Ask what proofreaders charge and you will get answers spanning an order of magnitude, quoted with equal confidence. Most of them are true somewhere, for someone, doing something specific, and useless to you without that context.

Rather than add another number to the pile, here is the method for producing one that is actually yours.

Start with time, not with words

Almost every published figure is a per-word rate, and per-word is a terrible place to start, because it hides the only variable that matters: how long the document will take.

Two 60,000-word manuscripts can differ by a factor of two or three in hours. One is a clean final draft from a careful writer. The other has been through four rounds of self-editing at midnight, with inconsistent capitalisation, citations in three formats and four hundred tracked changes nobody accepted. Quoting both at the same per-word rate means one of them pays you properly and the other does not.

The three numbers you need

  1. Your speed. Time yourself proofreading real text, properly, including the second pass. Do it on three different documents. Most people land somewhere between 1,500 and 3,500 words an hour, and where you land is the only figure that matters.
  2. Your target hourly rate. What you want to earn for an hour of concentrated work, before tax.
  3. The condition of this document. Which you find out by reading a sample of it, not by looking at the word count.

Multiply those out and you have a price. Divide by the word count afterwards and you have your per-word equivalent, which is useful for two things: quoting a client who insists on being quoted that way, and sanity-checking yourself against published ranges.

What the published ranges are good for

They are a sanity check, not a source. If your method produces a figure far below every published range, something is wrong with your speed estimate or your target rate. If it produces one far above, you had better have a specialty that justifies it.

Treat any single figure quoted as "the going rate" with suspicion, including any you find here. Rates differ by country, by specialty, by whether the client is an individual or an institution, and by year.

The mistakes that cost the most

  • Quoting before assessing a sample. A firm price on unseen text is a bet, and the files people are least willing to show are rarely the clean ones.
  • Forgetting the minimum charge. The brief, the sample, the style sheet, the invoice and the email thread cost the same on 800 words as on 80,000.
  • Pricing a proofread and delivering an edit. The single most common way people in this trade lose money, and it is a scope problem rather than a pricing one.
  • Not charging separately for a rush. Rush work displaces other work and is done at hours you would not otherwise be working.

Work out your own number, write it down, and practice saying it out loud until you can do it without apologizing.