Editing tax calculator
Type how often you record, how long each recording runs, how many clips come out of it and what your hour is worth. The editing tax calculator returns your own hours and dollars per year, scaled from a published dataset of one 12-minute recording that costs 390 minutes to post-produce properly.
Given your recording cadence, your clip count and your hourly rate, produce your own editing hours and dollars per year, in under two seconds.
338 hours a year
8.4 forty-hour weeks. $50,700 of your own time at $150 an hour, or $20,800 a year to hand it to an editor at $400 a recording.
| per recording | minutes | a year |
|---|---|---|
| Watch back, find the good parts | 25 | 22 h |
| Remove filler, dead air, bad takes | 45 | 39 h |
| Colour, audio levels, music | 20 | 17 h |
| Captions, styled, timed | 25 | 22 h |
| Reframe and export 9:16 | 15 | 13 h |
| Graphics, lower thirds, stat cards | 60 | 52 h |
| Find and cut the short clips | 90 | 78 h |
| Write hooks and copy per platform | 40 | 35 h |
| Thumbnail | 20 | 17 h |
| Upload, caption, hashtag, schedule | 50 | 43 h |
| total | 390 | 338 h |
That is the bill for one year of doing it yourself. Knowing the number does not move it — the hours only come back when the watching-back, the cutting and the captioning stop being things a person does by hand.
Next artifact: this week's recording, already cut.
One raw file in, and out comes the edit with the filler and dead air gone, the ranked short clips, word-timed captions, a thumbnail and the per-platform posts — scheduled.
Read how the 338 hours were measuredEvery number you type stays in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored, and there is nothing to delete.
What the editing tax actually measures
The editing tax is the total post-production time one recording costs before it is posted everywhere it is going. It is not the time spent in the timeline. It includes watching the recording back to find the good parts, removing filler and dead air, levelling audio, building graphics, cutting the short clips, writing a hook for each platform, making a thumbnail and scheduling the lot — ten separate jobs, only two of which feel like editing.
Counting it this way is the point. Most people know roughly how long the timeline takes and have no number at all for the other eight lines, which is why the total is always larger than the estimate. At one 12-minute recording a week the published figure is 338 hours a year.
How to work out your own editing tax by hand
- Time one recording, end to end. Not the edit — the whole thing, from opening the file to the last post being scheduled. Use a stopwatch, and count the interruptions, because they are part of the cost.
- Split it by what it scales with. Some of it grows with the length of the recording. Some grows with the number of clips. A thumbnail happens once. Keep the three apart or the annual number will be wrong in both directions at once.
- Multiply by your real cadence. Recordings per week times weeks you actually post. Be honest about the weeks you skip; they are the ones that tell you the cadence is unsustainable.
- Price the hours twice. Once at what your hour is worth, and once at what an editor charges to take it away. The gap between those two numbers is the decision.
Where the manual way breaks
Timing your own editing by hand breaks because the number changes the behaviour being measured. People edit faster when the stopwatch is running, skip the tasks they find tedious, and never count the days a recording sits untouched — which is where most of the real cost lives, in a backlog that is not being posted.
The second failure is that a single measurement is not a rate. One recording tells you what one recording cost on one Tuesday. The annual figure only means something if the cadence is real, which is why the editing tax calculator asks for cadence first and length second.
The number is worth having anyway, because it is the honest denominator for every tool decision that follows. Never exists to take those ten task lines off the list rather than to speed any one of them up: the filler and dead-air pass removes the 45-minute line, the clip harvest removes the 90-minute one, and the colour and audio levelling line is 20 minutes of it. Whether that is worth paying for is a question this page deliberately leaves to the number you just produced.
Read the transcript
Editing tax calculator Type how often you record, how long each recording runs, how many clips come out of it and what your hour is worth. The editing tax calculator returns your own hours and dollars per year, scaled from a published dataset of one 12-minute recording that costs 390 minutes to post-produce properly.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the 390 minutes come from?
From the published Editing Tax dataset: ten task lines timed against one 12-minute single-camera talking-head recording, post-produced properly and yielding eight short clips. The method, the sample and the per-task numbers are at /research/editing-tax under CC-BY.
How does the calculator scale the dataset to my numbers?
Three ways, and it shows which is which. Watching back, cleaning audio, captioning and exporting scale with how long the recording is. Finding, cutting and writing copy for clips scale with how many clips you make. A thumbnail and a scheduling pass happen once either way.
Is the outsourced figure what an editor would really charge?
It is the dataset's mid-point: roughly $400 to take one recording all the way, which is where a competent freelance editor lands for this scope. A retainer buys it cheaper per unit and a specialist agency costs more; treat it as the middle of a wide range.
Why 52 weeks and not 46?
Because the published headline figure — 338 hours a year at one recording a week — is annualised at 52, and a calculator that used a different multiplier would quietly disagree with the dataset it cites. Divide by your own real posting weeks if you take holidays.