Updated May ‘26

Hello friends, and welcome to the FWT freelance rate database!

This is an ongoing project to collect up-to-date freelance rates for hundreds of publications. These community-submitted rates range from tiny, niche blogs and trade magazines to national publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Science, CNN, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, National Geographic, Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Guardian, Forbes, The Boston Globe, Travel + Leisure, Time, and literally hundreds more. All of these rates were paid within the last 12 months or so, and I’ll remove outdated rates on a rolling basis.

To contribute some recent rates you’ve gotten, click here to share. Transparency about money helps us all out!

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Before we dive in, I want to throw out some quick thoughts and caveats about this whole project, as well as rate databases in general.

The first thing to keep in mind is that, as we all know, budgets industrywide have been in freefall for years, and it’s only going to get worse. But remember that your editor at a given publication doesn’t typically have a ton of control over what they can pay. Decisions about budgeting and establishing rates often happen many layers above your editor, so in a lot of cases their hands truly are tied. They want you to get paid just as much as you want to be paid, and good editors will fight for your rates. But sometimes awful rates are, tragically, just how things go.

That said: Always ask! I wrote a newsletter a while back on how to ask for more money, but the gist is that it never hurts to ask, and good editors will do everything they can to get you more. It doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a shot. (And if the editor makes you feel bad or greedy or weird for asking, that is not an editor you should work with, and you should tell all your freelance friends what a dick that editor was.)

Next, the rates in this database reflect what a specific freelancer was paid, but there are a lot of factors involved, including story type and scope, amount of reporting, whether a freelancer has worked with the publication before, and so on. All praise and admiration to that industrious freelancer who got $3/word from Bloomberg Businessweek, but a rate like that is the exception, not the rule.

Finally, this database will be continually updated as more rates come in, so again, please feel free to contribute here.

With all of that out of the way:

Now go forth and get paid!