.25 | 1.2k salaries, Jul 2026 |
| Upwork, video editors | $10 to $60/hr | Median band of freelance rates, all countries | Upwork cost page, Mar 2026 |
| Upwork, entry-level editors | $15 to $30/hr | Upwork's own tier guidance | Upwork cost page, Mar 2026 |
| Upwork, intermediate editors | $30 to $60/hr | Upwork's own tier guidance | Upwork cost page, Mar 2026 |
| Upwork, expert editors | $60 to $150+/hr | VFX, motion graphics and niche work at the top | Upwork cost page, Mar 2026 |
BLS hourly figures are annual wages divided by 2,080 hours. The Bureau reports that 35% of film and video editors are self-employed, the highest share of any occupation on this site, and that editors in motion picture and video work earn a median of $79,570 against $63,250 in professional and technical services. Indeed's city figures run from $32.25 in Washington DC to $59.86 in Austin, so where the client sits moves the rate by almost half.
Video editing rates per hour
What you have to charge to earn a US editor's wage
The employed median is a salary. As a freelancer you pay the other half of payroll tax, your own health cover, software and storage, and you only bill part of the hours you work. These are the hourly rates that close that gap.
$59 / hr at 8%
$68 an hour if you sell on Fiverr, where 20% comes off every order before you see it.
$100 / hr at 8%
$114 an hour if you sell on Fiverr, where 20% comes off every order before you see it.
$183 / hr at 8%
$211 an hour if you sell on Fiverr, where 20% comes off every order before you see it.
How those numbers are built
A 40-hour week with six weeks off is 1,840 working hours. At 60% billable, which is realistic once you count pitching, reviewing footage that never makes the cut, export failures and the revision round you did not scope, that is 1,104 hours you can charge for. Add $6,000 of software, drives and insurance and $7,200 of health cover, then self-employment tax at 15.3% on 92.35% of profit. Divide by the billable hours and gross up for the platform fee. Change any input on the freelance rate calculator.
What the employed average actually pays a freelancer
Bill Indeed's $35.76 average across the same 1,104 hours and you invoice $39,479. A 10% Upwork talent fee takes $3,948, expenses and health cover take $13,200, and self-employment tax takes about $3,155. What is left is roughly $19,000 a year, a quarter of the employed median, before income tax. At $30, the top of Upwork's entry band, it is about $14,000. At Upwork's $10 floor the year ends below zero once the overhead is paid. The employed number is a floor for what the work is worth, not a rate to type into a gig.
Video editing rates per minute
A video editing price list at three rates
Hours follow Upwork's own rule of one to four hours of editing per finished minute. Prices are those hours at the $35 employed average, the $100 median-wage break-even and the $183 top-10% break-even, rounded to the nearest $5.
| Deliverable | Editing hours | At $35/hr | At $100/hr | At $183/hr |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 60-second short or reel | 1 to 4 | $35 to $140 | $100 to $400 | $185 to $730 |
| 5-minute video | 5 to 20 | $175 to $700 | $500 to $2,000 | $915 to $3,660 |
| 10-minute YouTube video | 10 to 40 | $350 to $1,400 | $1,000 to $4,000 | $1,830 to $7,320 |
Why one finished minute can be one hour or four
Upwork lists the reasons itself: the type of project, its length and complexity, the technical skills required, turnaround, and the quality and organization of the raw footage. A talking-head clip shot on one camera with clean audio and a supplied script is an hour a minute. The same minute with three camera angles, a music bed to license and time, captions in two languages, a lower-third package and a client who sends the B-roll in four batches is four, and the fourth hour is the one nobody budgeted.
That is the case for tiers. Put the one-hour version in Basic with the inputs you require (one camera, clean audio, footage delivered in one drop) and the four-hour version in Premium with what it includes. The client picks the tier that matches the footage they actually have, and you stop absorbing the gap.
Short-form is not cheap by the minute
A 60-second vertical cut is the smallest deliverable on the list and the one most often underpriced, because the finished length is short. Editing time is not. Pulling one usable minute out of a 40-minute podcast recording, captioning it, reframing it for 9:16 and adding a hook takes the same one to four hours as a finished minute of anything else, which is why $100 to $400 per short is the honest range at the median-wage rate. Editors who quote $25 a short are pricing the output, not the work, and the fee comparison for video editing platforms shows that at that size a flat client fee or a $3.50 surcharge makes it worse.
How to price
Build a video editing price list in four steps
Find your floor
Work out the hourly rate that clears the take-home you need. For the US median that is about $100 an hour on an 8% platform. Keep it private; it is your floor, not your headline.
Time your last ten edits
Log real hours per finished minute on your last ten jobs, from ingest to final export, including feedback rounds. Your own number replaces Upwork's one-to-four range in the builder above.
Price per project and round
Multiply finished minutes by hours per minute by your floor, round up to a clean number, and write what is included: cameras, revision rounds, captions, music licensing, formats and turnaround.
Publish as tiers
Group the list into Basic, Standard and Premium by footage complexity so a client can order without a call. A fixed tier gets compared on value; an hourly quote gets compared on rate.
For the tier structure itself, the guide to packaging a service into Basic, Standard and Premium walks through what goes in each level and how far apart to price them. Retainers for weekly YouTube or podcast clients are the same math with a volume discount in exchange for a guaranteed schedule; price the discount, do not guess it.
What the platform keeps
One $500 five-minute edit, six places to sell it
Five finished minutes at one hour each, at the $100 break-even. Spread is the platform's total cut from both sides as a share of what the client paid, so a platform that charges the buyer cannot hide half of it.
| Platform | Editor keeps | Client pays | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|
| FreelanceNation Studio | $485.00 | $500.00 | 3.0% |
| FreelanceNation Pro | $475.00 | $500.00 | 5.0% |
| FreelanceNation Starter | $460.00 | $500.00 | 8.0% |
| Contra, free plan | $500.00 | $515.00 | 2.9% |
| Upwork, 10% talent fee | $450.00 | $525.00 | 14.3% |
| Fiverr | $400.00 | $527.50 | 24.2% |
The honest read: Contra's flat $15 client fee edges all three of our plans on a $500 edit, 2.9% against Studio's 3.0%. The percentage plans win on smaller orders, where a flat fee is a big share of a single short: Studio below about $485, Pro below about $285 and Starter below about $172. Above $500 Contra's fee steps to $29, and Studio stays cheaper until the order passes roughly $940. Fiverr is the most expensive at every size and gets worse under $200, when its buyer pays 5.5% plus $3.50. To run your own order value through all of them, use the freelance fee calculator, or read the full Fiverr fee breakdown.
Who uses this
Three editors who need a price list this week
Leaving a staff edit job
You earned around the $36.26 median as an employee. Quoting that as a freelance rate is a pay cut of nearly three quarters once tax, cover and unbilled hours are counted. Start from $100 and adjust from your real hours per minute.
Moving shorts off Fiverr
Your gigs are priced for a 20% commission, a buyer who pays 5.5% and a $3.50 surcharge on every order under $200. On an 8% platform the same take-home needs about 13% less on the price tag, which is room to compete or to keep.
Adding editing to a video studio
A production company or podcast studio selling edits alongside shoots needs fixed line items the client can approve without a call. A per-minute price list with tiers turns re-edits and clip packages into orders instead of emails.
If you are still choosing where to list, the roundup of the best platforms to sell video editing services compares every venue's fees on a $150 short and a $1,000 project, and the sell video editing services page shows what a tiered gig looks like once the list is published.
Questions editors ask
Video editing rates: common questions
The questions editors type before they set a price, answered first sentence first.
How much do video editors charge?
Freelance video editors on Upwork list $10 to $60 an hour as the median band, with entry-level editors at $15 to $30, intermediate at $30 to $60 and experts at $60 to $150 or more. Employed US editors earn a median of $36.26 an hour (BLS, May 2025). A US freelancer who wants to match that median has to bill about $100 an hour after fees, tax and unbilled time.
How much does a video editor charge per hour?
Between $15 and $150 an hour on Upwork, depending on the tier: $15 to $30 for entry-level, $30 to $60 for intermediate and $60 to $150 or more for expert work such as VFX and motion graphics. Indeed's average across 1.2k US job postings is $35.76 an hour. Those are employed or global figures; a US freelancer needs roughly $100 to take home the same median wage.
What is the average hourly rate for video editing?
The average employed video editor in the United States earns $35.76 an hour on Indeed (1.2k salaries) and $36.26 an hour in the federal survey. Upwork's median band is lower, $10 to $60, because it mixes every country on the platform. Averages describe salaried work; they are not the rate a freelancer should quote.
How much should I charge for video editing?
Charge the rate that clears the income you need after fees and self-employment tax, which for the US median of $75,420 is about $100 an hour on an 8% platform or $114 on Fiverr. Then price per project using Upwork's rule of one to four hours per finished minute: a five-minute video is $500 to $2,000 at $100 an hour. Quote the project price, keep the hourly rate as your floor.
How much to charge for video editing per minute?
Multiply your hourly rate by the hours each finished minute takes. Upwork's rule of thumb is one to four hours of editing per finished minute, so at $100 an hour a finished minute costs $100 to $400. Simple talking-head cuts sit at the low end; multi-camera edits, captions, motion graphics and sound design push a minute toward the high end.
What is a video editing day rate?
A day rate is your hourly rate times the billable hours in a day, usually eight. At the $100 an hour a US editor needs to clear the median wage, that is an $800 day; at $183, the top-10% break-even, it is about $1,460. Day rates suit on-site and post-production work where the client controls the schedule; per-project pricing suits everything else.
How much do YouTube video editors charge?
At Upwork's one to four hours per finished minute, a 10-minute YouTube video takes 10 to 40 hours, so it costs $350 to $1,400 at the $35 employed average and $1,000 to $4,000 at the $100 a US freelancer needs to match the median wage. Most YouTube editors price a retainer per video instead, which is the same math with a volume discount for a guaranteed schedule.
Should video editors charge per hour, per minute or per project?
Per project, priced from your hourly floor and the finished length. Clients compare a fixed price faster and argue less about it, and a fixed price stops a fast editor being paid less for being fast. Per-minute rates are a useful way to build the quote; hourly billing belongs to open-ended retainers where the scope cannot be written down.
How much does a freelance video editor make?
There is no federal figure for freelancers alone, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median for all film and video editors at $75,420 a year in May 2025, with the top 10% above $148,550, and reports that 35% of editors are self-employed. What a freelancer keeps depends on billable hours and the platform fee: $35.76 an hour billed full time on Upwork nets about $19,000.
Do platform fees change what I should charge as a video editor?
Yes. On a $500 five-minute edit, Fiverr's 20% leaves the editor $400 while its client pays $527.50, an 8% commission leaves $460 and the client pays $500, and Contra leaves $500 with the client paying $515. To clear the median wage you need about $100 an hour on an 8% platform and $114 on a 20% one.
Put your price list where clients can order from it
Turn the list into Basic, Standard and Premium tiers on a shareable gig page. Clients see the price per short or per video, pick a tier and check out without a call, pay no buyer fee, and you keep 92% on Starter, 95% on Pro and 97% on Studio.
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