The Voice Over Pricing Calculator Pack

Eight calculators for working out how much to charge for voice over work and voice acting from your own year, your own studio time and your own policies, not from anyone's rate card.

Sheet 1 turns the income you want, your costs and unpaid audition hours into an hourly floor, $73.30 per paid studio hour in the illustrative example. Sheet 2 turns recording and editing time into a rate per finished minute, and sheet 3 into a per-word script rate with your minimum. Sheet 4 prices a session, such as 3 hours of voice acting, at $403.15 in the example once setup, prep and editing are counted. Sheet 5 adds usage term and region pricing at multipliers you type in; no union scale or market figure is built in. Sheet 6 prices retakes, sheet 7 pays back your home studio, and sheet 8 checks whether a finished job paid your floor.

Every figure is an example for you to overwrite. These are estimates, not tax or legal advice. Every formula was recalculated and checked against an independent implementation before this shipped.

What is in it

8 calculators, one per sheet. Overwrite the blue cells with your own numbers and everything else follows — nothing is locked, there are no macros, and it opens in Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice and Google Sheets.

• Hourly floor rate — What must a paid studio hour earn to pay you and the business?
• Finished minute pricing — What should one finished minute of audio cost once recording and editing time are counted?
• Per-word script rate — What per-word rate matches your finished-minute rate at your own read pace?
• Session with a minimum — What should a session of booked hours cost, with setup, prep, editing and your minimum?
• Usage term multipliers — What does licensing the recording for a use, a term and regions add, at multipliers you set?
• Retakes and revisions — What do included retake rounds cost you, and what should an extra round bill?
• Home studio payback — What does your home studio cost per job and per hour, and when does a studio fee pay it back?
• Did this job pay — Once the audio is delivered, did the job pay your floor?

Every formula was checked

This pack contains 51 formulas. Before it was published, every one of them was recalculated by a spreadsheet engine and compared against an independent implementation of the same arithmetic written in Python. All 51 agreed to within a cent, and the workbook carries a Verification sheet saying so.

That is an unusual thing to be able to claim about a spreadsheet, and it is the main reason to buy this one rather than download a free template. A formula that looks right and is wrong is worse than no formula at all, because you will act on it.

What each calculator assumes

There is a sheet listing this, because a calculator that hides its assumptions is just a number generator:

• Every working week looks the same. Auditions are unpaid time you enter, so the floor already pays for that many. The tax set-aside is a share you enter, not a computed tax.
• Every finished minute takes the same recording and editing time. A script with characters or heavy direction needs its own ratio.
• Read pace is the same across the whole script. The word rate carries the recording and editing ratio from sheet 2.
• Setup and prep happen once per session. Editing scales with the hours recorded. The minimum is your policy, applied to billable hours.
• Term and regions scale the fee by the add-ons you enter, multiplied together. Exclusivity, buyouts and union terms are outside this sheet; write them into your contract.
• Every retake round takes the same time. A changed script after recording is a new session, priced on sheet 4, not a retake.
• Gear is spread evenly over its life. The payback counts the studio fee left after software and upkeep. If your floor already counts gear in business costs, do not add a fee too.
• Business costs and unpaid hours are already inside the floor from sheet 1, so this sheet subtracts only the costs that came with the job.

What this is not

Not financial, tax or legal advice, and not a recommendation to buy, sell, borrow or sign anything. These are calculators: they show what a choice costs, not which choice is right for you. Where a published rate or threshold is used it is the one current when the pack was built — those change, the arithmetic does not.

Honest about the format

One .xlsx workbook, 8 calculator sheets plus Start Here, Assumptions and Verification. Not a PDF, not a physical product, not a Notion template. Available immediately after purchase; nothing ships.

Refunds

If this isn't what you expected, email me within 30 days and I'll refund you in full — no need to explain. Because it's an instant download I can't take the file back, so I'd rather you just had your money back.