Copywriter Rate Calculator

What copywriters actually charge

Survey-backedEvery figure below carries its source, year and — where the publisher discloses it — sample size.

What we could not verify: The ProCopywriters day-rate figures were obtained via a secondary source citing the survey, because the original renders its chart as an image and gates the PDF.

Hourly, project or retainer?

Per-project flat fee dominates this field.

63% per project · ~20% per word · 11% hourly · the rest day rate or retainer — Peak Freelance survey of 213 freelance writers

Per-project pricing absorbs research, interviews, thinking time and editing — the parts of writing that per-word and hourly models systematically fail to pay for. Per-word pricing actively penalises concision, which is the thing clients are actually buying.

Realistic billable hours

20–26 hours a week. No survey measures billable utilisation for copywriters specifically. This is a planning assumption derived from general freelancer admin-time data, and copywriting carries an unusually heavy unbillable load — pitching, research calls and stakeholder wrangling.

This is the input people get most wrong. A 40-hour week does not contain 40 billable hours — pitching, admin, invoicing and marketing all come out of it first, and the difference between assuming 40 and assuming 23 changes your required rate by more than any other single number on this page.

Overheads specific to this field

Three pricing mistakes specific to copywriters

1. Pricing per word. It penalises concision, pays nothing for strategy or research, and only about a fifth of surveyed writers use it while nearly two-thirds price per project.
2. Charging only for drafting while giving away discovery, interviews, research and messaging strategy — frequently the majority of the actual hours.
3. Leaving revision rounds and stakeholder review cycles unscoped, so a multi-approver corporate client consumes two to three times the quoted effort.

Common questions

How much should a freelance copywriter charge?

$75–$100/hr, or 15–30¢ per word, for articles and ghostwriting (Editorial Freelancers Association 2026 Editorial Rate Chart, 2025 data). That is a market reference, not your number — your rate depends on your target income, your overheads and how many hours you can actually bill. The calculator on this page works it out from your own figures.

Should a copywriter charge hourly or per project?

Per-project flat fee dominates this field. Per-project pricing absorbs research, interviews, thinking time and editing — the parts of writing that per-word and hourly models systematically fail to pay for. Per-word pricing actively penalises concision, which is the thing clients are actually buying.

How many billable hours can a freelance copywriter expect?

Roughly 20–26 hours a week. No survey measures billable utilisation for copywriters specifically. This is a planning assumption derived from general freelancer admin-time data, and copywriting carries an unusually heavy unbillable load — pitching, research calls and stakeholder wrangling.

Next steps

Once you have a floor rate, two things decide whether it holds. First, whether the market bears it — the guide to setting your freelance rate covers finding your ceiling and positioning between the two. Second, what you keep after tax, which varies enormously by country: our Freelance Tax Index compares the total burden across 15 countries, and several charge you money even in a zero-income year.