How Much Should I Charge for Proofreading Jobs?

If you are looking at starting your journey as a freelance proofreader, the question “how much should I charge for proofreading jobs?” is a scary one to ponder. After all, what if you charge too much and no one will hire you? Or what if you charge too little and leave money on the table? And how can you even know what a reasonable rate is in the first place?

Unfortunately, the answer is not usually immediately apparent. It takes a good bit of thought and planning—and dare we say it, even math—to figure out the best rates to charge. 

In this blog post, we cover a five-step process to answer the question “how much should I charge for proofreading jobs?” in a way that is straightforward and will give you a reasonable rate to charge for any proofreading proposal or job.

Step 1: Know the market rate.

In order to know how much you should charge for proofreading jobs, it’s important to first understand the overall market rate. In other words, how much are clients willing to pay, in general, for proofreading services?

This is key because the market rate gives you a starting point for determining your own rate. Have you ever had no idea how much a product or service might cost (say, a test ordered by your doctor, for example)? It can be frustrating, to say the least—and it’s not fun to find out something costs more than you thought the hard way! But if you know the general range for something (say, a ticket to a baseball game, which can range from $10 to a few hundred dollars), you can plan and make a good decision that fits within your budget. 

The full market rate for proofreading work in the US is currently between $20 and $40 per hour. This doesn’t mean your rates will fall into this range necessarily, however, for reasons we’ll cover below. But in general and over the long term, this range is a pretty accurate representation of what you can expect to charge in most cases.

The best path forward, especially at first, is to establish a baseline rate in line with the market range above and then modify it based on the results of the next three steps. And if you have absolutely no idea, start with the bottom end of the range—$20 per hour.

And don’t worry—your rate doesn’t have to be static. If you aren’t getting traction with clients at one rate, adjust it down—or maybe even up!—until you find a rate that works in your situation.

Step 2: Determine the client type.

The type of clients you pursue (or who find you) will affect how much you will be able to charge for proofreading jobs. 

If your goal is to focus on the academic niche, for example, you will have to contend with the fact that the average university student does not have a large budget for hiring proofreaders. Therefore, they may have expectations of a lower price than certain other clients.

A freelancer or solopreneur is often going to be in the same boat as a student, but they are likely to have a little more money to spend on services related to their business.  

A small business, on the other hand, is likely to have more money available to hire or outsource proofreading services and is less likely to balk at a higher rate.

Large businesses or corporations are at the other end of the continuum as students. These companies often have sizable budgets for marketing materials and other written content, and as such you can often charge a much higher rate if you contract with one.

In your rate calculations, then, you will want to assign a multiplier to the client type. Perhaps, for example, you decide to only charge students 60% of your baseline rate. In this case, the multiplier is 0.6. So if your standard rate is $20 per hour, you would charge a student $12 per hour ($20 x 0.6) to review their paper.

You should charge corporations your full rate and then slot in small businesses and freelancers somewhere in between them and students. There is no “right” number when establishing client multipliers; just choose a reasonable scale that factors in probable budgets for each category of client.

Step 3: Determine the quality of the content.

The next biggest determiner of how much you should charge for proofreading jobs is the quality of the content you’re being asked to review and fix.

If at all possible, try to see the content, or an example of it, before agreeing to work with a client. If the content is poorly written, you will almost certainly have to spend a good deal more time on it. On the other hand, you are likely to breeze through excellent copy. 

Thus the next number you will need to establish is a quality multiplier. If you are getting copy riddled with mistakes, misspellings, and the like, you may need to charge up to twice your usual rate (a multiplier of 2.0). Fair-quality copy—text that’s not great but not terrible—might require a 25% or 50% increase, while content that comes to you in pretty good shape may not need an upward rate adjustment at all.

So if a client wants you to proofread a blog post that needs a ton of work and your base rate is $20, you may need to charge $40 per hour ($20 x 2.0) to account for the extra time you’ll be spending on it.

Of course, it’s not always possible to know what you’re getting into in advance. In these cases, you will have to make an assumption of how good the copy will be. Most writing tends to be fair to good, so establishing a multiplier between 1.0 and 1.5 in these situations can be a good practice.

Step 4: Factor into account your current client demand.

When you begin your proofreading career, it’s often more important to take any work and clients you can get, even if the pay is below your ultimate goal. As you grow, however, you can begin to use your existing client demand to your advantage.

If, for example, you have multiple steady clients paying you $20 per hour, it makes no sense to bring on a new client at a lower rate. You are literally losing money on that deal. Why bring on a new client at $15 per hour when you could be making $20 per hour by growing your relationship with a current client?

Instead, once you have established yourself with a pool of clients at a certain rate, raise your rates for the next client who comes along. If you have multiple clients at $20 per hour, make your rate $25 per hour. This is simply taking advantage of the law of supply and demand. Your services are limited by your current clientele, so a new client will have to pay more for the remainder of your time and effort.

Putting it into practice: an example scenario

Let’s put steps 1-4 together with another example. Let’s say you have three current clients at $25 per hour. A small business owner approaches you and wants to hire your proofreading services for his website. He shows you an example blog post, and it’s generally well written with only a few glaring mistakes. Your initial rate calculation might look like this:

$25 (base rate) x 0.8 (client-size multiplier) x 1.15 (quality multiplier) = $23/hour

This is all good and well, except for the fact that you already have three clients at a higher rate! Instead, you go back and increase your base rate to $30 per hour. Now the formula looks like this:

$30 (base rate) x 0.8 (client-size multiplier) x 1.15 (quality multiplier) = $28/hour (rounded up from $27.60)

Thus you would send the small business owner a proposal for $28 per hour.

Step 5: Factor in psychology.

Psychologically speaking, we all tend to undervalue our work. This makes us too quick to charge too little for our services. Given the fact that, at the end of the day, the goal of a freelance proofreader is to make money, this is not a good strategy!

Because of this, it’s critical to learn to set uncomfortably high rates. 

We mentioned in Step 1 above to pick a baseline or foundational rate—the rate that you will multiply by the client-type and quality multiples to get an individual rate for a particular job. And we also discussed raising your rates over time due to client demand.

But there is one more step in the process. Once you’ve determined the highest baseline rate you are comfortable charging, take that rate and add 25%-50% to it. 

This should make you nervous, and you may even doubt that any clients will say yes to this higher amount, but this is the rate you should use because it takes into account the money you subconsciously subtract by undervaluing yourself.

So if you come to the conclusion that $15 per hour is the “right” number for your baseline rate based on your situation, the actual rate you should use should be closer to $20 per hour. You will be surprised how often clients say yes to a rate you thought would scare them away!

Conclusion

The question, “How much should I charge for proofreading jobs?” is one of the most difficult for freelance proofreaders to answer, especially when you are first starting out. But using the five-step process outlined above, you can establish a reasonable and justifiable rate—and even raise it over time.

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