What editing costs, and how it is priced

How is editing priced, per word, per hour, or per project?

All four units are in use, and the EFA's rate chart reports figures for each of them.¹ The unit decides who carries the risk of a slow manuscript. A per-word price fixes the author's total before the work begins and leaves the editor to absorb the pages that turn out to be difficult. An hourly price does the reverse and leaves the author's total unknown until the job ends. A project fee is a per-word price with the arithmetic done in advance.

Pricing by level is older than the freelance marketplaces that popularized it. In 1980 the Jet Propulsion Laboratory published The Levels of Edit, which identified five levels built from nine named types of edit, and reported that the scheme had proved useful for estimating and monitoring cost.² The EFA takes no position of its own, and states that it neither sets rates nor advises members on what rates or rate types to use.¹

What is a normal price, and what does an unusually low price mean?

Published survey figures give the range. The EFA's 2026 chart lists fiction copyediting at 2.0 to 2.7 cents a word, or $40.00 to $50.00 an hour. Fiction proofreading appears at 1.2 to 2.0 cents a word, or $35.00 to $45.00 an hour, and fiction developmental editing at 3.0 to 3.5 cents a word, or $52.50 to $70.00 an hour.¹ The survey behind those figures ran from November 2025 through mid-January 2026 and drew more than 1,100 respondents, the most since it began in 1991. It was also the first edition opened to professionals outside the association.³

The EFA states that the rates in the chart are for guidance only and are not mandated or recommended rates.³ The per-word column and the per-hour column are more informative read together than separately. Dividing the hourly figures by the per-word figures puts the implied reading speed for fiction copyediting somewhere between roughly 1,500 and 2,500 words an hour. A price well under the low end implies a faster pass over the page, a narrower scope, or both, and neither of those is dishonest where the editor describes it accurately. EditFast charges 3 to 5 cents a word and averages about 4 cents.

Is the quote fixed, or an estimate that can move?

How much of the manuscript the editor has read decides this. A figure produced from a ten-page sample is an extrapolation, and later chapters written under different conditions can be denser than the opening. A figure produced after reading the whole manuscript can be held. The EFA's guide for new authors notes one further variable that moves a price in a predictable direction, which is that rush work commands higher rates.⁴

What keeps a quote still is a written scope: the level of edit, the word count it covers, what happens to material added afterward, and the date. A sample sent out for quotation is unpublished work in the hands of a stranger. Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence.

How many passes are included?

No external body sets the number, so the agreement decides it. Editors Canada's Professional Editorial Standards describe the knowledge, skills, and practices most commonly required for editing English-language material, and they do not prescribe how many times a text is read.⁵ The number is a commercial term rather than a professional one.

That has a practical consequence at the point of ordering. Where an agreement is silent, an author has no ground for expecting the editor to look at the manuscript again after revisions come back. Authors who know they will want a second look are better served by settling it in the quote than by raising it afterward.

The related term is what happens to queries. A copyedit typically returns with questions attached to the text, and answering them changes the file again. Whether the editor reads those answers, or the author simply applies them, is a separate matter from the number of passes and is worth writing down alongside it.

Am I paying for the pass or for the result?

An author is paying for the pass, and the distinction is worth stating plainly. No professional body publishes an error tolerance against which a finished edit is measured. Editors Canada's standards set out skills and practices, not a permitted number of surviving typographical errors.⁵ An edit is a described piece of human work performed over a long text, and what an author buys is that described work.

This is one reason the sequence of passes exists at all. Proofreading is defined by Editors Canada as an examination of material after layout, which is a second reading of the same text by different criteria.⁶ Books that go through both a copyedit and a proofread are not being edited twice by accident.

Do I pay a deposit?

Neither association consulted here publishes a rule on deposits, and practice varies between individual editors. What is documented is the risk at one end of the range. Writer Beware states that paying the full fee upfront leaves an author with nothing still to withhold if the work is unsatisfactory or the editor fails to complete it as agreed.⁷

A payment schedule tied to delivered work addresses that directly, whether it is split between the start and the return of the file or spread across sections of a long manuscript. An editor who declines any staging on a substantial job is asking the author to carry the whole risk, and that is a term worth naming out loud before the job starts.

What happens if I stop the job halfway?

Most of the answer follows from the pricing unit. Hourly work stops cleanly, because the hours worked are the hours owed. Per-word and per-project work does not stop cleanly, because the price was set against the whole manuscript and the editor has already reserved the time.

Two situations get confused here. An author who stops because the work is unsatisfactory is in a dispute. An author who stops because the book has changed direction is asking for a variation, and a variation is usually settled by paying for what was done and rescheduling the rest.

Where the agreement says nothing about cancellation, there is nothing to appeal to, and the outcome is a negotiation. This is a matter for the agreement rather than for editorial practice, and an author with a substantial sum committed should have the terms read by an attorney.

How long will it take?

Schedule and price move together. The EFA's guide records that rush work commands higher rates, and that an editor needs adequate time to edit a complete manuscript.⁴ A date quoted before the whole manuscript has been seen carries the same uncertainty as a price quoted the same way.

Two things lengthen a schedule more than authors expect. The first is the author's own turnaround on queries, because a copyedit with fifty open questions is not finished until those questions are answered. The second is delivery in parts, which suits an author who is still writing and costs the editor the continuity that catches inconsistencies between chapters.

Neither is a reason to avoid those arrangements. Both are reasons to have the dates written down on both sides, including the date by which the author undertakes to return answers.