The reason nobody gives you a straight number for voice over rates is that the honest answer is a range, and the range is set by how the recording will be used. A read that takes twenty minutes in the booth can be worth fifty dollars or several thousand, and the difference is not the twenty minutes. It is whether the audio plays on one company's internal training portal or on national television for a year.
Once you price by usage rather than by time, the ranges stop looking arbitrary and start looking like what they are: a licence for a specific use.
Usage, not hours, is what you are selling
This is the idea everything else rests on. You are not renting out an hour of your voice. You are licensing a recording for a defined use, and the value tracks the use:
- Where it runs. One region, one country, worldwide. Online only, or broadcast television and radio.
- How long the licence lasts. Three months, a year, in perpetuity. Longer is worth more, and "forever" is worth a great deal.
- How big the audience is. An internal video for one office is not a national campaign, even if the script is identical.
A quote that ignores usage is not a quote, it is a guess, and it is usually a guess in the client's favor and against you.
The categories are priced on different logic
Voice work is not one market. The main categories charge on different bases, and mixing them up is how people misprice:
- Commercial is priced on usage and licensing above all, which is why it has the widest range and the highest ceiling.
- Narration and corporate is often priced by the finished minute or by the project, with usage mattering less than in commercial.
- E-learning is typically per finished minute, at volume, with revisions built into how it is quoted.
- Audiobook is priced per finished hour, and the finished hour hides many unpaid hours of recording and editing, which beginners routinely underestimate.
- IVR and telephony, the on-hold and menu prompts, is priced per prompt or per project and is steadier than it is glamorous.
Use a rate guide the industry actually cites
You do not have to invent your numbers, and you should not take them from whoever posted last in a forum. The GVAA Rate Guide is the reference most of the professional side of the industry points to, a maintained set of ranges by category and usage. Use it as your starting point and adjust for your market and experience, rather than pricing from a single figure someone told you once.
This page deliberately quotes no dollar amounts, because real ranges move by year and by usage, and a number printed here would be out of date and misleading the day after. The guide is where the current numbers live.
The underpricing trap
The strongest pull when you are starting is to win the job by being the cheapest. It works once and costs you afterward. A low rate trains the client to expect that rate, trains you to accept it, and quietly sets the ceiling other clients will assume. Worse, very low pricing reads to serious buyers as inexperience rather than a bargain.
Competing on being reliable, easy to direct and fast to deliver is durable. Competing on being cheap is a race you win by losing.
Know what a buyout actually is
A client will sometimes ask for a "buyout", a single flat fee instead of a usage-based licence. That can be reasonable, and it can also be a way to pay a one-region fee for worldwide, perpetual use. Before agreeing to a buyout, pin down exactly what is being bought: which media, which territory, how long. A buyout is only a fair price once you know the usage it is covering.
How rates should appear on your own site
Silence on price costs you work, because a buyer with a deadline moves to the voice who made the next step easy. You have two honest options, and both beat saying nothing:
- A published rate card for the standard, well-defined work (e-learning per minute, IVR per prompt). It filters out the wrong-budget enquiries before they cost you time.
- A clear "get a quote" for usage-driven work like commercial, with the few questions you need answered to price it: where it runs, how long, how wide.
Either way, the place this lives is your own site, next to the demos, which is the half of the business the voice over website page is about.
Somewhere to publish your rates
A site at your own name, with your demos and your rate card in one place. Start free, and the free plan does not expire.
Getting started in voice
Where rates fit in the bigger picture: how to become a voice actor.
We build the site your rates live on. The GVAA Rate Guide named here is not ours, we are not affiliated with it, and we earn nothing if you use it. It is here because it is the honest answer to where the real numbers come from.