Free tool
How many hours the getting ready room actually needs
Put in the service counts and your real per person timings and see how far before the ready time your first chair has to start.
Free tool, no sign up
What is left of a bridal package after kit, travel and your assistant
Enter one booking and see the take home, the margin and the hourly rate you are really working for on a wedding day.
A bridal party at fourteen hundred dollars sounds like a good Saturday until you subtract nine dollars a face in product, seventy miles of driving, and two hundred and forty dollars to the artist who worked beside you. What is left divided by a nine hour door to door day is the number that tells you whether your minimum is set correctly.
This calculator does that subtraction in one pass. It counts direct costs only, meaning the money that leaves your hands because this specific wedding happened. Insurance, your website, your kit rebuilds between seasons and your own taxes sit on top of the result, which is why the take home figure needs to be comfortably larger than it feels.
Your result
Direct costs of the day
$361
Product, driving valued at seventy cents a mile, and the pay your team takes home.
Left for you
$1,089
What remains before taxes and the fixed costs of running the business.
Effective hourly rate
$121
Take home spread across every hour the wedding took you, driving included.
Margin on the booking
75.1%
The share of the package price that survives the direct costs of the day.
Run it once with your largest party from last season and once with a four person booking, and your real minimum tends to show up on its own.
Why the hourly rate is the number that stings
Artists usually judge a wedding by the invoice total. The hourly rate is more honest, because a fourteen hundred dollar booking that eats a nine hour day plus two hours of driving is a very different job from the same total earned in five hours twenty minutes from home.
Once you can see the hourly figure, travel policy stops being an argument. A wedding ninety minutes away needs either a travel fee or a higher minimum, not because you resent the drive but because three hours of your Saturday are being paid at nothing.
What the calculator deliberately leaves out
It counts only costs caused by this wedding. It does not spread your insurance, your kit rebuild, your website, your assistant training time or your unpaid consultation hours across the booking, because those vary too much between artists to guess at.
A practical rule is to treat the take home figure as the pool those fixed costs come out of. If your season is thirty weddings and your fixed business costs run several thousand dollars, work out what each wedding has to contribute and check that this booking clears it.
Questions about this calculator
Should I include the trial in this calculation?
Only if the trial is included in the package price rather than billed separately. If the trial is bundled, add its product cost and its miles into the wedding day figures, or your margin will read higher than it is.
What product cost per face is realistic?
Most bridal artists land somewhere between five and fifteen dollars a face once lashes, disposables and hair product are counted. Track one full party from your own kit for a season and you will get a figure that is yours rather than an average.
How do I use this to set a minimum?
Enter a small booking, such as bride plus two, at your current minimum. If the hourly rate comes out below what you would accept for a studio day, the minimum is too low for the travel and setup that a wedding morning demands.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The wedding morning call sheet template you can fill in tonight
A blank call sheet with every line a bridal team needs, so your second artist arrives already knowing who is in her chair at seven forty.
That number moves the week of the wedding
What is on this screen is true for the count you just typed in. It stops being true the day a bridesmaid adds hair, the flower girl appears, or the first look shifts twenty minutes earlier. BrushCallSheet keeps your per person timings and your rates so the answer rebuilds itself, then hands each artist her own column of names and start times. Send your inputs over and we will walk them through a live wedding date.