Three Real CODB Budgets, and the Day Rate Each One Implies

The median photographer in the US earned $44,660 in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number is close to useless on its own, because “photographer” covers a part-time portrait shooter running sessions around a day job, a full-time wedding photographer booking most weekends, and a two-person studio splitting a season of weddings between two shooters. Three completely different businesses, filed under one job title, with three completely different day rates once you actually run the math.

The cost of doing business calculator runs the same formula for all three: yearly costs plus target income, divided by billable shoots, equals the floor you can’t price below. What changes between them isn’t the formula. It’s every number that goes into it. Here’s what that looks like line by line for three real profiles.

Profile 1: the part-time portrait shooter

• Gear: a $6,000 kit (one body, two lenses), amortized over 5 years = $1,200/year
• Insurance: about $300/year - a general-liability policy near Insureon’s $200 median, plus a modest equipment rider on a kit worth under $10,000
• Software & subscriptions: $530/year (Adobe’s Photography Plan at roughly $240/year, a gallery host around $288/year)
• Storage & upkeep: $150/year
• Marketing, web, workspace: $600/year
• Target income: $15,000/year - a second income on top of a day job, not a living wage
• Billable shoots: 60 sessions a year, a realistic count for evenings and weekends

That totals $17,780 the business needs to bring in. Divided across 60 sessions, the floor is $296 a session - close to the $250-$350 a typical family or portrait booking runs, per HoneyBook’s pricing data. A part-timer charging in that range isn’t underpricing by accident. They’re pricing right at the floor, with almost no room for a slow month or a broken lens.

Profile 2: the full-time wedding photographer, 25 weddings a year

• Gear: a $15,000 kit (two bodies, a handful of lenses, flashes), amortized over 4 years = $3,750/year
• Insurance: $570/year, the average bundled general-liability-plus-equipment policy in Insureon’s 2026 book of photography business data
• Software & subscriptions: $780/year (editing suite, gallery delivery, invoicing)
• Storage & upkeep: $600/year, in line with the roughly $24-25 a wedding actually costs in storage once you run 25 of them through the math
• Marketing, web, workspace: $2,000/year
• Target income: $65,000/year, inside the $60,000-$90,000 a mid-market full-time wedding photographer can realistically target
• Billable shoots: 25 weddings

Total: $72,700. Divided by 25, the floor is $2,908 a wedding - close to the $2,500-$4,000 average package price range quoted across current pricing guides, which means a full-time shooter at that volume is pricing near the edge of viable, not comfortably above it. Spread over a realistic 20 hours a wedding (shooting plus editing, calls and delivery), that floor works out to about $145 an hour for the time the job actually takes.

Profile 3: the two-shooter studio, 45 weddings a year

A two-shooter studio changes two things the calculator can’t see by itself: there’s more gear to insure and more volume running through software, but there’s also a second person getting paid on every job, and that fee is a per-job cost, not a fixed one. That’s exactly the kind of cost the calculator’s own FAQ says to leave out of the fixed-cost fields and add back afterward.

The owner’s fixed side looks like this:

• Gear: $25,000 (two full working kits), amortized over 4 years = $6,250/year
• Insurance: $900/year on the larger declared gear value - see what gear insurance actually costs for how that number scales with kit value
• Software & subscriptions: $1,200/year (two editing seats, gallery hosting, invoicing)
• Storage & upkeep: $1,100/year, scaled up from the same per-wedding storage math at nearly double the volume
• Marketing, web, workspace: $3,500/year
• Target income (owner’s draw): $90,000/year
• Billable shoots: 45 weddings

Total: $102,950. Divided by 45, the owner’s floor is $2,288 a wedding - lower per booking than the solo full-timer above, despite much higher fixed costs, because the extra volume spreads the overhead over more jobs. But that’s not the number that belongs on the invoice. Second shooters commonly earn $30-$50 an hour, and over an 8-hour wedding day that’s roughly $240-$400 paid out per booking. Add a conservative $350 and the real price floor for a two-shooter wedding is closer to $2,638 - a number the calculator alone would never show, because it was never built to guess at a cost that changes with every job.

Why the three numbers don’t converge

None of these three photographers is wrong to charge what their math says. The part-timer’s $296 looks tiny next to the studio’s $2,638, but it’s covering a sixtieth of a much smaller cost base, not a worse business. The mistake would be any of the three borrowing another one’s number: a part-timer quoting wedding-level packages has priced themselves out of the portrait market they’re actually in, and a two-shooter studio pricing like a solo full-timer is quietly paying its second shooter out of the owner’s own pay.

The fix is the same for all three: run your own gear list, your own fixed costs and your own honest booking count through the calculator, and add back whatever per-job costs - a second shooter, travel, an album - the calculator deliberately leaves out. The number it gives you is never going to match a stranger’s price list, and it isn’t supposed to.

If worked examples like this are useful as a running habit rather than a once-a-year gut check, they show up now and then in our field-notes emails.