A video editor costs $25 to $150 an hour freelance. The invoice is about half what the ad really costs.

Freelance, by hour: published 2026 rate guides put the range at roughly $25 to $150 an hour, with entry level around $20 to $45, mid level around $45 to $85, and senior editors with motion graphics or colour work at $85 to $150 and above. Read 1 September 2026.

Agency, by hour: $100 to $250 is the range those same guides report, and the gap over a freelancer buys project management, cover when somebody is ill, and a contract.

Salaried, for comparison: the US Bureau of Labor Statistics gives a median annual wage of $75,420 for film and video editors in its May 2025 figures, which is about $36 an hour over a 2,080-hour year before employment costs.

Freelance, by video: short social clips are commonly quoted at $50 to $400 each, and simple social cuts with text overlays at roughly $10 to $50 per finished minute. A thirty-second vertical ad sits at the bottom of both ranges.

Use those as a sanity check on a quote, not as a budget. The spread is five-fold because scope, seniority and market all move it, and nobody can quote your job from a range.

Now the part the ranges do not contain. On most small teams the editor's invoice is roughly half of what a finished ad actually costs, and the other half is briefing time, review time, delay and work that never ran.

Hourly puts the risk on you. A vague brief or messy footage grows the hours. You pay for the confusion. It is honest work. It punishes an unprepared client.

Per video puts the risk on the editor. A buffer gets priced in. What is included gets capped. The cap is where the arguments live.

A monthly retainer buys availability. It is the cheapest per unit if you fill it. It is the most expensive if you do not. You are paying for a queue you are not using.

One clause decides more than the rate does. What counts as a revision. Two editors quoting the same number can differ by half your annual bill on that definition alone.

That is also why the ranges above are wide. A $60 hourly rate with two included rounds and a $90 rate with unlimited rounds are not the numbers they look like.

Use your own last invoice rather than a benchmark. Take your per-video price, call it P, and multiply by the creatives you need each month.

Now add the costs that are yours. Hours spent briefing. Hours spent reviewing. The cost of the delay while a version sits in a queue.

Then add the edits that never went live. An abandoned brief. A cut that came back wrong twice. A video killed by a change of plan. You paid for those in full and ran none of them.

Worked example. Twelve creatives a month. Forty minutes of briefing and reviewing each. That is eight hours of a salaried person, priced at their loaded hourly cost.

For many teams that internal time lands between a quarter and a half of the external invoice. It appears on no document anybody signs.

Turnaround days. If a revision takes two days, a creative needing two rounds is a week old before it goes live. Across a month that is a week of spend you did not test.

Revision rounds. Two included sounds generous until you notice a round is a full day of calendar. The third round, where you finally see the thing you meant, is often billed separately.

Batch consistency. Twelve creatives cut across three months by two people drift in pace, caption style and length. When they perform differently you cannot tell whether it was the idea or the execution.

Version tax. A second aspect ratio, a shorter cut, a swapped opening line. Each is trivial creatively and priced as work.

Add those to the invoice and the real figure often doubles. A $150 per-video quote is a $300 finished ad, and that doubled number is the one to compare against any alternative.

An editor is worth hiring when the work needs judgement. A launch film, a founder story, anything where pacing and taste carry the piece. Nothing automated competes there, and $150 an hour is fair for it.

The case weakens on volume work. Twelve near-identical vertical ads a month, differing by opening line and length. That is repetitive labour. It costs real money and real days.

That is the split Cutroom is built around. One take, up to three minutes, comes back as a finished 9:16 MP4. You adjust it by marking the transcript.

A batch is 100 credits and covers transcription, the director pass and the b-roll search. Export is 20 credits per output minute, so a thirty-second ad is 110 credits from upload to file. Basic is $39.99 a month for 2,500 credits and Premium is $79.99 for 5,000.

The point is not that it undercuts a person. Turnaround falls from days to minutes, and turnaround is what caps how much you get to test.

Run the same four lines against this route. The invoice becomes a flat monthly figure you already know. The queue days go, because there is no queue.

Internal briefing time goes with them. There is nobody to brief. You read the transcript and mark it yourself. The edits that never went live stop costing much, because an abandoned variant cost an export rather than a booking.

The fourth cost is the one worth keeping. Somebody still has to decide what the ad says, and that decision is where the win lives.

This is also the part no other route gives you in one step. An editor hands you a queue. A stock library hands you clips. A generator hands you a raw talking clip you still have to finish. This hands back the file you upload.

The facts a buyer needs. The source is a person speaking, up to three minutes. Every export is a 9:16 MP4, so a square version for a website comes from somewhere else. There is no timeline underneath. Three finished videos are free in your first 7 days, no card, and a free export carries a Cutroom mark across the middle of the picture.

Keep the editor for the two or three pieces a year that carry the brand. Stop paying craft rates for the twelfth cutdown.