How Much to Charge for Video Editing When Revisions Eat Your Hours
The real price of an edit includes the hours spent decoding notes, exporting again and chasing approvals, so here is how I price all of it at my agency, with a worked example.
The video edit on my screen is a file called LaunchTeaser_v3_FINAL.mp4, open in Premiere late on a Thursday night, and I'm scrubbing back and forth between 01:12 and 01:48. The client's feedback came in as a two-minute WhatsApp voice note about making the bit where she laughs feel punchier, and the catch here is that she laughs three times in that stretch, right, so I'm basically guessing which laugh they mean.
That hour is the reason I think most answers to how much to charge for video editing are really really incomplete. I quoted this job for the editing and only the editing, so I'll pick one laugh, export again, upload again, ask if this is the one they meant and wait until morning, and none of that will ever show up on the invoice, right.
So this post is my full method, from the seat of someone who runs a video-editing agency and also builds PlayPause, for pricing the cutting plus everything wrapped around it, so the number you quote actually covers the hours you actually spend.
The three ways editors charge for video editing
There are basically three models I see everywhere, and I've used all three, first while working as a freelancer and later inside my own agency, and I've lost money on each one at least once, right, so here's how they actually behave.
Hourly is the simplest, you track your time and bill it, and it feels safe because every hour is paid. The catch is that clients hate open-ended numbers, so they either cap the hours, which pushes the risk straight back onto you, or they start asking why a small change took ninety minutes.
Per project is the model I lean on for almost everything, and I've written up my breakdown of flat fee versus hourly separately. The short version is that the client knows the cost upfront and I get rewarded for being fast, and the risk only bites when the scope is fuzzy or the feedback goes on forever.
Per finished minute is common for YouTube and short-form work, where a creator wants a predictable video editing price per minute of final runtime. It works nicely once the format is stable, like a weekly talking-head show, but it falls apart when a 60-second ad takes longer than a 10-minute vlog, which happens all the time, right.
At the end of the day, hourly vs per project video editing is less of a religious debate than people make it, because all three models run on the same raw input. That input is how many hours the job really takes you, and if that count is wrong, every model is wrong along with it.
The hidden hours: feedback, decoding notes and exporting again
When you estimate a job, you probably think about the selects, the first rough cut, the colour, the sound pass and the export. That's the visible work, but a big chunk of the whole post-production stage is actually the stuff happening between the edits, right.
Every round of feedback carries its own little project inside it, for instance reading notes spread across email, WhatsApp and a Google Doc, and working out that a note about the middle bit probably means 04:30. Then you ask two clarifying questions, wait, make the change, export, upload, send the new link and chase the approval for three days, and so on.
In my agency, before we moved all review into one link, I'd say a single round like that easily cost an hour of pure overhead before anyone touched the timeline. On a project with three rounds, that's three or four unpaid hours sitting on top of an edit you priced as if feedback was free.
Each round also means reading notes, asking what they meant, exporting, uploading and chasing approval, so that time belongs in the quote.
So before you touch your rates at all, track two numbers on your next five projects, the hours you spend editing and the hours you spend on everything feedback-related. I'm pretty sure the second number will surprise you, because it surprised me very very badly the first time I did it.
I mapped where those hours sit between brief and payment in my freelance workflow from brief to paid, and the review stage is where most of the leaking happens, right.
How much to charge for video editing per project
Before any project math you need an hourly number, and I'd build it from what you need to earn rather than from rate lists online, which blend beginners, specialists and agencies into one average that fits nobody.
Say, purely as illustrative math, you want $3,800 a month and your tools cost around $200, so $4,000 has to come in, and since pitching, admin and chasing payments eat a big chunk of the month you'll never bill a full 160 hours, so if you can honestly bill about 100, your floor is $40 an hour, which is the rate I'll use below, so swap in your own numbers.
So take a creator who wants a 10-minute YouTube video edited from a talking-head recording with some b-roll, and from your own tracking you know a first cut like this takes about 8 hours, so the edit itself is worth $320.
Now add the feedback, and say you include three rounds, each averaging an hour of overhead plus an hour and a half of actual changes. Round one is heavy and round three is tiny, so an average of 2.5 hours per round gives you 7.5 hours across all three, which is another $300 at your rate.
Then add the tool, which on a flat plan is a dollar or two per project, plus a buffer of around 10 percent for the stuff you can't predict, like a corrupted proxy or a surprise vertical cut. Your total lands near $685, which I'd round up to a clean $700 quote.
You see what I mean here, right, the naive quote was $320 and the real job is $700. The editor who quotes $320 is doing more than half the work for free, and that's before anyone asks for a cutdown for Reels.
feedback, exports and the review tool quietly come out of your own pocket
review hours, included rounds and tool cost are covered before the client says yes
If you prefer a video editing price per minute, just divide, so $700 across 10 finished minutes is $70 per minute for this kind of talking-head job, and here's why I let the math produce that figure.
Run the same method on a 60-second Reel cut from that recording, where the edit is maybe 2.5 hours because of captions, punch-ins and a hook that has to land in the first second, and two included rounds at 1.25 hours each add another 2.5 hours. That's 5 hours, so $200 at $40, plus the buffer, and you're quoting around $220 for one finished minute, more than three times the per-minute rate of the YouTube video, which is exactly why freelance video editor rates for Reels, ads and podcasts should come out of this math rather than a price sheet.
Pricing the revision rounds you include
The included rounds are where the quote either holds or collapses, and the mistake I see most is editors writing revisions included with no number attached. That basically means unlimited, and unlimited rounds make every calculation above meaningless, right.
I include two rounds on simple formats and three on anything with a real story or motion graphics, and I wrote up how many revision rounds to include separately. The number matters less than defining a round, which for me is one consolidated set of notes on one version, rather than six messages drifting in across a week.
That definition has to live in writing, so I'd put it straight into your agreement using the approval language from the video editing contract template. When the fourth round shows up, you're pointing at a clause everyone signed, and the conversation stays friendly.
If an hour lives on your calendar, it has to live on your quote too.
This is also where the review setup quietly protects your price. When the client opens one link in a browser with no account and no install, leaves comments that stick to the exact frame, draws on the frame, and the new cut stacks on the same card as MV2 and then MV3, a round becomes a clear, countable thing, does that make sense, right.
If you cut in Premiere, the Premiere Pro panel brings those comments into the editor and clicking one jumps the playhead to that frame, while in Resolve or Final Cut you export, upload, review in the browser and work through the notes beside your timeline.
For rounds beyond what you included, I charge a fixed price per extra round quoted upfront, based on the same per-round hours from the worked example. The script for raising that without awkwardness is in charging for extra revision rounds, which honestly saves more client relationships than it costs.
Budgeting your review tool as a business cost
A lot of editors treat their review tool like a personal expense, when it's basically a cost of doing the work like your editing software, so the healthy move is to divide it across projects and bake it into the quote, right.
Using our own numbers, PlayPause Creator is $9 a month or $89 a year, flat per workspace rather than per member. That gets you 10 members, 100 GB of storage, 30 projects and share links that last 30 days before the files expire, and every plan starts with a 7-day free trial.
Say you deliver six projects a month, so $9 divided by six is $1.50 a project, and on the yearly plan $89 works out to about $7.42 a month, roughly $1.24 a project, and trust me on any level, a dollar and change disappears inside a $700 quote. The two Creator limits worth watching at that volume are the 30 projects and the 30-day links, and Agency removes the project cap and keeps links alive for 90 days.
The flat part matters more as you grow, because per-seat tools charge you again every time you add an assistant editor. Frame.io, for example, starts from $15 per user per month, so a team of four already pays several times what one flat workspace costs, which is why I like flat-rate review pricing for freelancers.
Agency is $19 a month or $199 a year and adds AI transcription, side-by-side version compare, guest version upload and Playbooks, the per-client document where I keep each client's style rules. The transcript lets you run a paper edit your client can use, and Playbooks stop the same note from coming back on every project.
The whole solo setup lives on PlayPause for freelance editors, and I broke the spend side down further in what editors should pay for review software.
When and how to raise your video editing rates
Once you've priced the hidden hours properly, the next question is when to push the number up, and to be very honest most editors wait way too long, because staying booked solid at a price that ignores the feedback rounds is what quietly burns you out, right.
- You are booked three weeks or more ahead
- Clients approve inside your included rounds
- You have tracked real hours on five projects
- Your tool cost is already inside the quote
- New quotes go out at the new rate first
In my own agency the trigger is usually a calendar full weeks ahead while clients keep approving inside the included rounds, and once my tracked hours also match my estimates, I raise without overthinking it.
How I raise is equally boring, which I think is the point, so new clients get the new rate straight away and existing clients get a friendly message about 30 days ahead, usually in steps of around 10 to 20 percent, because steady steps keep good clients and still move the number.
Frequently asked questions
How much should a beginner charge for video editing?
I'd start from what you need to earn rather than from a market average, because averages hide wildly different formats. Work out an hourly floor from your monthly target and realistic billable hours, track your real edit and feedback hours on a few jobs, and build per-project quotes with the method above. A beginner can charge less per hour than a senior editor, right, but a beginner still has feedback rounds, so price them in from day one.
Is hourly or per project better for video editing?
For most freelance work I prefer per project, because clients like knowing the cost upfront and you get rewarded for working fast. Hourly makes sense for open-ended jobs like archive sorting or retainers where the scope genuinely can't be pinned down. Either way, the price only holds once you've defined the included revision rounds, since both models break the moment feedback becomes unlimited, and that happens really really often.
What is a fair video editing price per minute?
There isn't one universal number, because a talking-head minute and a motion graphics minute take completely different hours. I'd work it backwards, so build a project price from the edit hours, the included rounds, the tool and a buffer, then divide by the finished runtime. In my examples that came to $70 per minute for a 10-minute YouTube edit and around $220 for a 60-second Reel, so your format decides the number.
Should I charge clients separately for the review tool?
I wouldn't put it on a separate line, because a dollar or two per project looks petty on an invoice. Treat it like your editing software, a business cost you spread across projects inside your quote. On PlayPause Creator at $9 a month, six projects a month puts it at $1.50 each, which basically disappears inside any real project price, right.
If you want to run these numbers on your own work, start the 7-day free trial, send your next client one review link instead of a WhatsApp thread, and notice how much easier it becomes to count a round. You can compare every plan on the PlayPause pricing page before you pick one.
So yeah. That's my way of saying it.
Saumyajit co-founded PlayPause after years watching review and approval quietly eat creative teams' deadlines. He writes about the workflow side of video, feedback, versioning, and getting to a clean sign-off.
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