How much should you charge for your first weddings?
Cost of doing business math with the arithmetic shown, the self employment tax figure everyone forgets, when free for portfolio is rational, and how to price honestly while disclosing inexperience.
This article explains United States law in general terms and was not written or reviewed by a lawyer. The rules it describes differ from state to state, and some may not apply where you work. Take questions about your own situation to an attorney licensed in your state.
Pricing itself is a business decision, not a legal one. The tax obligations around it are real law: for anything beyond the general figures cited here, talk to a tax professional, and for disputes, an attorney licensed in your state.
One thing on this page is genuinely state by state: whether sales tax applies to photography, and to which part of it, the service, the delivered files, or the prints. States answer that differently, and getting it wrong is a real liability. Confirm your own state’s treatment with its revenue department or a tax professional, and put questions about contracts around pricing to an attorney licensed in your state.
Why does a price have a floor?
A wedding price is not a vibe or a confidence score, it is a number with a floor underneath it, and the floor is what the wedding costs you to shoot. Cost of doing business math is the one pricing tool that produces a defensible number for a photographer with no market reputation yet: it cannot tell you what the market will pay, but it tells you with certainty what you cannot accept without paying to work. Every number below is a worked example with visible arithmetic, not a market rate; plug in your own figures and the method is yours.
The math, worked in full
Start with annual fixed costs: everything you pay to exist as a working photographer whether or not you shoot. As an example, and it is only an example: insurance around 400 dollars a year, software subscriptions around 400, website and email around 200, and gear depreciation, say a 4,000 dollar kit expected to earn for four years, so 1,000 a year. Example total: about 2,000 dollars a year. If you expect to shoot ten weddings this year, each one carries about 200 dollars of fixed cost before you lift a camera.
Now count the hours honestly, because a wedding is never eight hours. An example day: two hours of calls, emails, and the walkthrough; one hour of prep and packing; eight hours of shooting; an hour of ingest and backup; twenty hours of culling and editing; an hour of gallery delivery and follow up. About 33 hours. A 1,200 dollar wedding at 33 hours is about 36 dollars an hour before costs; subtract the roughly 200 dollars of fixed cost and per wedding expenses, say 50 dollars of travel and cards, and you are near 29 dollars an hour, before tax. Run this arithmetic on any price you are considering, because the gross number will always sound better than the hourly truth underneath it.
The tax everyone forgets
Self employment income carries self employment tax on top of income tax: the IRS states the rate as 15.3 percent, 12.4 percent for Social Security and 2.9 percent for Medicare, on net self employment earnings.1 Roughly a sixth of your net, gone before income tax, and invisible on the day someone hands you a check. The working habit that survives contact with April: move a fixed share of every wedding payment into a separate account the day it arrives and treat it as never having been yours. Whether your state also wants sales tax on photography is the state by state question flagged at the top of this page.
When free for portfolio is rational, and when it is a trap
Shooting free or nearly free is rational under exactly one condition: you are explicitly buying portfolio images you do not have, from a wedding you chose for that purpose, and both sides know it. It becomes a trap the moment it is recurring, apologetic, or aimed at clients who could pay: the fixed costs and 33 hours above do not shrink because the price did, so an underpriced wedding is you paying for someone else’s photography. The recurring forum register here is guilt, photographers asking whether they should lower an already low price because they feel bad. The math is the antidote to the feeling: when the number has a floor you can show, lowering it below the floor stops being kindness and becomes a subsidy.
A middle path beats free in most cases: charge a real but reduced price, disclose your experience plainly, and put the reduced number in writing as a first wedding rate so it does not silently become your permanent one. Deliver the same professionalism the full price would buy: the contract, the retainer, and a payment schedule. The discipline is the product you are practicing.
Pricing while inexperienced, without apologizing
State the price, state what it includes, and if asked why it is lower than the market, say the true thing: this is a first wedding rate reflecting your experience, and it comes with everything on this page done properly. Do not pad the conversation with nervous discounts; the couple hears uncertainty about the price as uncertainty about the work. And once the day is shot and delivered well, raise the number for the next one, on purpose, because the first wedding rate was priced for a photographer who no longer exists.
Every dollar figure in the worked example is illustrative and labeled as such; this site has no data on your market and will not invent going rates. For the contracts and disputes that pricing decisions eventually live inside, consult an attorney licensed in your state. The two numbers here that are not examples are cited: the self employment tax rate, from the IRS, and the method itself, which is arithmetic you can rerun. What the market in your city will bear is knowable only by quoting real clients real numbers, which is the previous chapter’s job.
Frequently asked
Is it wrong to charge at all for my very first wedding?
No. Payment is part of the arrangement being real: it entitles the couple to hold you to the standard on this site, and it obligates you to meet it. The honest lever for inexperience is the disclosed first wedding rate, not zero. Zero is defensible only in the deliberate portfolio case, agreed as such by both sides.
Should I price per hour or per package?
Quote packages, because couples buy coverage of a day, not increments of your time. Do the hourly math privately anyway: it is how you check that a package price survives the 33 hour truth of what a wedding costs to deliver.
What about charging for travel?
Decide a radius your base price includes and put mileage or lodging beyond it in the contract as a stated line, not a day of surprise. Travel is a real per wedding cost, and the worked example shows exactly where it eats the hourly rate if it rides for free.
SOURCES
- Internal Revenue Service, Self Employed Individuals Tax Center, irs.gov: the self employment tax rate of 15.3 percent, comprising 12.4 percent Social Security and 2.9 percent Medicare. Fetched 2026-08-04.
- Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, Wex: “Contract”, law.cornell.edu/wex/contract, for the written agreement the pricing conversation must end in. Fetched 2026-08-04.