Salary for freelance writers

Are you a freelance writer? If so, you may be wondering how much money you can make after you write a post. Are all writers paid the same hourly wage or are all different genres of writing paid different amounts? These questions and more will be answered in this guide. I hope this guide helps answer all your questions about pay for freelance writers.

Freelance writing is a great option for anyone who wants to make their own schedule, work from home and earn a solid income. But what’s the average salary for freelance writers?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly wage for all types of writers in 2016 was $24.02 per hour—which comes out to $48,124.00 per year. The highest paid 10% earned more than $71,500 per year.

Of course, this number varies based on your experience, location and other factors. If you’re looking for an hourly rate, we’d recommend starting with a minimum of $15 an hour as a goal—and if you’re going after projects that pay by the word or page instead of by the hour, that number should be even higher!

Salary for freelance writers

Introduction: How Much Do Writers Make

Pretty much everyone in the tech industry has done this at least once with varying degrees of success. It is almost a rite of passage to work in tech and is a great way get noticed by innovative companies. Many may have hated it immediately, but for some it became their full-time profession. And we are not talking about trying to be an Instagram celebrity or building the next Flappy Bird. In this case, it is all about freelance writing.

Right now we are in a freelancing boom that many experts believe will continue. With a staggering 53 million Americans that would be categorized as freelancers and almost
30% of those doing it in tandem with their main profession. Although there are no concrete numbers on how many are actually freelance writers, the estimates are pretty high. A simple search on either UpWork, Scriptd or Fiverr brings up hundreds of thousands of freelance writers. UpWork boasts 600k+ writers available for hire! But can you survive as a full-time freelance writer in 2016?

How much content do writers need to create in 1 month in order to survive in the U.S.?



In addition to earning some extra cash, freelance writing is a perfect place to learn more about your industry. Honestly, it is where I got my start in tech. I always knew I wanted to work in tech, and with my writing experience it was a perfect match. Simply by writing about new startups for the first year after graduation, I was put in contact with thousands of startups and founders. It also gave me the chance to expand my skills and portfolio in subjects that I was passionate about.

One of the things that stuck with me was how wildly the pay varied between publications. Some of the most well known publications would pay in exposure, hoping to find new and eager writers like myself. But some of the other small or niche sites and publications would pay extremely well. Back when I was a new writer and even now, it makes no sense to me!

That is why for some time I have been wanting to investigate this phenomenon further. But because publications do not post their pay scales publicly, I was at a loss. Until I stumbled upon Who Pays Writers in a very helpful article on The Next Web. According to their site:

Who Pays Writers is an anonymous, crowd-sourced list of which publications pay freelance writers—and how much. This list is primarily concerned with writing for publications; we don’t collect information about copywriting, advertising, corporate, or sponsored-content assignments.”

And after finding this goldmine of data that outlined some interesting trends, I knew we had to dig deeper. So I did and got lost in it like the Forbidden Forest.

To make this article a little easier to follow, I have decided to break it into two parts: the first part will strictly report on our findings after looking at the Who Pays Writers data; the second part will be all about the implications of those findings and bring in some outside data on writers across the country. But both will be used to answer the ultimate question: Can you survive as a full-time freelance writer in 2016?

PART 1: Who Pays Writers?

As stated above, Who Pays Writers (WPW) is a fantastic resource full of crowdsourced pay rates and other important metrics. Writers have recorded their experiences with many publications including The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, XOJane, and more.  At last count, there were over 500 publications included in their database with even more entries about working with them. The typical WPW entry can be seen below:

The entries are broken down by “pay per word”, “approximate word count”, “type of article”, “workload and type of relationship” with the publications. They also include “time to be paid” and “comments”, but not all of the entries had those, so they were left out of our data.

For our data set, I collected an unintentionally tidy number of 520 entries across all 500+ publications between the years 2014-2016. The entries from previous years were excluded because most of them were not complete. Now let’s get into the data!

Most Writers Make Less Than $0.25 A Word

Since this entire study started with the desire to see how freelance writers are paid, we should probably start there. I broke this down into two distinct categories to make sure the analysis was thorough. They both show almost the same thing, but it makes it easier to visualize later on. Firs,t we looked at strictly the Pay Per Word of each article but we also calculated at the Total Pay of each article. Simply put writing 1000 words at $0.02 a word and 100 words at $0.20 a word give you the same total pay. But the paths to that pay are completely different.

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Since everything in this world is distilled down to averages we found that the average Pay Per Word was about $0.30. That may sound like a lot or like nothing depending on how seasoned you are as a freelancer. And actually that is a pretty high average with, 72% of the writers making less than the average. The top heaviness of the data can be seen clearly:

Because the data was a little top heavy we decided to break it down a little further. This way we will not be making inaccurate conclusions later on. A more accurate of breakdown of Pay Per Word can be seen below. From these findings we could conclude that the majority of freelance writers make around $0.17 a word, or almost half of the average found above.

Freelance-Pay Per Word Breakdown

The Top 10% of writers have it extremely well, making more than four times the average pay of $.30 per word. But as we move towards the Bottom 50% of writers, it becomes a little more disheartening, with the top half of the sample of writers making eight times more per word than the bottom half.

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To triple-check our data we even analyzed the Pay Per Word data in an extremely elementary way: simply counting the number of articles that fell in our carefully selected ranges. That method yielded very similar findings, with the majority of writers making less than $0.25 per word. And more writers were not being paid for their work (21 people) compared to those making more than $1.50 a word (20 people).

Just like many other professions, to really make a great living you have to be at the top. That belief is even more prevalent and obvious in freelance writing. There are a few out there can afford to make freelancing their sole source of income, but again, they are the only really the Top 10% of writers. But honestly, most will not make enough for it to be a longtime legitimate career choice. But we will get deeper into that in the second part of this article.

80% of Writers Will Make Less Than $500 An Article

Pay Per Article Full

Now on to the Pay Per Article data, which paints a similar picture of a struggling freelance writer. We will start with averages: the average pay per article being about $380. And again, this was extremely top-heavy, over 76% of writers making less than the average. It may look very similar to the Pay Per Word graph, but the point at which payments drop below the average happens a bit sooner.

Just like with Pay Per Word data, we broke the Pay Per Article data into manageable segments. It was quickly apparent that it was even more top heavy than we expected, with the Top 1% making more than double per article compared to the Top 5%. This shows that there is some income inequality even at the top!

Pay Per Article Main Graph
Most Writers Make Less Than 250 An Article

In this case, the Top 10% earned five times more per article than the sample average and three times more than even the Top 50% of writers–although, in this case, the difference between the Top and Bottom 50% was a little closer. The top half of writers made a bit over three times more per article than the bottom half. And finally, the Top 10% of writers made almost a 160 times more than the Bottom 10% and 24 times more than the Bottom 50% of writers.

To further show that most of the freelance money stays with the top writers, we broke it down even further. In this case, a majority of the writers do not make more than $250 per article and most make less than a $100. Those making under $250 per article make up 62% of the sample, and those making less than $500 make up over 83%.

This is yet another finding that shows a majority of the freelance writing money is made by the few. At the top, there were 43 writers that made more than $1000 per article and the other 477 making under $1000. When the total pay for both groups was added up it was a lot closer than you would think.

Total Pay Comparison

There is less than a $10k difference between the groups, with the top making $94k in total and the rest making just over $103k. If that does not discourage you from becoming a full time freelance writer, I am not sure what will.

Writing More Words Does Not Guarantee Higher Pay Per Article

Average Pay Per Lenght

From what we found directly above, writing longer articles should help make money writing online. But in some cases, that is not entirely true. We found that the average length was a reasonable 1400 words. If you are having trouble visualizing that, it is about the length of this article up until this section. In fact, 54% of articles are less than 1400 words long, so the average is very true to the sample.

From there we tried to determine the perfect article length to maximize payment. But instead of finding that more words led to higher pay, we saw something interesting: those who wrote the longest articles, or more than 7k words, actually earned less per article than some of the others. We were blown away to find that writing 4.5k more per article words only led to a $90 higher payment! This definitely went against what most people would expect, especially those used to working hourly.

As you can see in the graph above, the optimal range to maximize payment was between 5k and 7k words per article. Even writing between 2.5k and 5k words gave a higher average payout than 7k+! If you are looking to maximize pay, we would recommend writing anywhere between 2.5k and 7k words, as long as it is interesting. If you are looking to keep the word count low but still make more than the average $380 per article, we would recommend shooting for a more reasonable 1k to 2.5k words per article.

It is important to remember these findings should only be used as a guide. Do not expect to write 5k+ words and make almost a grand off just one article. We have seen that many new and experienced writers still do not know how to price their word. This will hopefully curb some of that ambiguity and confusion.

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