What Freelance Writers Earn

One of the perks for being a writing guild member is access to a Slack channel where we kibbitz and share information. This week, a member posted a link to the current rates for freelance articles on major national papers and magazines. I’m mentioning this as an addendum to some recent discussion about writing that freelancers covering beer have been having lately. I will get to the numbers in a minute, but let’s mention up here at the front that McDonald’s in rural Oregon are hiring workers at $20 an hour. That’s $800 for a 40-hour work-week.

Writing an article isn’t like putting in a shift at Mickey Dee’s. You don’t do it in a single block of time. Depending on the kind of article you’re writing, it may take weeks of reporting. It’s a stretched-out process, and will include trading emails, doing an interview, possibly transcribing interviews, plus background research—all before you sit down to write the words. The writing may go relatively quickly—or not. I can usually knock out a typical article (up to 1,500 words, say) in a half a day, with another hour a day or two later to reconsider and edit. Sometimes it’s not quite so smooth and I literally rewrite the whole thing. But sometimes it’s super fast, too. In any case, you don’t just sit down and write an article—it’s a whole process and it takes time.

So, let’s say a person were doing this for the New York Times. How much would you expect they’d get paid? A couple thousand, maybe? The link below will take you to the Twitter feed of Tim Herrera, who has reported and edited for the NYT and Washington Post. He now encourages freelancers, and had a thread about what people make for an article. To show how bad it can get, he begins with the case of a deeply-reported 2,500-word piece for Rolling Stone. That’s a very long article, and it’s a major national outlet, and certainly took weeks to write. You’d expect RS to pay well for this kind of content, right? Maybe four, five grand? Try $500.

This is the thing. Writing is a terrible way to make a living. It’s why people end up going into marketing. You could spend your days scrambling after $600 articles, or you could get a job for $60k with benefits. This is why we bleed great writers, who take their services to companies who will pay what their work is worth.

It’s not just that the money’s bad—it’s also hard to get. If you could somehow stack up your articles and get a couple in every week, you could make a decent living, maybe fifty, sixty grand a year before taxes. (Oh yeah, taxes. Freelancers get killed in the U.S. on taxes, so figure you’re losing a good 10% right off the top there.) Trying to pitch stories, and then research, report, and write a hundred of them in a year? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but again, you’d be barely making more than working at McDonald’s if you somehow enjoyed that level of “success,” which perhaps 2-3% of working freelancers enjoy.

(In this regard, writing about beer isn’t terrible. The outlets that pay for work are typically competitive with the national outlets below—and a lot better than that Rolling Stone story. The only penalty in writing about beer is the paucity of outlets willing to publish stories on the subject.)

Anyway, have a look for yourself. Here is a sampling of the rates Herrera posted:

Teen Vogue: 2800-word feature, "good amount" of reporting, $500
Fast Company: $400/800 words
Travel+Leisure: $150/400
Eater: $750/3000

There were some better ones in there as well: The Guardian, Science, and National Geographic were pretty good. But keep in mind, even when you get a “good” rate, like doing an op-ed for the NYT ($1200 for 1200 words) you’re getting a buck a word. The New York Times had annual revenues of $2.4 billion last year. 🤔

If you have any other choice, don’t write. It gives you a nervous tic and endangers relationships. You will have poor health insurance. On the other hand, you may not be able to stop writing, no matter how bad things are. (This is the definition of a writer.) It’s why the Times pays its lawyers real good and throws scraps to the writers. Good lawyers are hard to find. At least now you know what you’re getting yourself into. Good luck!