How Much Does It Cost to Maintain a Wedding Photography Business Year-to-Year?
Last Updated: February 14th, 2020
Business maintenance costs can be defined as…”purchases of the equipment and services that are recurring year after year.”
These are the things you just know you need to buy over and over again. Otherwise known as “overhead.”
In the food industry, there is always going to be overhead for restaurants to buy food supplies, kitchenware, and even pay rent and utilities for the space itself. In the wedding photography industry, we see the same exact things for some of our gear and, even more often, the business services we use and don’t see phasing out any time soon.
In this post, we’re going to share with you how much it costs to maintain a wedding photography business as time goes on. Keep in mind, we wrote a HUGE post about how much it costs to start a photography business, this is just to talk about recurring overhead expenses in a little more detail.
What’s the cost and what kind of things do wedding photographers need to buy over-and-over?
We have been shooting weddings together for 3+ years now, so we know a thing or two about what we are spending money on regularly. Here is how it breaks down:
Total recurring cost every year: $5,000
This cost is broken out like this:
- Business Services (85%)
- New or replacement equipment (10%)
- Travel expenses (5%)
The good news is: most of our recurring expenses are predictable and able to be offset by small price increases.
We know every year that we will be renewing our subscriptions to services we need like:
- Honeybook
- Squarespace
- Bluehost
- MileIQ
- Quickbooks
- Adobe Suite (Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator)
- Microsoft Suite (Word, Outlook, Excel)
- Pic-Time
- Hiscox Insurance
For a full list and more information – check out our recommended photography business services.
In addition, we also know that some of our gear will get worn out and need to be replaced. It’s not always possible to predict as we’ve had some camera bodies for 3 years without fail, and have dealt with other gear not working after a few months.
On top of that, we also know that, with the amount of traveling we do, we will need to budget in some money to cover those costs. This includes gas, fixing our car due to wear and tear, and occasionally a hotel stay if we’re farther from home. Some of these costs are directly covered by clients in the form of travel fees built into their contracts.
The Tax Benefit of Business Expenses
For business owners, there is no way around having business expenses. It’s just the nature of the beast.
Fortunately, whenever you make a business purchase, that cost can be written off on your taxes. This doesn’t mean you get all the money back (that would be a tax credit), but it means that how much you have to pay in taxes will be lower.
For example (and this is simplified to spare you too much confusion) – if you made $60,000 dollars as a business this year, but purchased $5,000 in services and gear, you will only have to pay taxes on $55,000 dollars.
If this is a topic you’d like to read more about, let us know you’re interested!
5 Ways to Keep Your Wedding Photography Business Overhead Low
Our goal as business owners is to keep our expenses as low as possible in order to maximize our profit.
1). Only purchase things you need
As we browse through the online stores of Amazon, Adorama, B&H Photo…it is pretty obvious that there is a lot of photography gear out there. As photographers, it can sometimes be tempting to want to purchase the latest and greatest tech. The trouble is – this all gets very expensive very quickly.
For wedding photography gigs, we only really need a handful of select items. We travel relatively lightly with just a few camera bodies, some choice lenses, a simple flash setup, and a few little accessories. At this stage, we have no need to really grow our gear bag. For yourself, you should come to a resting point in the spending department after you’ve bought all your necessary gear.
With these initial investments out of the way, you should only need to purchase replacements for your current gear once in a while.
2). Buy things that will pay for themselves
Some purchases you can make as a business owner will save you time and money in the long run.
Many of the annual subscriptions we have work like this!
For example, with MileIQ – for a small annual fee we are able to automatically track our driving mileage. All the miles driven for business reasons (so getting to and from a wedding, meeting with clients, scouting locations for an engagement shoot, etc.) can be deducted from our taxes at the end of the year. For $40/year we end up with thousands of dollars in tax deductions. That is a great example of a purchased service paying for itself!
3). Price shop alternatives
Price shopping is an underrated way to keep your overhead low.
It can be easy to get into the mindset of…”I need this thing NOW” (*Clicks Buy Button*). But, this is one way to spend a lot more money than you really have to!!
When it comes to photography equipment, you can price shop across different (reputable) websites. In our experience, most of the time the prices for higher end gear stay pretty consistent (boo!). In the upside, a lot of times there are hidden deals to be found. When purchasing cameras and lenses (like the Canon 5D Mark III that we use), you can sometimes find special kits that include things like camera bags, SD cards, batteries – even flashes and lenses sometimes – all for the same price as the product on its own.
When the included items in the kit would be useful to you, it can be a great way to save some money. When we purchased our cameras, we would always look for a kit to help us save on SD cards, batteries, and other little things that add up over time (seriously – we have like $1,000 dollars in SD cards sitting on our desk).
A kit like this one is crazy talk:
[amazon_link asins=’B01LBMMMII’ template=’ProductAd’ store=’ffl0d-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’d5b1a0ba-4114-4cc3-9e09-f39e42d6d8f9′]
4). Pay for gear in full vs. a payment plan with interest
When you buy a $3,000 dollar camera, you are either buying it outright OR put into a payment plan where you can pay it off over a year or two with interest.
Interest payments are one of the things we actively avoid when purchasing gear for our photography business. It’s a simple way to end up in more debt than gear is even worth. With photography equipment, this is especially not worth it as it depreciates (ie: loses value) very quickly after your purchase.
Buying a camera is a lot like buying a car for this reason. Once you drive it off the lot, you’ve already trimmed some of its value. If you turn around and want to sell the same camera on the used market, you can expect to take a hit of a couple hundred dollars (or more).
5). Rent camera gear if you only need things once or twice
The last thing we want to cover – renting vs. buying camera gear.
As a general rule, we aim to buy things that we know we will be using over and over again. Almost every weekend we are shooting weddings, couples sessions, portraits, and doing other work. We know with 100% certainty that we will need our camera bodies (Canon 5D Mark III’s & Mark IV’s). We know that we need certain lenses that come out during every shoot like our 35mm and 50mm.
For some weddings, there may be unique situations that pop up that make us want a special piece of equipment that we will likely never need to use (or at least – not need to use that frequently). We feel this way with renting static video lights to illuminate especially dark reception halls. You might think of a particular lens that wouldn’t come out of your camera bag all that often – but could be great for “that one wedding.”
In cases where we are not frequently needing a piece of gear, it makes more sense to just rent. This saves us money, but still lets us take advantage of the benefits of using high quality equipment.
For photography equipment rentals, we use BorrowLenses. They have a great selection of gear you can rent at reasonable prices. It’s allowed us to even experiment with some really high end gear like studio lights by Profoto on the cheap. Try it out next time you go to rent some gear!
