A single edited social video in the UK typically costs £150 to £500. A full production day runs £750 to £1,500 before editing. Monthly retainers for ongoing content sit between £1,000 and £3,000 for most small to mid-sized brands.
Those are the honest numbers. We run a video content agency in Wales and price work like this every week, so this guide reflects what brands actually pay rather than what rate cards claim. Here is where your money goes and how to make it go further.
Costs cluster into four tiers. UGC-style ads shot on phones by a creator cost £150 to £400 per video. Edited cuts from existing footage cost £200 to £500 depending on complexity. A professional shoot day with crew and kit costs £750 to £1,500, which then produces raw material for anywhere between 5 and 20 videos. Ongoing retainers covering editing plus periodic shoots run £1,000 to £3,000 per month.
Large agencies in London quote multiples of these figures for the same outputs. That premium sometimes buys genuine strategic depth. Often it buys office rent.
Five things move the number more than anything else: how many people appear on screen (actors and models add £150 to £400 each per day), location hire, the number of edited versions you need per master clip, motion graphics beyond captions and titles, then revision rounds. A clean brief agreed before the shoot is worth more than any single line item. Late direction changes are the most expensive thing in video production.
Sometimes. Paid social rewards volume and iteration, so five rough-edged videos usually beat one polished hero film. The trap is content so generic it could belong to any brand. Cheap is fine; unbranded and forgettable is not. Judge content on cost per converting view, not cost per video.
Three models dominate. Per-deliverable pricing (a fixed fee per finished video) suits one-off campaigns. Day-rate plus editing suits brands that want a footage library. Time-based retainers, where you buy a monthly pot of production and editing hours, suit brands feeding always-on paid social. We have moved most of our retainer clients to the hourly model because it is transparent: you see exactly where every half hour goes.
Batch everything. One well-planned shoot day can yield a month of content: multiple outfit changes, multiple setups, scripts prepared in advance, every clip captured in formats for Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts at once. This is the thinking behind our Content Sprints, which compress planning, shooting and editing into a single focused engagement from under £1,000.
For a brand running paid social seriously, £1,000 to £2,000 per month covers a steady flow of new creative and iterations of winners. Below that, batch quarterly shoots instead of monthly trickles. Spending more than £3,000 only makes sense once you have proven creative formats worth scaling.
UK video content pricing is wide because the product is wide. Decide whether you are buying a single asset, a footage library or an always-on creative engine, then pick the pricing model that matches. If you want a month of content from one shoot day, that is exactly what our Content Sprints were built for. Get in touch and we will scope one for your brand.
A 30-second social-first promo typically costs £200 to £500 when cut from existing footage, or £750 to £1,500 where a shoot day is needed. Broadcast-grade production with crew, actors and licensed music starts around £3,000 and climbs quickly from there.
UK UGC creators typically charge £150 to £400 per video, with usage rights for paid advertising adding 30 to 100 percent on top. Bundles of three to five videos from one creator usually bring the per-video price down meaningfully.
Freelancers are cheaper per day, typically £250 to £600 against agency day rates of £750 plus. Agencies earn the difference on strategy, consistency and turnaround across a pipeline of content. For one-off projects a good freelancer is often the right call.
A well-planned shoot day should produce raw material for 10 to 20 short-form videos. The key is preparation: scripts written in advance, shot lists organised by setup and every scene captured with multiple hooks so editors can build variations.
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