Article fee calculator
The calculator converts a fee from any payment model into all the others at once: per word, per 1,000 words, per hour and as a flat fee per project. There is one number that matters here — what you actually earn per hour after the marketplace commission, tax and every round of revisions. This is where "$180 for an article" first turns into a number you can read. Until length, time and deductions are brought together, a job looks equally attractive at $180 and at $540 — the difference only becomes visible per hour.
The job
Deal terms
What you get
Fill in length, rate and hours — the calculation will appear here.
The same fee in other models
| Payment model | Rate that gives the same total |
|---|---|
| The calculation appears once you enter the data. | |
Your numbers stay in your browser: the tool calculates locally and sends nothing anywhere.
How the fee is calculated
First comes the base: the rate is multiplied by the length, by the hours, or taken as a flat fee. Then the rush surcharge is added — it applies to the whole base, because a compressed deadline costs proportionally more, not a fixed amount more. Next the marketplace commission is subtracted from the gross, and the tax is taken from what is left after the commission — that is the order in which the money actually moves. The last step matters most. The net amount is divided not by the hours you quoted but by all hours including revisions: the number of revision rounds multiplied by the time one round takes. That is why two articles with the same price give different hourly rates when one client asks for two rewrites and the other asks for none. Pricing runs on words, because that is the unit English-language clients quote in: per word and per 1,000 words are the same rate a thousand apart. If your brief gives the length in characters with spaces, switch the volume unit and the tool converts it through the average word length in prose — about 6.5 characters including the space. That is an average, not a constant: words run longer in technical writing and shorter in dialogue.
What an article costs in 2026
The chips under the rate field are not a rate card. They are broad ranges observed across marketplaces and direct clients, at three steps of experience, and the spread inside every step is wide enough that your own niche can sit anywhere in it. The English-language market counts per word. Roughly $0.05 a word is the level you reach without a portfolio, around $0.15 is the working middle, and $0.40 and up is paid for industry expertise rather than for clean grammar — the same ranges seen per 1,000 words are about $50, $150 and $400. By the hour the pattern repeats: something like $25 starting out, $60 in the middle, $125 for a specialist; in pounds that is roughly £20, £45 and £95. Treat all of those as orders of magnitude. Rates move with the niche, the client's size and how much research a piece needs, and a US technology client and a UK charity will not pay the same number for the same word count. The hourly model is almost always better for a writer starting out, because it moves the risk of endless revisions onto the client. A flat project fee suits someone who already knows their own speed: if you have never measured how many hours an article eats, a flat fee is a rate set blind. Compare the effective hour, not the number in the contract. A $540 job with four rounds of revisions often loses to a $360 job with none.
What the calculator does not do
It does not convert currencies. The currency select only puts a symbol next to the number: exchange rates would mean an outside request, and this tool deliberately loads nothing and saves nothing. It does not know your tax situation. The "tax" field is simply a percentage you type in yourself; the figure differs for a sole trader and a limited company, for self-employment tax on top of income tax, and for income earned from clients abroad — only an accountant can tell you which one applies. It does not judge the quality of your text and it cannot say whether a client will accept your price. This is the arithmetic of your deal, not a forecast of the negotiation. And it does not count the time you spend finding work, writing emails and chasing invoices. If you want that in the picture, add those hours to the "hours to write it" field and watch the effective rate drop.