How Much Should You Charge for a Marketing Video?

The short version: a marketing video in 2026 should cost anywhere from £150 for a simple phone-shot social clip to £30,000 or more for a fully produced brand film with a crew, and the honest answer to "how much should I charge" depends on what problem the video is solving for the client, not how many minutes of footage you hand over. Most freelancers underprice because they think in day rates instead of outcomes. Get the pricing structure right and you will earn more for less filming.

If you want to go deeper on this: Best AI Video Generators for Social Media 2026: 10 Compared.

What marketing videos cost in 2026, tier by tier

I have commissioned video work as a business owner, been filmed as an influencer, and now advise clients on what to pay for it. The range is wide because "marketing video" covers everything from a 15 second Instagram Reel to a national TV ad. Here is what I see people charging and paying right now.

• Social media clips (15 to 60 seconds, phone shot, one location): £150 to £400. This covers a UGC style testimonial, a founder talking to camera, or a product demo shot on an iPhone with basic captions added.
• Small business promo video (60 to 120 seconds, one camera operator, half day): £500 to £1,500. This is the most common quote a small business gets when they ask a local freelancer for "a video for our website."
• Professional brand video (full day shoot, two cameras, lighting, sound, colour grading): £2,000 to £8,000. This is where most established small and mid-size businesses land when they want something that looks like it belongs on a homepage.
• Animated explainer video (60 to 90 seconds, custom illustration or motion graphics): £1,500 to £8,000 depending on style, with hand-drawn or 3D animation sitting at the top end.
• Agency-produced commercial (multi-day shoot, crew, actors, locations, post production): £10,000 to £50,000 and up. This is TV ad territory or the kind of video a funded startup shoots for a launch campaign.
• Editing only, footage already shot: £300 to £800 per video, or £50 to £150 an hour if billing by time.

Day rates for a solo videographer in the UK currently sit between £300 and £800, with £450 being a fair middle for someone competent with their own kit. In the US that translates to roughly $400 to $1,000 a day. Add a second shooter, a drone, or a studio hire and you can add another £200 to £600 to the day.

Why two videos that look identical can cost £300 or £8,000

Clients rarely understand why prices vary so much, and honestly the footage often does look similar to an untrained eye. The gap is almost never in the camera. It is in three things: pre-production, usage rights, and revisions.

Pre-production is scripting, storyboarding, briefing, and planning the shoot so you are not wasting hours on set figuring out what to film next. A £300 video usually has none of this. Someone turns up, presses record, and hopes for the best. An £8,000 video has a written script approved days before, a shot list, and a plan for how the footage will be cut before anyone picks up a camera.

Usage rights matter more than most freelancers charge for. A video shot for one client's Instagram is a different licence than a video the client plans to run as a paid ad to 500,000 people for six months. If you are not charging extra for paid media usage, you are giving away money. Stock footage houses and ad agencies have charged usage fees for decades. Freelance videographers, oddly, mostly do not.

Revisions are the third gap. A £300 quote usually includes one round of small tweaks. An £8,000 quote includes two or three structured rounds built into the contract, because the client is paying for a collaborative process, not a delivery.

A real example: the £150 quote versus the £3,800 quote

In 2019, when I was still doing regular filmed content as part of my influencer work, a skincare brand reached out through my network wanting "a marketing video" for a product launch. Their budget, stated upfront, was £150. What they described in the brief was a 90 second video with two locations, a voiceover, licensed music, three product close-ups, and delivery in four different aspect ratios for Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and their website.

I put them in touch with a videographer I knew who did exactly this kind of work. He quoted £3,800. The brand was upset, assuming he was overcharging, until he broke it down: one day of shooting at two locations, a day of editing, licensed music clearance, four export formats, and two rounds of revisions. Once it was itemised, the founder understood the £150 figure had been based on what a friend charged for filming a wedding speech, not what a multi-format ad campaign requires.

They ended up compromising on a single location, one aspect ratio, and no licensed music, which brought the price to £1,600. The lesson from that whole exchange has stuck with me: clients are not usually trying to lowball you. They do not know what goes into it, and it is your job to itemise the work, not just quote a number.

The uncomfortable truth about pricing by the day

Here is the part most people pricing video work do not want to hear: if you quote by day rate, you are training your best clients to want fewer, longer days from you, and your worst clients to squeeze you on hours instead of paying for the outcome. A day rate rewards speed and punishes quality, because the faster you shoot and edit, the more "profitable" that day becomes to you, even if the video underperforms.

Value-based pricing flips this. If a video is going to run as a paid ad with a £20,000 media spend behind it, the video itself is worth far more than a day rate suggests, because a bad video wastes that entire £20,000 budget while a strong one multiplies it. I have seen brands pay £2,500 for a video that then drove £180,000 in sales over three months, and I have seen brands pay £8,000 for a beautifully shot video that generated almost nothing because nobody asked what action the viewer was supposed to take. The camera work was not the problem in either case. The strategy behind the video was.

So the question to ask before naming a price is not "how many hours will this take me" but "what is this video meant to make happen, and what does that outcome cost the client if it fails." A recruitment video meant to fill ten roles is worth thousands more than the same length video meant to sit quietly on an about page nobody visits.

How to work out your number

If you are the one setting the price, whether as a freelancer or a business owner buying video work, here is the process I recommend, in order.

• Ask what the video needs to achieve. Awareness, direct response, recruitment, and investor pitches all need different structures, lengths, and calls to action, and that changes the value, not just the difficulty.
• Cost the pre-production separately. Scripting and planning for a one minute video usually takes two to four hours. Price that as its own line item, even if you fold it into a total, so clients see where the value sits.
• Price the shoot day. Use £300 to £800 in the UK as your baseline, adjusted for your experience, kit, and location travel.
• Price editing separately from shooting. A one minute polished video with captions, music, and colour grading typically takes four to eight hours to edit. At £75 an hour that is £300 to £600 on top of the shoot.
• Add usage rights. Social only use is your base price. Paid advertising use, especially over £5,000 in spend, should add 20 to 50 percent on top.
• Build in two rounds of revisions and charge extra beyond that, clearly stated in your quote before you start, not after the second round of "just one more small change."

A worked example: a small business wants a 90 second testimonial style video for their homepage and to run as a Facebook ad with a £3,000 spend. Pre-production, two hours at £60 an hour, £120. Shoot day, £500. Editing, six hours at £75, £450. Paid usage add-on, 30 percent of the total so far, £320. Two revision rounds included. Total: £1,390. That is a realistic, defensible quote for that scope, and it is a very different number from the £150 someone might ask for if they only describe it as "a quick video."

Where this fits into your wider marketing spend

Video rarely sits alone. If you are already spending money on AI marketing tools to script, caption, or repurpose that footage across platforms, a £600 to £1,500 tool subscription can turn one shoot day into a month of content, which changes the maths on what the original video is worth. I cover this in my breakdown of what AI tools cost small teams, because a lot of the editing, captioning, and repurposing work that used to justify a higher freelancer day rate can now be done for a fraction of the cost.

It is also worth comparing video pricing to hiring someone in-house. If a business is filming content weekly, it is often cheaper to bring on a dedicated person than to keep commissioning freelance day rates, and my content marketing specialist salary guide lays out what that role costs in salary compared to ongoing freelance spend. And if the video sits at the top of a funnel that ends on a landing page, the video is only doing half the job. A brilliant £3,000 video sending traffic to a weak page is money wasted, which is why I also wrote about what a landing page should cost, because the two budgets need to work together, not compete.

One more thing worth flagging if the video involves someone with an existing audience fronting it: that is influencer style work, priced differently again, often by reach and engagement rather than shoot time. My piece on how to define influencer marketing for your brand walks through how that pricing model differs from standard production quotes.

What I tell clients who say video is "too expensive"

Almost every time someone tells me a video quote is too expensive, what they mean is they have not seen the connection between the number and a result yet. So I ask them to work backwards. What is one new customer worth to you. If it is £400, and the video is expected to bring in even five new customers over its lifetime, a £2,000 video has already paid for itself. Framed as a cost, £2,000 feels steep. Framed as an investment against a known customer value, it rarely does.

The flip side is just as true and less comfortable to say out loud: some businesses do not need video at all yet. If you cannot answer what the video is for, who will see it, and what you want them to do next, no price point makes it a good spend. I have turned down briefs where the client wanted "something professional" with no clearer goal than that, because a £5,000 video with no strategy behind it is a more expensive way of doing nothing than a £300 one.

Related: video marketing: guidelines and how to pitch.

Frequently asked questions

What is a fair price for a 60 second marketing video?

For a small business, £500 to £1,500 is a fair, realistic price for a professionally shot and edited 60 second video with one location and one round of revisions. Add usage rights for paid advertising and the price should rise by 20 to 50 percent on top of that base figure.

Should I charge by the day or by the project?

Project pricing almost always serves both sides better, because day rates reward speed over outcome and make it harder for clients to compare quotes. Use a day rate internally to build your quote, then present the client with one project figure tied to the deliverable.

How much should I charge if the video will run as a paid ad?

Add 20 to 50 percent on top of your standard shooting and editing fee for any video that will be used in paid advertising, since that usage carries far more commercial value than a video posted organically to a few thousand followers.

Is it cheaper to hire a freelancer or an agency for a marketing video?

A freelancer typically costs 40 to 70 percent less than an agency for the same scope, because you are not paying for account management and a larger production team. Agencies make sense for multi-location, multi-day shoots; freelancers make sense for single location videos under 3 minutes.

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