Last Updated: February 14th, 2020
If you’re wondering…What is the average price for a wedding photographer? You will find the answer here!
Whether you’re a bride trying to figure out how much you should expect to pay for a wedding photographer, or you’re a photographer yourself trying to come into the market at a competitive price point – we have you covered.
Instead of just giving you a random number, we decided to go investigate a large number of different wedding photographers around the United States to find out what the average price for photography services is.
The Average Price for Wedding Photography: $3,239
At $3,239 – the average price for wedding photography is on par with what we would expect as wedding photographers ourselves.
For brides looking into hiring a wedding photographer, it’s worth mentioning that it is entirely possible to spend more or less than this, with new photographers often charging budget rates and the most famous of photographers like Annie Leibovitz charging $10,000 or more.
For wedding photographers looking to figure out what to charge, it is around this price range that you will start to see more success for your business in general. This provides a living wage in most areas of the USA. With this said, there are exceptions. In major metros like NYC and Los Angeles, you can expect to charge more in order to thrive. But, when the markets are saturated, nailing your pricing in a way that suits your clients and your own needs can be a real challenge.
How We Collected This Data
In order to get valuable information so we could give you a data driven average price point for wedding photographer services, we took a few different approaches.
First, we defined the “average” wedding photography price to mean a photographer’s mid-range package price.
We have an assumption that most people will book this package, while a few clients will book a higher package and a few will book a lower package. This was supported by some conversations had with some of the photographers providing information for this post.
Next, we collected a bunch of pricing information from wedding photographer websites.
Simply searching the web for “wedding photography” turns up plenty of information on its own. We also spent some time browsing through photographers on The Knot – a popular website for finding wedding professionals.
We made an effort to select wedding photographers from around the country so as to arrive at a better average. There are photographers in this data representing many states including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, New York, Kansas, Texas, Louisiana, Colorado, Utah, Minnesota, Hawaii, and more.
We would visit the photographer’s pricing pages and refer to the middle package price as the average when it was available.
Of course, not every wedding photographer broadcasts their prices on their website…
Because we didn’t want data exclusively from wedding photographers who list their prices, we also reached out directly to some wedding photographers asking the simple questions:
- How much do you charge for wedding photography?
- How much is your average wedding photography booking worth?
For the purpose of setting an actual end date for this project, we gave each photographer 24 hours to respond.
In total – we contacted 80 wedding photographers through email, and received only 5 responses. It’s surprisingly low!!
Lastly, to get a bunch more randomly selected data, we also posted the question on Reddit.
We asked wedding photographers that contribute to discussions on r/weddingphotography the same questions.
What is really great about this platform is this: not only did we get some hard data to review, but we also got to read some interesting insights about how these photographers are approaching their pricing.
We will actually be talking about what contributes to the price of wedding photography and more at the end of this post!
But first…the data you’ve been waiting to see…
The Raw Data – 50 Wedding Photographers Chime In!
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Wedding Photography Average Price (INFOGRAPHIC)
Below you will find a chart of all the data collected above.
You will see that most photographers, on average, charge in a similar range between $2,500 – $3,500. As with any type of data collection, there are outliers. In this case, there is 1 photographer who charges an average of $6,200 and a few photographers who charge less than $2,000.
5 Key Takeaways
#1: Experienced Photographers vs. Inexperienced Photographers
The average wedding photographer in our selection of data is performing a service as a trained and experienced professional.
In the “real world”, the average wedding photography cost may well be lower when you factor in the number of people who simply don’t get a photographer at all or decide to go a significantly cheaper route by paying someone with little to no experience off sites like Thumbtack, Facebook, or Craigslist.
In practice, most industries will have those people who can undercut the established businesses. A person could go to an established bakery to get a cake, or have their grandma take care of this.
In the photography industry, this just seems to be something that is seen much more often than in other industries because the barrier to entry is extremely low – with new wedding photographers just needing some good camera gear, an easy to setup website, and a good personality.
#2: Listing Prices vs. Not Listing Prices
While researching this post, we started to find really interesting the distribution of photographers who included pricing information on their websites vs. photographers who did not include this.
While we compiled formal data on 50 wedding photographers and their average package price, our actual research involved reviewing and contacting an additional 75 photographers for more information who did not provide a response within 24 hours (the deadline for this post).
This means we reviewed a total of 125 photographer websites for pricing content!
Only 40% of wedding photographers made their pricing information available immediately (on their website) or in a timely manner (within 24 hours).
This is hugely impactful to any business, because price will be a major factor for most clients.
In our opinion, pricing information should be made available immediately for the purpose of transparency. If you decide to not do this, being prompt to respond to inquiries will help retain business.
#3: People Will Pay for Great Wedding Photography
When we started researching for this post, we were under the impression that most wedding photographers would be charging less.
An average cost of $3,239 is actually very reasonable as far as we are concerned.
This means that a photographer shooting 15 weddings a year will be making roughly $48,000 in gross income. This lines up with what we saw when researching whether or not photography would make a good career path as the average wedding photographer made in this range, which is higher than average in the photography industry as a whole.
#4: Wedding Photographers Have A Lot of Add-Ons
While the gross earnings are pretty high for most established wedding photographers, they don’t paint the entire picture.
What we observed was this: many wedding photographers include a number of extra items in their packages to make the sale more enticing. The logic makes sense – throw in some prints, an album, an engagement session…and it becomes easier to get a potential client to want to book your wedding photography service.
The downside to this is, all of these things cost money!
In some cases, wedding photographers are really smart and upcharge their packages to offset the cost. If it takes $100 to have an album printed, and the math on a package works out that the photographer is actually making $500 off of that album anyways, then we’d say that’s a good business decision.
On the other end of things, some wedding photographers include these items while still charging a low cost. If a photographer is only charging $2,000 but including an album, multiple prints, a USB flash drive, an engagement session – they will actually be making very little after expenses and taxes.
Related: Pixieset Review – A Great Online Gallery
#5: A La Carte vs. Package Pricing
The last thing we found really interesting was how different photographer structured their wedding pricing.
In this business, there has long been 2 primary models –
- the A La Carte model (ie: pick what you want)
- the Package model (ie: the photographer puts together packages and sells their service like this)
Arguments can be made for and against both of these approaches.
For most wedding photographers, the average earnings per booking will still be roughly the same.
In our opinion, the best solution to pricing is to use a blended method. Provide some package options as these give convenience to your potential clients, and are much more customer friendly. But, be sure to include A La Carte upsells – like extra sessions, more shooting hours, prints, albums, flash drives, and more.
We have used this blended method ourselves to great success!
For more reading check out The Wedding Photography Business Starter Guide – Our FREE Comprehensive Resource for Running Your Own Wedding Photography Business!
Discussion
To wrap up this post, we want to invite you to chime in!
In the comment section below, give us your thoughts on the average wedding photographer price.
Does this make sense with what you have seen? What do you think impacts the number? Should wedding photographers be charging more or less than that?
We’d LOVE to hear from you!!