Model rates per hour are the first thing most people search for and the last unit a professional quote is written in. The reason is not snobbery about the format: an hourly figure prices your time, and on almost every commercial job the money is in what the client is allowed to do with the images afterwards. Price the time only and you have priced the small half.
Per hour, per day, or per licence
Three units turn up in this work, and they are not interchangeable.
- Per hour. Genuinely standard for short staffed bookings where nothing is being licensed: a four-hour hostess or events shift, a promotional activation on a stand, a fitting, a fit-model session. You are being paid for attendance, the images either do not exist or are incidental, and hours are the honest unit.
- Per day, or per half day. The default for shoots. A photographer books a block, not a stopwatch, and a half day that overruns by forty minutes should not turn into an argument about a timesheet. Agree the hours the day contains and what happens past them.
- Per licence. Not a separate booking, a separate line on the same quote. This is the part that varies by an order of magnitude between two jobs that look identical in the diary.
If a client asks for your hourly figure for a shoot, the useful answer is your day rate plus the hours the day covers, plus the licence question below. Dividing a day rate by eight and quoting that invites a two-hour booking at a quarter of the money and the same usage.
Four questions before you quote anything
- Which media? The client's own website and social channels, in-store point of sale, packaging, print advertising, out of home, paid digital. Owned media is the cheap end. Packaging and paid advertising are the expensive end, because the images are doing direct commercial work.
- Which territory? One country, a region, or worldwide.
- What term? Six months, a year, three years, or in perpetuity. Perpetuity means the client is buying the images outright and should be priced that way.
- Is exclusivity requested? Agreeing not to work for competing brands restricts your future earnings, so it is a separate line with its own uplift, never a free clause.
One email gets all four answers. A client who cannot answer them has not finished planning the shoot, and that is useful to know before you commit a day to it.
Model day rate: building the number
Most professional quotes are built the same way: a base fee for the day, then the licence priced on top of it as a multiple or an added amount, then anything unusual about the day itself.
- Base fee. Your rate for the hours, in your city, in your category.
- Licence. Priced by media, territory and term. Broader is more.
- Exclusivity. Its own line, priced by how restrictive it is and for how long.
- Day factors. Overtime beyond the agreed hours, travel days, fittings, and any expenses you are being asked to carry. Each defaults to zero if nobody mentions it.
Write it out as those lines rather than as one figure. A client who wants a lower number can then buy less licence instead of asking you to work for less, which is a much better conversation to be in.
A worked example, with made-up inputs
Suppose your base is a day rate you are comfortable with, the client wants their own website and social channels only, in one country, for one year, with no exclusivity. That is the modest end of the licence scale and the quote sits close to the base. Now the same client says the images may also run as paid social advertising across three countries for three years, and they want category exclusivity for that period. Nothing about your day changed. The value to the client changed enormously, and so does the quote.
The point of the example is not the numbers, which are yours, it is the shape: the day is a constant and the licence is the variable. Reading a print rate takes the same structure apart from the other direction.
Putting it in writing
A quote worth sending contains: the shoot date and hours, the location, the fee, the licence in one explicit paragraph, what happens on overtime, the payment term in days, and an expiry date on the quote itself. Then the release you sign on the day should match that licence. A release is a permission slip, not a payment agreement, and if its scope is broader than your quote, say so before signing rather than after.
Common ways money is lost
- Agreeing to "all rights" as a shorthand because it sounded like standard wording.
- Letting travel, fittings and overtime go unmentioned and therefore unbilled.
- Accepting an exclusivity clause with no uplift.
- Quoting a number before asking the four questions, then having no basis to revise it when the usage grows.
- Never asking about the payment term and discovering it is ninety days after the work is done.
Publishing a day rate for models, before anyone asks
If your range is visible before contact, the first email is about the shoot and the usage rather than about whether you are affordable, and the buyer who cannot reach your number never spends your afternoon finding that out. On Maxgirls that range is a field on your own profile, it is filterable, and no commission is taken from anything you agree. What a profile publishes covers the rest of the fields.
Where this applies on Maxgirls
Your day-rate range, your categories, your city and your availability sit on your own profile, visible to a brand before they contact you, and Maxgirls takes no share of anything you book.