Are You Working for Less Than Minimum Wage? (Calculate Your True Hourly Rate)

You charge £1,800 per wedding. You've done the rough sums in your head: roughly 8 hours on the day and another 8 hours editing — that's £112.50 per hour. Sounds good. Professional. Worth the time.

Then you actually track every hour for one booking. Not just the obvious ones — the full picture. The three phone calls before the booking was confirmed. The venue site visit. The emails back and forth about timelines and song requests. The travel both ways. The pre-wedding consultation. The wedding itself. The editing. The revisions. The delivery and final follow-up.

Add it all up and you've spent 24 hours on that booking. Your actual hourly rate? £75.

That's still alright — but it's not £112. And if you're putting 30 hours into a booking instead of 24, that drops to £60/hour. At 35 hours, £51/hour. Suddenly you're getting uncomfortably close to UK minimum wage territory for someone running a skilled, creative business.

Here's the awkward truth: most wedding suppliers don't know their true hourly rate. They know what they charge. They've got a vague sense of how long things take. But they've never sat down and properly logged the reality. And the reality is usually quite different from the estimate.

Here's how to work out your true hourly rate — and what to do once you've got the number.

Why Your Estimate Is (Probably) Wrong

The human brain is rubbish at estimating time. We remember the bits that stand out — the creative work, the client-facing hours — and forget all the invisible tasks around them.

What most people forget to count:

• Pre-booking communication (initial enquiry replies, phone calls, writing proposals)
• Planning and logistics (timelines, shot lists, coordination with other suppliers)
• Travel time (to the venue, to client meetings, to the wedding itself)
• Admin (invoicing, contracts, file organisation)
• Post-delivery work (final revisions, file delivery, follow-up emails)
• Unpaid time answering "quick questions" after the booking is delivered

Each one feels small on its own. Five minutes here, ten there. But across a full booking, they often add up to 30–40% of the total time you've put in — time you're not consciously charging for.

The True Hourly Rate Calculation

Here's the formula that matters:

Simple, right? The hard bit is getting an honest count of those "total hours." Here's how:

Step 1: Pick One Recent Booking

Don't try to track every booking you've ever done. Pick one recent example — ideally one that felt fairly typical in terms of complexity and time. If you can't remember the exact hours, estimate on the high side (round up, not down).

Step 2: Log Every Task

Walk through the whole booking and log time for each phase. Use this as a template:

Pre-Booking (Enquiry → Signed Contract):

• Initial enquiry response: ___ minutes
• Phone/video call(s): ___ hours
• Proposal/quote creation: ___ minutes
• Follow-up emails: ___ minutes
• Contract prep and sending: ___ minutes

Planning & Prep (Contract → Wedding Day):

• Pre-wedding consultation: ___ hours
• Timeline/shot list creation: ___ hours
• Coordination with venue/other suppliers: ___ minutes
• Travel to venue recce (if applicable): ___ hours
• Ongoing client emails/questions: ___ minutes

Delivery Day:

• Prep and packing: ___ minutes
• Travel to venue: ___ hours
• On-site time (full day): ___ hours
• Travel back: ___ hours

Post-Production:

• Editing/retouching/processing: ___ hours
• File organization and backup: ___ minutes
• Album design or deliverable prep: ___ hours
• Revisions (if requested): ___ hours

Delivery & Wrap-Up:

• File delivery/upload: ___ minutes
• Final client communication: ___ minutes
• Post-delivery "quick questions": ___ minutes

Step 3: Add It Up

Convert everything to hours (e.g., 45 minutes = 0.75 hours). Add the total. This is your True Total Time for that booking.

Step 4: Calculate Your Rate

Take your package price and divide it by the True Total Time.

Example breakdown:

What Your Number Means

Once you've got your true hourly rate, here's how to read it:

£80+ per hour: You're pricing well

This is a healthy rate for a skilled wedding supplier in the UK. You're covering your time properly and there's room for profit after expenses. The next question: can you take on more bookings, or push prices up further, to grow revenue?

£50–£80 per hour: You're in the zone, but there's room to improve

This is sustainable, but you're probably leaving money on the table. Small price tweaks or efficiency gains (cutting time per booking) could improve your hourly rate significantly without any major shakeups.

Below £50 per hour: Time to restructure

This is where alarm bells should ring. You're putting in skilled, creative hours for a rate that doesn't match what you actually deliver or the experience you bring. Something has to give — pricing, delivery time, or how your packages are put together.

How to Fix a Low Hourly Rate

If your number came in lower than you'd hoped, you've got three levers to pull:

Option 1: Put Your Prices Up

Most direct fix. If you're at £60/hour and want to be at £80/hour, you need a 33% price increase. That might mean taking your £1,800 package up to £2,400.

This works if your positioning, portfolio, and brand can support higher pricing. A lot of suppliers undercharge simply because they've never tested higher prices, not because the market won't pay them.

Option 2: Cut Delivery Time

If you can deliver the same quality of work in fewer hours, your hourly rate goes up without changing what you charge.

Where to find time savings:

• Batch similar tasks (do all your emails in one block, edit several weddings in one session)
• Build templates for recurring work (email replies, timelines, contracts)
• Set boundaries on revisions ("One round included, additional rounds £X")
• Streamline editing with presets, actions, or batch processing tools
• Cut down pre-wedding meetings (swap in-person for video calls, or skip them entirely for straightforward bookings)

Shave 5 hours off a 25-hour booking and your £72/hour rate becomes £90/hour overnight — no price increase needed.

Option 3: Restructure Your Packages

Sometimes the issue isn't your pricing or your speed — it's that certain packages are just badly structured.

The usual culprits:

• Your mid-tier package has so many extras it takes as long as your premium one but costs less
• You offer unlimited revisions, and some clients ask for 4–5 rounds
• Your "all-day coverage" package doesn't account for 12–14 hour wedding days

Look at which packages are eating the most time relative to their price. Either put the price up, trim what's included, or get rid of them entirely.

Track It Going Forward

This isn't a one-off exercise. Your true hourly rate will shift as you get more efficient, change your prices, or restructure your packages. The aim is to track it quarterly:

• Pick one recent booking each quarter
• Log the full time breakdown
• Work out your true hourly rate
• Compare it to last quarter — is it going up?

If your hourly rate is climbing quarter on quarter, you're heading in the right direction. If it's flat or dropping, something in your process or pricing needs a look.