There is no rate card for this work. Build your own in an afternoon.
Every photographer eventually searches for the number. What do I charge a builder for interior photos. There is no published answer, and there is not going to be one, because antitrust law stops any trade body from setting rates and every honest source says so in a footnote. That absence is usually read as a gap in the information. It is not. It is the answer: the number depends on facts nobody but you has, and the method for getting to it is teachable in an afternoon.
The day rate is the floor, not the price
The single most expensive habit in this trade is quoting a day and calling it done. A day rate covers what it cost you to make the pictures. It says nothing about what the pictures are worth to the person using them, and those two numbers are not related.
The same interior frame is worth one thing on a local builder’s project page and something else entirely on a national manufacturer’s packaging. Identical file, identical shooting day, and the fee should differ by a lot, because usage is the value. This is the oldest idea in commercial licensing and it is still the one most often skipped.
So a quote has two parts that live separately: what it cost to produce, and what the use is worth. Collapsing them into one number is how you end up charging a manufacturer a day rate.
The seven levers
Usage is not one dial, it is seven, and they are the vocabulary you price in: media, placement, size, volume, term, territory, and exclusivity.
Each is a question with a real answer. Where does it run. How prominently. How big. How many images. For how long. In which markets. Does the client stop you licensing it to anyone else.
Answering all seven is most of the work, and it is also the paperwork: these are the same seven things the licence has to name. A quote and a licence built from the same seven answers cannot contradict each other, which is worth more than the pricing itself.
How they combine, which is the part people get wrong
The instinct is to multiply. Double the term and double the size, and the fee doubles twice.
The published method does not do that. In the ASMP model, combined usage increases are priced by the square root of the product of the multipliers. Double two levers and the product is four, the square root is two, so the fee doubles. Double three and the product is eight, the square root is about 2.83.
That feels wrong at first and it is right in practice. A client asking for more of everything is not eight times more valuable to serve, and a fee that compounds linearly prices you out of exactly the broad licences worth having. The square root is what keeps a wide grant sellable while still charging more for it.
One set of interiors, priced three ways
Take a single shoot of a finished house, and a hypothetical base of $400 for a small local grant of ten images. Watch where the spread comes from.
The builder. Their homepage and project pages, plus paid social, three years, regional. Term is up, placement is up, territory is up. Three levers at roughly double is a product of eight, so the square root is about 2.83. $400 becomes roughly $1,130.
The national manufacturer. Their product is in the frame, and they want it for trade advertising and packaging, nationally, for three years. Media, placement, territory and term are all considerably more than the base, not merely doubled. On the same method the multiplier lands near 6.7. $400 becomes roughly $2,700.
Same day. Same files. The spread is close to seven to one, and every step of it came from a question about use rather than from anything about the shoot. That is the whole argument for pricing this way, and it is also why the manufacturer conversation is worth having at all.
Add exclusivity or a perpetual term on top and both are commonly charged as a percentage uplift on the base, because exclusivity removes your future income and a long term extends the value. Neither is free, and neither should be given away to avoid an awkward moment.
“We only want five of the thirty”
This is the most common real objection and it deserves a straight answer, because the instinct is to divide the fee by six.
Do not. Volume is one of the seven levers, not the whole price. Five images running on a national campaign are worth more than thirty on a local flyer, so a per-image number that ignores the other six levers will be wrong in both directions: it overcharges the small local user and it badly undercharges the big one.
The workable shape is a fee that moves with volume but not proportionally, on the same logic as the square root: the second image is worth less than the first, and the thirtieth much less again, because the use is already bought. Price the use, then let the count adjust it.
What to do this afternoon
- Write down your seven levers as a form. Media, placement, size, volume, term, territory, exclusivity. Fill it in for the last three jobs you quoted by instinct and see what you missed.
- Set your own base. One number, for a small local grant of a defined number of images, that you would be content to shoot for. It is yours and nobody else’s business.
- Apply the levers the same way every time. Consistency is what makes the method defensible. Reaching a number by feel is what makes it arguable.
- Quote the use, not the day. Say what the fee buys, in the seven terms, and the price stops sounding arbitrary.
- Write the same seven answers into the licence. If the quote and the agreement disagree, the agreement wins, and it is usually the vaguer of the two.
This is the calculation Resid runs, which is why it exists: the levers, the combination, and a number you can defend, before the conversation rather than during it.
Where this fits
Read the pricing rules in full, what a licence must name, or all 54 rules.
Every rule here is a decision Resid makes for you.
It finds the companies who worked on a property, prices each licence on real licensing data, writes the agreement, and collects.
See how it works →