Wedding Photographers Spend Only 4% of Their Work Time Taking Photos, Survey Shows

UK company Your Perfect Wedding Photographer—a website that vets and connects wedding photographers with interested couples—has released the results of their fourth annual photographer survey, and it contains some interesting info about how much photographers are making, the brands they’re using, how they spend their work time, and much more.

The survey results are based on answers from “over 300 professional wedding photographers” from across the UK, so it’s worth taking the regional implications and relatively meager sample size into account. Still, the information gleaned from the survey is very interesting.

You can see all of the results in an interactive infographic at this link, but we’ve summarized some of the most intriguing bits below:

  • Wedding photographers spend only 4% of their time actually taking pictures. The vast majority (55%) is spend on photo editing, followed by Business/Admin (18%), Culling (11%), and Communication (7%).
  • The average number of weddings shot in a year is 28, down from 29 last year.
  • Average full-day starting package price was £1,590, or approximately $2,050.
  • Average yearly cost of marking is £1,253, or approximately $1,610. This includes “online advertising, printed brochures, wedding fairs and other marketing spend.”
  • Only 59% of photographers surveyed list their prices on their website.
  • The majority of photographers still use Canon or Nikon. 40% of those surveyed shoot Canon, 31% shoot Nikon, 22% shoot Sony, 7% shoot Fuji.

This is just a snapshot of the results that Your Perfect Wedding Photographer published. They also touched on average age and years of experience, average number of enquiries vs bookings, what percentage take part in online awards, and more. Check out the full results here.

Given the small-ish sample size and UK limitation, we’re hesitant to draw any broad-stroke conclusions, but we’d love to hear from the wedding photographers in our audience. Does your experience match the above results? Let us know in the comments.


Image credits: Header image uses photo by Beatriz Pérez Moya, CC0

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