Wedding Photographer Pricing Survey 2021/2022
Every year I run a survey on how much photographers charge because I like to take a pulse on where I am in the market relative to others. It’s the only sure fire way to cut through the smoke, mirrors and fluff in the industry.
I’ve done this since 2018 and it has evolved somewhat. I’ve never published these outside of my personal facebook but I’m doing it via my blog for a specific reason of which I’ll go into detail below.
Along with the data, I’ll make some commentary about what I’ve found relevant to myself as if I was a consumer.
Before I go on though it’s big fat disclaimer time:
- I have a bias based around how I, personally, run my business. If I take exception to what another photographer has done to their website or show surprise at what someone has done / how they do it then it really has no bearing on anything. You do you. What it is is a good way to start a conversation because as we all know, photographers love the hype but this is often in an absence of any real data collection.
- There was always an issue with photographers not having prices on their websites when it came to harvesting data. The last three years the sample set was smaller than it should be because of this – so this time around I emailed photographers asking how much they would be for a Saturday in August by pretending to be an interested couple. Which is why I’m posting this survey publicly, to give something back.
- I know it’s public but Bridebook, UKbride (lol), Hitched and several other bridal magazines were here first.
- We also rated websites on their quality and also separately based on the work online to see if there was a correlation between those and price. Again, this is subjective, of our own opinions and should be valued as such.
Let’s get started.
Methods used:
The aim was for 200 photographers to be discovered on Google search by typing in ‘Wedding Photographer’ – It was the most specific search query to use. We considered using ‘UK Wedding Photographer’ but that single additional modifier of ‘UK’ might close out results from those who don’t target that phrase. Adblock was on, only genuine search results were recorded. Any photographers who fell out of the UK were replaced.
For those without a pricing guide online we posed as a couple getting married on a Saturday in August 2022. We ensured the usual contact form annoyances were avoided and made sure we addressed the photographer by name, referred to their work as if we’d actually looked at their site. We asked about a full day’s cover, digital only, ceremony at 1.30pm at a venue less than an hour away from their registered location. Anyone who wasn’t available was replaced by someone who was in order to keep the level of data points high.
Where there was only cover until the first dance we worked out the supplemental hourly rate and adjusted values accordingly. If there was no single photographer option I took a small amount off but not much because couples that work together all the time tend to share the workload vs two independent shooters smashing the hell out of everything on burst.
Ultimately we got results for 171 photographers and out of those, 54 didn’t have any pricing online. This is a big contrast to 2020’s survey where 50% of the photographers surveyed didn’t have any pricing online.
When rating the website we based this on the genral feel of their About, Blog and general feel on the site from the Homepage inwards. The average, baseline figure for all scenarios was 5 out of 10. This was based on a parabolic scoring system. It would be easy to go from a 5 to a 6, but a 6 to a 7 would have to be really special. If any site got a 9 they were something special disconnected from most others.
When rating the images it was solely what was online. The elephant in the room here is that some showed a lot and some showed very little. It was hard to be objective. Did they show technical ability, was there a lot of style diversity, did everything look like it had been dragged backwards through misty mud. That sort of thing. Although that being said, content was king. Editing choices were way low down on our rating radar. The same parabolic rating method was given to the website assessment as well.
Results:
From 171 data points the average price turned out to be £1538 for all day cover and digital supply only, which is down on the last three years
You can see below the last three years have all averaged higher for the same cover however the data sets were much smaller on each preceding year. Also – The covid effect mustn’t be ignored.
Quality of the website and images:
Up and down like a yoyo, but there is a definite increase in quality as the price goes up.
Overlaid with price:
The trend is definitely up and bolsters the view that a higher price likely means a better service / photographer / image quality. (with caveats, obvs).
Here’s the average prices for the last four years:
- 2018 – £1597 – Sampleset of 54
- 2019 – £1713 – Sampleset of 37
- 2020 – £1697 – Sampleset of 95
- 2021 – £1538 – Sampleset of 171
Intervening and confounding variables, problems, issues:
- The sample set of the first three years could have been bigger, 2019 could be higher than the figure shown and illustrates why we had to secret shop those without prices online.
- Covid could have meant a general percentage lowering of price to reflect more difficult trading times
- A lot of photographers who I consider top end who were in the last year’s results are no longer in the top 200
- Localised search results could have shown a regional divide but all overseas photographers were removed from the figures, replaced and there was a wide spread of photographers across the UK. At least reflective of the population density in those areas.
How figures can be fudged to confuse things further:
We have the figures, but interpreting them slightly differently can give you different results (which support a bias).
- There were 127 wedding photographers with their pricing online, their average price was £1310
- There were 54 photographers without their pricing online, their average price was £1789
- Out of those 54 photographers, if you remove the top 5 from the numbers their average price drops to £1672
- If you remove the top 10, so, anyone over £2000, the average price for those without pricing online drops to £1437
You could then say that the saying of ‘if the prices aren’t online they’re expensive’ isn’t as true as often said. (£1310 vs £1437)
Conclusion
So you have the numbers, but next is the commentary on the actual experience of doing this and what I learned.
Filling in almost 75+ contact forms was painful but eye opening. I can’t help but feel some photographers are sabotaging their business. Please remember what I said at the start though, this is just my opinion as a consumer using the sites and if it works for you, it works!
Firstly it’s going to be reassuring to you all that out of all the email responses I got, only two went into spam. And those were just the auto replies sent after I submitted the form. The actual emails from the supplier came through AOK.
I know we often wonder if our emails are being received but to me at least, with the gmail address we created for correspondance everything came through. Maybe if we’d used a Hotmail account the landscape would change.
Second is the list of things I didn’t like:
- Google challenges – Being asked the select all the boats in a grid before sending a contact form, I don’t think it’s a good look.
- Asking for a phone number – The only reason I see this being used is to send a text to say you’ve replied to an email. Sure, do that, maybe say it’s optional though because otherwise they may worry they’ll get hassled. You’re sort of moving into their easy access private space and couples make joint wedding email addresses for a reason but couples don’t have burner phones. When contacting photographer if I included a made up number I got a reply, if I put 111111111 as our number (but the rest of the form was filled out perfectly normal a lot of the time I didn’t get any response from the vendo, which is nuts.
- Making the phone number mandatory – Really?
- Asking if they’ve read the privacy policy at the point of form submission when they clearly haven’t.
- Asking for their full names or worse both their full names and also making it mandatory. Why do this? I want an initial price, not a new best friend.
- Having a section to fill out the date and when the calendar drops down it take 24 arrow clicks to find the date
- Forcing them to say what their budget is, no, I just want YOU to tell me what you want to charge.
- Promising to show a price list after form submission only to say that you’ll ‘be in touch soon’.
- Having so many forms to fill in that I want to head off to facebook to see what the last thing I ate and the road I lived in makes my dogs name become.
- Questions like ‘what kind of cake am I’ put me into a crisis.
Email manner:
Generally most emails that came back were scripted and depersonalised. I’m guilty of this too. Maybe they don’t spot it, but as we send emails like this all the time then to the trained eye it’s like signing off ‘Best’ so maybe those areas could be improved, I don’t know. It’s hard when every couple just asks how much you are. I get it.
Random stuff:
- I was pretty surprised that a couple of photographers would reply to my request for information with everything except the answer to my question. They wouldn’t actually price or even supply a range without seeing me in an online meeting. If a couple only have £1500 and you’re £2500 you waste everyone’s time. I know there’s the thing about making sure you’re right for the couple but you can fire a couple or send them a Dear John after the fact. Sabotaging your prospects early on like this doesn’t seem intuitive.
- More than a few contact forms and online PDF’s didn’t work in Firefox. My browser of choice. I’ll never use Chrome and a lot of other people feel the same way. So test your stuff or let someone else with a website that works take your business.
- In all of this my screen resolution was set to match a typical 17″ laptop but even then a lot of PDF’s were unreadable. The text was too small. Also the font colour was too light for a lot of backgrounds (it’s not my monitor, I’m on a calibrated Eizo) and to a greater extent this is happening on websites too, particularly ones with full screen images and a menu across the top. I genuinely couldn’t see some menus.
Final thoughts:
I’ve always wondered if we hit ‘peak photographer’ a few years ago. If you look at 2018’s results it suggests that was the last year of price discovery before flattening out (but the sample set was low enough it could just be noise). I’ve not upped my prices for about four years, preferring to shoot the numbers rather than chance a higher rate. It certainly seems that Covid has punched the industry in the gut, from which it’ll recover but I am concerned about 2023/2024 because people haven’t been able to turn a drunken snog in 2020/2021 into a wedding in 2024.
We’re in interesting times, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Tags: how much should I pay for wedding photography, how much is a wedding photographer, how do I pick a wedding photograph, wedding photograhy prices, wedding photography costs, What is the average price for wedding photography