Free tool
Does the Photo List Fit Before Sunset?
Put in the sunset time, the ceremony end, and the shot list, and see whether the portraits finish in daylight or run into a schedule you will have to defend on the day.
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What Your Day Of Coordination Fee Really Pays Per Hour
Enter the package fee and the hours a wedding honestly costs you, and see what is left per hour once your assistant and your vehicle are paid.
A coordination fee is not a day rate, though it gets priced like one. The wedding day is the visible part. The invisible part is the intake call, the venue walkthrough, the timeline build and its three revisions, the two week confirmation calls, the rehearsal, and the driving between all of it. Planners who add those hours up for the first time usually find the effective rate is well under what they assumed when they set the price.
This calculator gives you that number. Put in the fee, the hours, the pay you hand an assistant, and the round trip miles, and it returns what the wedding leaves per hour before taxes. Run it on your last three weddings rather than a hypothetical one, because the wedding that overran is the one setting your real average.
Your result
Total hours the wedding takes
30.0
Every hour the wedding consumes, not only the hours you are on site.
Vehicle cost for the wedding
$63
Priced at seventy cents a mile to cover fuel, wear, and insurance.
Fee left after assistant and driving
$1,437
What the package actually leaves you before taxes and overhead.
Effective hourly rate
$47.90
What is left divided by every hour the wedding took from you.
Run this on your last three weddings, not an average one, because the date that ran long is the one setting your true rate.
The hours coordinators forget to count
The venue walkthrough is the classic omission. It is two hours on site plus an hour of driving, and it almost never appears in a package description as billable time. The rehearsal is the second: an hour on paper, closer to two once a mother of the bride wants to run the processional again.
After that come the small ones that add up faster than the big ones. Timeline revision three when the band changes its load in. The florist who calls twice about ceremony teardown. The confirmation calls at two weeks out, which run fifteen minutes each across nine vendors. None of these feel like work until they are in a column, and then they are usually a third of the total.
Reading the number without panicking
A low effective rate on one wedding is not a pricing failure. It is often a scope failure, and the fix is a sentence in the agreement rather than a higher number. If the hours came from full planning tasks that crept into a coordination package, the answer is a clearer boundary on what coordination covers and when the handoff begins.
If the hours are genuinely coordination hours and the rate is still thin, then the price is the problem. Work out the rate you need, multiply it by the hours a normal wedding truly takes for you, and compare that to what you charge now. Most coordinators find the gap is one tier of pricing rather than a doubling.
Questions about this calculator
Should I count travel time as hours as well as miles?
Yes, if you want the honest number. Add drive time into the planning or rehearsal hour fields and keep the miles field for vehicle cost. A ninety mile round trip to a wine country venue is two hours you cannot sell to anyone else.
What if I do not pay an assistant?
Set that field to zero and read the rate as what a solo coordinator earns. Then try it again with a realistic assistant cost. If the rate is still workable, hiring help on your bigger weddings is affordable and you probably should.
Does this cover taxes and overhead?
No. The result is what the wedding leaves before self employment tax, insurance, software, and the unpaid hours you spend on inquiries that never book. Treat the number as a ceiling on your take home, not the take home itself.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The Wedding Day Run of Show Template
A fill in run of show built the way vendors read it, with a header block, call times by vendor, and the two checks that keep a room flip from opening late.
Take that number into your next wedding day timeline
A calculated portrait window or an honest coordination rate is worth something only when it reaches the document your florist, DJ, and venue manager work from, rather than a tab you close. Bring the result to a short demo and we will drop it into a real run of show, tag the blocks by vendor, and show you the page each of them opens on a phone. It takes about twenty minutes.