Advice - General / What freelances need to charge and why

Non-journalists may think that some of the numbers in this Guide represent a lot of money for what may sometimes seem, from outside, like quick work. Staff journalists often look at freelance day rates, divide their salary by 365 and mutter about "freelances having it easy". No, we do not. That arithmetic is wrong and entirely misunderstands the economics.

Charging for shifts

The simplest point to make is this: the total direct cost to a company of employing someone, not counting the costs of running an office, is about one-and-a-half times their gross salary. The company has to pay employer's National Insurance contributions and pension contributions. Other incidental costs of employment mount up. (The Fees Guide editor did not believe how much they mount up either, until we did the accounts for a charity - and re-did them in disbelief.)

These extra costs fall due before you include the cost of providing an employee with a desk and a piece of floor to put it on; or factor in the sheer convenience to a company of engaging a freelance, who is only there when they are needed. Sometimes it seems to freelances that companies think that, when they cannot see us, we exist in a state of suspended animation, waking for five seconds every hour to check for email from them.

This is not the case. Even a freelance who is doing five sub-editing shifts this week must budget to be able to eat next week, when some (or all) of those shifts may have ceased. They would be foolish to budget for more than 180 paid days per year.

Out of their fees, freelances have to pay tax and two chunks of National Insurance, and arrange their own pension.

The point freelances make to staff journalists, as economic beings and as trades unionists, is this: if you engage a freelance at less than 160 per cent of the equivalent staffer's daily gross pay, then you are undercutting a staff job. Unfortunately, even some of the suggested rates in this Fees Guide do undercut staff in this way, since they spring from reports of actual market rates. That does not mean that the NUJ condones this practice.

Charging for writing and reporting

To non-journalists we say this: the high rates you have heard about (up to hundreds of thousands a year!) are paid to columnists and presenters for major papers and channels. Those rates are agreed by hard-headed publishers' and broadcasters' accountants on the basis of their expected contribution to profits. They are in effect part of the marketing budget.

Journalists who produce news and features have to work harder - for considerably less money. The agreed minimum rates at the Guardian represent an hourly rate less than the UK minimum wage for a 500-word story that takes 18 hours to produce. Not all stories may take that long. But really interesting stories - the ones that justify this whole journalism business - can and should take much longer to do and to do well.

At these rates it is simply uneconomic for a freelance to do intensive, investigative, independent reporting - again, the kind that makes the whole business worthwhile and is supposed to be what freelances are for. A diet of fluff is the inevitable result of the way that bean-counters are exercising their control over the publishing and broadcasting industries.

Photographers

On top of all these arguments, photographers face huge equipment costs. See the link below.

What your client saves by engaging a freelance

NUJ member Andrew Bibby produced a ready reckoner that works out the daily rate equivalent to the total cost of employing someone on a given salary. It is now maintained by the NUJ Freelance Office: see the link below.

It does not suggest that these rates are commonly attainable right now. It should be a powerful negotiating tool, especially when - as usual - you can point out to a staff member commissioning you how much the rate they're offering you is undercutting their own job.