A publisher sends you a 60,000-word manuscript and asks for a quote. Quoting by the hour is awkward — you don't know yet how many studio hours it'll actually take — so the audiobook industry solved this decades ago with Per Finished Hour (PFH) pricing: you charge for the polished audio that comes out, not the raw hours you put in. This calculator turns a word count and a PFH rate into a project fee, plus an honest look at how many real labor hours that fee has to cover.
How it works
Audiobooks aren't priced by the word or by studio time — they're priced by the length of the finished, edited, retail-ready audio file. The industry benchmark is that roughly 9,300 words of manuscript produces one finished hour of audio, a ratio narrators and platforms like ACX use to translate a book's word count into an expected runtime before anyone records a single line.
The calculator divides your manuscript word count by 9,300 to get finishedHours, then multiplies that by your PFH rate to get the projectFee — the number you'd actually quote or invoice. It also estimates the real labor behind that fee: roughly six working hours per finished hour once you count first-pass recording (with flubs and retakes), editing, and proofing/mastering, not just the clean narration time. That laborHoursEstimate is the number that keeps a PFH rate honest — it's easy to quote a rate that sounds good per finished hour and forget it has to cover six times that in actual studio time.
Worked example
Take the defaults: a 60,000-word manuscript and a $200 PFH rate.
- Finished hours: 60,000 ÷ 9,300 = 6.45 hours
- Project fee: 6.45 × $200 = $1,290
- Estimated labor hours: 6.45 × 6 = 38.7 hours
So a $1,290 project fee, which sounds like a tidy sum for "6.45 hours" of audio, actually has to cover something closer to 38.7 hours of real work once you include the takes you'll re-record, the edit pass, and proofing the final files against the manuscript. Divide it out and that's roughly $33/hour of actual labor — a useful sanity check before you accept a PFH rate that looked generous on paper.
How to interpret your result
Project fee is the number to put in a quote or contract — it's what the client pays, full stop. Finished hours is mostly there to sanity-check the fee against the manuscript: if an editor tells you a 90,000-word novel runs "about 9.7 finished hours," you can verify that against your own word count before signing anything.
Estimated labor hours is the number worth staring at before you accept a rate. A $150 PFH rate on a technical manuscript that takes you eight real hours per finished hour (dense terminology, constant retakes) pays worse than a $150 rate on a clean, fast-reading novel — even though the PFH number on the contract is identical. The 6-hours-per-finished-hour figure here is a reasonable average, not your number; track your own ratio across a few projects and you'll get a far sharper sense of what PFH rate you actually need to hit your target hourly income.
Be skeptical of a very low word count paired with a rate you'd normally reserve for a full-length book — short manuscripts (novellas, children's books, short nonfiction) can carry disproportionately high per-word overhead in setup, character work, or client communication that this simple word-count-to-hours conversion doesn't capture.
Methodology & sources
The formula is three steps: finishedHours = round(manuscriptWordCount / 9,300), projectFee = finishedHours × pfhRate, and laborHoursEstimate = finishedHours × 6. Each step is rounded to two decimal places before it feeds into the next — projectFee and laborHoursEstimate are calculated from the displayed finishedHours value, not from the raw, unrounded division. That's why the worked example ties out cleanly: 6.45 × $200 = a clean $1,290, not the $1,290.32 you'd get by multiplying the rate against the unrounded 6.451612... hours first and rounding after.
The 9,300-words-per-finished-hour benchmark and the PFH pricing model itself come from ACX's guide to paying and getting paid for audiobook production, which states plainly that "about 9,300 words equals one hour of finished audio" and cites a combined narration-plus-post-production range in the $300-$400 PFH ballpark for a fully professional, retail-ready product. Published PFH rate surveys elsewhere put the full range wider — anywhere from roughly $50 PFH for beginners up to $400+ PFH for in-demand, experienced narrators — so treat the $200 default here as a realistic mid-range starting point, not a market ceiling or floor.
Two honest caveats. First, the 9,300 words-per-hour ratio is an average across typical prose; heavily formatted nonfiction, poetry, or multi-character dialogue can run meaningfully slower to record, which understates both finishedHours and everything downstream of it. Second, PFH is not the only way audiobooks get priced — royalty share (RSH) trades the guaranteed fee this calculator estimates for a cut of ongoing royalties, usually split 50/50, with no payment at all if the book doesn't sell. RSH can outperform PFH on a book that does well, but it shifts real financial risk onto the narrator that a flat PFH fee does not carry.