Freelance rates by profession
What people in your field actually charge, where that number comes from, and a calculator that works out your own floor from it. Every benchmark is sourced and dated — and where the public data is thin, we say so rather than filling the gap with a plausible number.
Copywriter
$75–$100/hr, or 15–30¢ per word, for articles and ghostwriting
Editorial Freelancers Association 2026 Editorial Rate Chart
Survey-backedConsultant
£540/day median (management consultant); quartiles £425–£622
ITJobsWatch UK contract job ads
Partly survey-backedWeb Developer
£513/day median (software developer); quartiles £424–£575
ITJobsWatch UK contract job ads
Survey-backedSocial Media Manager
Average monthly retainer $2,107 across all respondents
HeyOrca social media pricing report
Partly survey-backedGraphic Designer
$38.06/hr average; 10th–90th percentile $20.68–$85.11
Payscale
Partly survey-backedVirtual Assistant
£32.35/hr average; specialists £50+/hr
Society of Virtual Assistants UK VA Survey
Limited public dataPhotographer
A 2025 food and drink campaign: $5,500 creative and licensing fee, on a ~$15,760 total invoice covering crew, styling, studio, equipment, post and talent. One year, global licence.
Wonderful Machine, via A Photo Editor
Limited public dataVideo Editor
Marketplace rates $10–$60/hr, median $35. Entry $15–30 · intermediate $30–60 · expert $60–150+
Upwork
Why rate benchmarks mislead
A published average tells you what a market pays somebody, not what it will pay you, and it says nothing at all about whether that rate covers your costs. Two freelancers charging the identical hourly rate can end the year tens of thousands apart, because one bills 28 hours a week and the other bills 15, or because one is carrying £8,000 of equipment depreciation the other is not.
That is why every page here pairs the benchmark with the two numbers that actually decide your income: how many hours you can genuinely bill, and what your field costs to run. The billable hours figure is the one people get most wrong — a 40-hour week does not contain 40 billable hours anywhere, and in some fields it contains fewer than 20.
On the quality of this data
Freelance rate data is far patchier than it looks. Some fields are well served: the Editorial Freelancers Association survey ran to over 1,100 respondents, and UK consultant day rates are corroborated by three independent sources landing within £22 of each other. Others are barely covered at all — there is no public US photographer rate survey, and the best video editing ratecards sit behind member logins.
We have labelled each profession accordingly, and excluded several widely-quoted figures whose samples were too small to support the medians built on them. Where a number would have been a guess, there is a gap and an explanation instead.
Related
Once you have a rate, the Freelance Tax Index shows what you keep from it across 15 countries, and the guide to setting your freelance rate covers finding your market ceiling and positioning between floor and ceiling.