All creators ask this question at one point in their journey: “What should I charge as an artist?” Whether you make digital or physical art, pricing your art can determine if you can make a living as a working artist, part-time or full-time, so it’s important to take it seriously.
The moment you start putting the business into your art, so to speak, you should start thinking about prices. And you’ll battle questions like: Do you know how some people can be suspicious if something is priced too low, and jump to the conclusion that it’s not of quality? And what about those prospective customers you can easily lose if you overprice your work?
But what is too low, and what is too high? How much can I charge for art, anyway?
Let’s take this step by step.
⏰ Or, here’s your TLDR:
Consider these factors when pricing your art:
- Cost of materials/supplies
- Hourly rate
- Execution time
- The size of the artwork
- Original work or reproduction
- Shipping costs
- Business expenses
- Taxes
- Insurance
Here’s the formula you can follow to price your art:
Hourly rate x Hours of project time + Cost of base materials + Markup
For more details, read the article:
How to price your art? 👈 Read this, if nothing else
Do your research: How do artists price their work?
Consider selling artworks at different price points
Adjust your prices over time (up or down)
Think about how much non-artists make for a new mindset
How much do artists make?
First, we’ll get some perspective on how other artists price their work.
The average hourly rate for fine artists, including painters, sculptors, and illustrators in the US, is $34.34, and the median hourly wage is $28.51. The average hourly rate of freelance artists is $24.85, while the hourly pay of freelance concept artists can range from $22 to $40 per hour.
The Artists’ Union England has a very good breakdown of artists’ wages that reflects experience, too (and we’ll also discuss the importance of that and its relation to pricing later in the article). The prices below reflect how much freelance artists and those with short-term contract employment make in the field of visual art.
A new graduate artist can price £27.08 an hour, while someone with 3+ years of experience can ask for £35.54 per hour, and if you have 5+ years behind you, your average hourly rate can be £44.00.
Note that these rates for England don’t include costs like shipping, insurance, rental costs, and tax contributions, which are extremely important to calculate with, as you’ll see in the list below.
How to price your art?
To calculate your art prices, you’ll need to consider the following:
Cost of base materials
How much did you pay for supplies? These are part of your essential base costs that you must calculate into your final price. After all, your work wouldn’t even exist if you hadn’t had your tools, whether they’re a print or digital canvas (aka a software subscription or a brush set you paid for), a ball of yarn, paint, or a bag of clay.
You also need to make sure that you count the extras. If you sell painting or prints with frames, the costs of those must be accounted for, especially so because items like these influence shipping costs due to their size and weight (which we’ll address in a bit, too).
In addition, keep in mind how the cost of supplies can change. Illustrator Dais-Scott Bennett talked about this in our interview:
“Recently, I’ve been thinking I might have to readjust prices again to things like cards because the cost of cards has really changed, and to be able to make the right amount of money off them, I need to change their price.”
Hourly rate
Calculate an hourly rate based on your market research of comparable artists’ prices, your own expertise, skills, the popularity of your works (perhaps the number of items you sold), and your reputation as an artist. It’s tricky to push all this into one number, but it really helps if you do your research and see how others do it.
It’s also worth remembering that reputation can mean something different for a “traditional” artist who works with galleries and those who build up a following on social media and rely on a digital buying audience.
The first group will be more bound by the expectations and demands of the traditional art market and can receive insights on how to price their work from agents and art buyers. The second group can, for instance, look at follower or subscriber numbers, too, which can be an indication for a certain growth.
But, I caution you to not solely focus on those digits when it comes to defining your experience and success. To take an extreme example, you might have 10K followers on Instagram but it you have only ever made 15 sales, that’s not a reason for you to raise your hourly rate claiming that you’re popular.
Execution time
How long does it take to create the artwork?
Consider if it’s an easy job that you’ve done a thousand times before, and you’re skilled enough to make it quick. At the same time, don’t forget that even if that’s the case, you should raise your hourly rate to better reflect your expertise.
Consider also if you’re highly skilled, but you still need to make a complicated piece of artwork that will simply take up more of your time. That also means a higher hourly rate.
Ceramicist AJ Simpson told us in an interview how this approach worked for them:
“What makes the biggest difference in my pricing is my time and how long things take. When I first started selling things, I was a newly graduated student, so I was charging my hourly rate based on the recommended rate for artists who had just recently graduated. Now that I’m a bit more established, I use an hourly rate that’s a little bit higher because I have that experience and I have the following.”
The size of the artwork
The size of your artwork can also influence your execution time. It’s common for two-dimensional artists to use a pricing formula based on the size of their artwork. There are different ones, too:
- (Height x Width) × Price per square inch: The last number is where you consider your market situation, your reputation, and credentials. In a way, it’s a pretty subjective number, but something you can calculate once you do your market research and see the prices of other artists. Also, it can be a lower number for smaller artworks and a higher number for larger art pieces.
- (Height + Width) × Price per linear inch: This formula is more useful when you offer different sizes of artworks, and you don’t want big price differences between them that would be hard to explain to potential buyers. And so, as the name suggests, this calculation is more linear and will result in more linear prices in your portfolio.
In case you need a more visual representation, here’s a very good breakdown of these formulas.
When you multiply your supply costs by the execution time, you’ll get your labour cost. This should realistically reflect the project’s complexity, plus the value of your work, and should represent your skills and experience.
Fine art crocheter Amanda Barbisch has a very solid pricing formula for her handmade art that she talks about in this interview:
Original work or reproduction
Whether you create an original work or make editions or reproductions of that original will directly influence your working hours and consequently your labour cost.
Shipping costs
When you offer the option to ship to different countries, the shipping fees will naturally vary, so your costs will differ, too. What you can do is calculate an average or flat fee for all shipping options, or you can have a different estimate for domestic and international shipping.
In addition, make sure you consider not only the actual shipping costs but also any other costs related to packaging and labeling. Boxes, protective box fillers, like foam inserts, and printing labels are not free for you either, right?
Business expenses
We’re mainly talking about studio costs, which include a home studio, and basic living costs, such as:
- Rent
- Utilities (electricity, water, gas)
- Internet
- Food and drinks
- Craft-related offline costs, e.g., ceramic artists often pay studios to use their kilns
- Craft-related digital costs, e.g., website and webshop operation, ecommerce provider fees
- Employee or contractor fee, e.g. do you pay anyone who helps you with your business, either on a project basis, part-time, or full-time?
These types of expenses are often forgotten by artists. This is where you have to remember that you’re thinking about how to price your art because you want to make a living out of it (even if you do it part-time, it’s going to contribute to it).
Let’s repeat: you want to make a living from your art business.
You cannot live without eating and drinking.
You cannot live (truly) if you don’t have a home or have the means to turn a place into your home (in case you’re a digital nomad).
You cannot live if you don’t spend on essentials.
But for that, you need to bring in that money first.
Taxes
Technically, taxes belong under business expenses, but I wanted to dedicate a separate section to this part to emphasize its importance.
The amount of taxes will very based on where you live and the type of business you own (sole proprietorship, LLC, DBA, etc.), so the first thing to do here is for you to check how much is that. Then, you can calculate that into your potential sales.
But, remember: you don’t have to charge customers your taxes, you have to pay taxes. Many artists round up their final sales price accordingly, so they know they’ll be able to pay their taxes after the piece is sold.
Another method is to make sure you can save a certain amount of money put aside each month or quarter, and that is usually in the range of anywhere between 10% to 35%, based on the varying factors mentioned.
It’s also worth considering that, depending on your business type and location, you may write off or deduct certain costs, which means the money you should save up for paying taxes can be lowered.
Insurance
Like taxes, any insurance you pay truly belongs under business expenses but we must talk about it separately because insurance rates can be astronomical and thus should be accounted for.
In the most simplest terms: If you pay insurance for your art business, whether that’s for your equipment or the artworks specifically, calculate that into the price.
This is more common for artists who create physical art and especially art of a larger size, like paintings on a big canvas, or need expensive tools to make them, like a new longarm sewing machine that art quilters may use, which can easily cost anywhere from $5000 to $25000.
Accounting for insurance when calculating your prices is similar to your taxes in that you won’t directly charge your customers, but have to have an estimate of a fraction of a fee that you calculate into your prices. This way, when they add up over the course of a year, you’ll know that you’ll be able to pay for your insurance every month.
So, how much can I charge for my art?
Now, I want to make sure that this message comes across solidly, and I’m not afraid to repeat it. When I write things like you have to calculate insurance into your final artwork prices, I don’t mean you have to add the full cost of that to your final price point. It would be quite ridiculous to add a thousand-dollar insurance cost to a hundred-dollar ceramic mug.
Similarly, you likely won’t be bringing in all the money you need in a month by selling one piece of artwork. Plus, as you’ll grow as an artist and expand your business, you’ll tap into more income channels, and that will immediately help you see how you can bring in money from more than one sale or source.
The most basic formula for calculating the base price of one artwork is this:
| Hourly rate x Hours of project time + Cost of base materials (you’ll need to adjust this, so keep reading 👇) |
This formula purely shows the potential price of the artwork and if you deduct the costs of creating it, you’ll see how much profit you’d make once it sells.
But this formula doesn’t account for everything that goes into creating the artwork and doesn’t account for all the items we listed above, so let’s keep going.
How can you tell what the full cost of creating one artwork is?
Some things are evident, even if it’s just an estimated cost of how much paint you used, how much you paid for a canvas, or knowing how much it’ll cost you when you ship it. But what about those other items, like thinking about rent or insurance? How do those factors add to the price of a single artwork?
Those all go into your markup, and so you’ll need to change the formula:
| Hourly rate x Hours of project time + Cost of base materials + Markup |
The markup will cover your overhead and desired profit margin.
What is overhead in art pricing?
The overhead costs are the expenses that are not directly related to creating an artwork, but are costs that you pay on an ongoing basis to run and manage your art business (tools, marketing costs, insurance, taxes).
You have to know what these costs are on a monthly or yearly basis and figure out how many of your artworks you have to sell and at what price point, so you can pay for all those things.
This is the part where many artists realise how much money they truly spend and how they must account for all those costs when setting up their prices.
This is where you also have to think about the quality versus quantity question in pricing, meaning that you’ll either sell many pieces at a small price or a few at a higher price point to make things work. (More on this later.)
As we move on, notice how I said that the overhead is only one part of the markup. The other is your desired profit margin.
What is profit margin in art pricing?
Your profit margin is the money left after you deduct your costs. If you don’t calculate with a profit margin and, in short, won’t have a profit after you make a sale, it means you’ll make zero profit margin and that you’re business is breaking even. The revenue covers the costs, so there’s no loss (which can also be incredible if you have a fresh business), but again, no profit either.
This might also be a temporary case. As you might have heard, many artists have a fluctuating income, and it’s completely possible that you won’t hit the business lottery with every single piece you sell. Pricing is just one of the things that you’ll get better at with time as you gain more experience and especially as you get more comfortable with the business side of things.
But in the long run, a zero-profit situation won’t be sustainable, and while there are industries and fields of commerce where companies live long using that model, trust me when I say that art is not one of them. Art is a very sensitive market from many perspectives, particularly if you run your own business.
So, make sure that you have a positive profit margin as soon as possible and for as long as possible.
And now, 4 final tips that will help you with pricing your art.
1. Do your research: How do artists price their work?
Look at how other artists in your field price their work.
If possible, try to find successful creators who talk about actually selling their work, too. If they post on social media about how their new collection or certain items sold out in an hour, that’s a good sign of that. Somebody repeatedly sharing about having repeat customers or selling yet another piece of artwork to a gallery is another sign you can look for.
The goal here is not only to see their exact price points and try to match them (considering that you’re at a similar stage in your professional life, and whether you have developed a similar level of skills as they have).
You can also learn, and should learn, about buyer expectations. There’s that saying that everything has a price someone is willing to pay for it. In marketing, we call this willingness to pay (WTP), which is the maximum amount a person is prepared to spend for a good or service.
Doing your research on pricing can be very beneficial for two further reasons.
- Don’t sell yourself short: You might want to price your artwork too low, thinking that you won’t have a buying audience for it if you price it higher. You can save yourself from selling yourself too cheaply once you see other artists with similar expertise and experience as you and with similar artwork priced higher and making good sales.
- Don’t fly too close to the sun: You may calculate atrociously high prices in the beginning because of your lack of experience with pricing and lack of market knowledge. Avoid assuming that you’ll achieve quick success by bringing in money with only a few but pricy items, then contemplate why you don’t make any sales. It can happen, but the art business is extremely competitive.
To summarise the two points: Be humble about your craft and be reasonable about the business.
2. Consider selling artworks at different price points
Smaller items create a smaller price point for customers, but in those cases, you must remember that you rely on quantity. You have to do more to make those pieces sell, which usually means more promotion so you can bring in a similar amount of money as when selling one piece of more expensive artwork.
From another perspective, products that fall into this category, like print-on-demand products, can generate passive income for you while making your art available to more people, including those who have a tighter budget.
And there’s the consideration from the artist’s point of view that ceramicist AJ Simpson shared with us:
“I’m also expanding and trying to merchandise because I can sell those cheaper since it takes a lot less time for me to create and get them out there. It creates a smaller price point.”
When you have a higher price point for something you made, you rely on quality, and so you need “quality buyers”. You’ll need to find the right customer for those art pieces (although, take that as general advice, too), people who will pay that amount of money, without questioning their value, along with the hours you spent on them and the skills that are represented in that number. The right people probably won’t even start thinking about those questions.
Both types of customers are perfectly welcome in the art world and should be equally respected. Most artists who build their creative business from the bottom up have a portfolio that targets both groups, and have artworks ranging from less to more expensive to make sure that there is a certain amount of income coming in every month.
3. Adjust your prices over time (up or down)
This means two things.
1. Raise your prices gradually
As you get better at your craft, you sell more, and become more successful and popular, you should raise your prices so that your knowledge and experience will be reflected in those numbers.
It’s a perfectly understandable and accepted method to have lower prices at the beginning of your art career, then to slowly raise your prices to have them match up with who you are as an artist in the present and what your artworks look like at the current stage of your creative journey.
You progress as an artist, so do your artworks, and so should your prices. This is what illustrator Dais Scott-Bennett talked about in an interview with us:
“The main change in prices I’ve seen is my cost for my originals because there is more demand… And, I think the way I draw originals has gone beyond what I like to think better, so their prices are slightly adjusted to reflect the effort in them.”
2. Know if your market still accepts your prices
Many popular artists, even big names with professional representation in gallery circles, sometimes face the fact that the market trends have changed, and they might not be able to sell at the same price as before, for different reasons.
I mentioned WTP, willingness to pay. Very often, the market for certain artworks or designs shrinks or disappears altogether. The demand for certain things might be lower, which means that there are fewer potential buyers for your art, and that their willingness to pay is also lower.
In those cases, you need to accept that you can only sell something for much less than before, contradicting the general rule that the better you become at your craft and the more sales you make over time will grant you the opportunity to have higher prices.
At the same time, a situation like this can also be temporary, so keep that in mind, too.
4. Think about how much non-artists make for a new mindset
I know it’s like comparing apples to oranges in a way, but I urge you to look at what people make in other professions.
This will give you perspective and help you build a mindset where you remember that everybody lives from money, and so everybody has to make money, enough so, that they can live and do what they want to do. (Let’s skip the part where we compare basic living to luxury and how “needing” and “wanting” money are not the same thing.)
How much does a babysitter make per hour? What is the daily rate of a cameraman? How much money does a PR agent make in a month?
Feel free to look at random examples that have nothing to do with art, and jobs that are on the very opposite sides of the scale, like a kids yoga teacher and a freelance architect.
Again, this is not about looking for an exact comparison. It’s about planting the idea in your head that (ideally) they get paid as much (and ideally, more) as they need to be able to pay the bills at the end of the month (at the very least).
For those artists who run their small creative business and/or do freelance art projects, it’s even better if they think about how much money employees make, but more importantly, how people who are employed at different organisations look at their salary.
Anyone who receives a pay each month will want to make sure that the money reflects their skills and experience, is enough to pay for everything in their lives, and ideally, also for saving a little for any unexpected expenses or simply saving for their future (like retirement years).
When that’s not the case, they ask for a raise, and if they don’t get it, they’ll look for another job opportunity with another company that will pay them the amount of money they need. This is what people do when they can’t make ends meet.
As a working artist, you need to employ that mentality as well. You need to get the money that represents your skills and experience. You have bills to pay. You need to set aside money for unexpected costs. You need to be comfortable with your earnings so you can live your life.
Pricing art is a process
While making sure that the way you’re selling art is profitable, you can make ends meet and even set aside money to either reinvest in your creative business or save up for different personal or business purposes in the future, remember that nobody nails this for the first time.
Artists go back and forth about figuring out what to charge, and put their own experience and approaches next to the well-known pricing formulas. As ceramic artist Kness explained in one of our interviews:
“I consider how much I would like a certain piece vs. keeping it for myself. Would I like $100 or keep this? If the answer is keep it, my price is too low. It’s very organic and subjective, but that’s how I part with the work that I love. 😊
… If something sells in the first 5 minutes, it’s probably not expensive enough—up to a point, because I know some of my pieces are super popular, but I wouldn’t raise the prices more than what it is already.”
Garther market knowledge, look at smart formulas, but also lean into your common sense, and make sure that you are comfortable with your prices. And whenever something feels off, take a moment to reconsider.
This is a balancing act between understanding what the market wants and what buyers accept, and what you need to do to make a living as an artist.
Pricing is a process and you need to trust to process. Even better: trust that you can deal with the process.
Featured image by Igor Omilaev
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