Podcast editing has a pricing quirk that trips up a lot of new freelancers: the number that should set your price isn't the length of the finished episode, it's the length of the raw recording you started with. A tight editor who trims a rambling 90-minute interview down to a crisp 45 minutes shouldn't get paid less than a sloppier editor who barely touches the same file — this calculator prices the work you actually did, not the runtime the audience hears.
How it works
You enter the length of the raw, unedited recording in minutes and pick a complexity tier. Basic covers a straight cut-and-level pass — trimming dead air and smoothing obvious volume swings, nothing more. Standard adds the pieces most shows expect by default: intro and outro music, ID3 tagging, general cleanup. Heavy covers rough recordings that need real noise reduction, plus structural work like reordering segments or cutting long tangents and filler words — editorial judgment, not just a cut tool.
Each tier maps to a dollar rate per raw minute: $1.50 for basic, $2.50 for standard, $4.00 for heavy. Multiplying that rate by your raw audio minutes gives the price for one episode. Multiplying the per-episode price by how many episodes you'd edit in a month projects a monthly retainer, and multiplying the per-minute rate by 60 gives you the equivalent price per raw hour — a useful number to compare against flat hourly quotes from other editors or agencies.
Worked example
Take the default case: a 60-minute raw recording, standard complexity, and 4 episodes a month for a weekly interview show.
- Per-raw-minute rate at standard complexity: $2.50
- Price per episode: 60 × $2.50 = $150
- Monthly retainer: $150 × 4 = $600
- Price per raw hour: $2.50 × 60 = $150
Bump that same show to heavy complexity — say the host records in a noisy home office and the episodes need real noise reduction and tangent-cutting — and the per-episode price jumps to 60 × $4.00 = $240, pushing the monthly retainer to $960 for the same four episodes. The raw length didn't change; the work did, and the price follows it.
How to interpret your result
Price per episode is your quote for a one-off or trial job — the number to put in an invoice or a first email to a new client. Monthly retainer is what the same relationship is worth if it turns into a standing weekly or biweekly gig; it's a straight multiplication, not a discounted rate, so if you want to offer a loyalty discount for the commitment, apply it after you see this number, not before.
Price per raw hour exists mainly for comparison. A lot of editors and agencies quote a flat hourly rate instead of a per-minute-of-audio rate, and converting your own number to the same unit makes it easy to sanity-check whether you're underpricing relative to the market — or whether a client's hourly-rate counteroffer is actually worse than what you're already charging per raw minute.
None of this is the same calculation as what the podcast host earns from the show. A host's revenue comes from ads, sponsorships, or listener support and has zero relationship to editing cost — you can be the editor on a show that makes its host nothing, or one that makes them a full-time income, and your rate here doesn't move either way. If you're pricing the host side of a podcast business instead of the editing side, that's a different calculator entirely.
Methodology & sources
The formula is pricePerEpisode = rawAudioMinutes × perRawMinuteRate, where perRawMinuteRate is $1.50 / $2.50 / $4.00 for basic / standard / heavy complexity; monthlyRetainer = pricePerEpisode × episodesPerMonth; pricePerRawHour = perRawMinuteRate × 60. All three outputs are rounded from unrounded intermediate math, so they stay internally consistent with each other.
Pricing by raw recording length rather than finished episode length is standard practice among freelance podcast editors — WhatShouldICharge's podcast editor pricing guide documents the same convention: "a common formula: base rate for up to 60 minutes of raw audio, then $1-$2/minute for additional raw recording time," with the explicit note that pricing should be "based on raw recording length, not final episode length." The per-raw-minute rates here are calibrated to land in a similar ballpark to what that guide and similar freelance rate surveys report for entry-to-mid-level editors — not a direct hour-for-hour conversion, since editing an hour of raw audio rarely takes an hour of labor; treat them as a sane starting anchor for a quote, not a fixed market price, and let your own rate move with your experience, niche, and turnaround time.