Most photographers charge mileage and stop there. A 90 minute drive each way at 76 cents a mile comes to about $76, which sounds fair until you notice you also gave away three hours of a working day. Three hours you cannot sell to anyone else, on top of the session itself.
A travel fee that holds up has three parts: the cost of getting there, the value of the time it takes, and the accommodation if the job cannot be done in a day. Leave out the middle one and you are quietly subsidising every client who lives far away, which over a season is a real number.
Set a free radius, then charge past it
Almost everyone starts with an included radius, and it is the right structure. Something like: 30 miles from your base included, everything beyond it billed.
Two details decide whether it works. Measure from your home or studio, not from the town centre, and say so in the contract. And measure driving distance rather than a straight line on a map, because a 25 mile straight line across an estuary can be a 60 mile drive.
Pick the radius from your actual market rather than a round number. If your city is 20 miles across and most of your clients are in it, a 30 mile radius covers your normal work and charges for genuine outliers. If you serve a rural county where an hour's drive is unremarkable, a 30 mile radius makes you look expensive against local competitors and 50 is the sensible figure.
Charge the miles at the real rate, not the fuel price
The mileage rate that most photographers use is the government business rate, because it is easy to justify and nobody argues with it. In the US that is the IRS standard rate: 72.5 cents a mile from January 2026, raised mid-year to 76 cents from 1 July 2026. In the UK it is HMRC's approved rate, which went from 45p to 55p a mile for the first 10,000 miles from the 2026 to 2027 tax year, the first change since 2011. Both are worth checking each January rather than carrying last year's figure forward, and 2026 shows they can move mid-year too.
Use the official rate because it already accounts for what people forget. Fuel is maybe a third of the cost of driving a car. The rest is tyres, servicing, insurance, depreciation, and the tolls and parking that eat a wedding day. Charge only the fuel and you are paying to work.
Bill round trip miles, not one way. This is the single most common error, and it halves the fee.
Bill the time, because that is the actual cost
Here is the part most pricing pages omit. If your session fee assumes a four hour working day and the drive turns it into a seven hour one, you have taken a 43 percent pay cut for that booking.
The clean way to handle it: include the first 30 minutes of drive each way, then bill travel time beyond that at half your hourly rate. Half, because you are not working, but you are also not free. Most clients find that obviously reasonable when it is written down, and it costs the near ones nothing.
If you have never worked out what your hour is genuinely worth once culling, editing, and admin are counted, the effective hourly rate calculator will give you the number in about two minutes, and it is usually lower than people guess. Half of a real number beats a full share of an invented one.
Overnight, flights, and the multi-day job
Past a certain distance the day stops being a day. The usual thresholds:
- Over two hours each way, with an evening finish. Charge one night's accommodation. Nobody should drive home from a wedding reception at 1am after twelve hours on their feet, and your insurer would agree.
- Over four hours, or a flight. Two nights, arriving the day before. This is not luxury, it is the only version where a delayed train does not cost the client their ceremony coverage.
- Flights. Book refundable or flexible fares and bill them at cost, plus a checked bag for gear, plus airport transfers. Get the client to approve the fare before you book.
Bill accommodation at cost with receipts rather than marking it up. Clients scrutinise a hotel line more than any other, and cost plus receipts ends the conversation. Charge a per diem for food only if you are away more than one night, and keep it modest.
Destination work also changes your insurance and equipment position, and flying with camera gear has its own rules that are worth knowing before you quote, not after.
Two worked examples
Here is the whole formula applied twice, with a 30 mile included radius, the first 30 minutes of drive each way included, a $100 hourly rate (so travel time bills at $50), and the 76 cent IRS rate.
A family session 75 miles away, 90 minutes each way.
| Line | Working | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Mileage | (75 minus 30) x 2 = 90 miles at $0.76 | $68.40 |
| Time | (90 minus 30) x 2 = 2 hours at $50 | $100.00 |
| Travel fee | $168.40, quoted as $170 |
A wedding 190 miles away, 3.5 hours each way, reception ends at 11pm.
| Line | Working | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Mileage | (190 minus 30) x 2 = 320 miles at $0.76 | $243.20 |
| Time | (210 minus 30) x 2 = 6 hours at $50 | $300.00 |
| Hotel | one night at cost, with receipt | $150.00 |
| Travel fee | $693.20, quoted as $695 |
Notice where the money is. In both cases the time line is bigger than the mileage line, which is exactly the part a mileage-only fee gives away. A photographer who billed the wedding on miles alone would have charged $243 and driven seven hours for free.
Round the total up to a clean number. Nobody needs to see the 40 cents, and a round figure reads as a policy rather than a calculation.
Write it as one number on the quote
Do the arithmetic in your own spreadsheet, then show the client a single line: "Travel to Norwich: $340." Not four line items they can argue with individually. Itemised travel invites negotiation over each component, and you will spend an email thread defending a hotel rate.
Keep the breakdown ready in case they ask, and be transparent if they do. But lead with the total, the same way you would with a package price rather than a menu.
Decide when to waive it, deliberately
There are good reasons to absorb travel. A venue you have wanted to shoot at for two years, a slow February, a wedding that will produce a portfolio you can sell against for the next season. Those are investments and you should make them consciously.
What you should not do is waive the fee because you feel awkward raising it. That is how photographers end up with a diary full of distant, low-margin bookings and no idea why the year felt busy and paid badly.
If you waive it, say so on the quote: "Travel to Bristol: $280, waived." The client sees the value of what they were given, and you keep the number visible for next time rather than establishing that you are free everywhere.
The two lines that stop the arguments
Put both in the contract, next to the fee:
Travel is calculated from the photographer's studio by road, round trip. Mileage beyond the first 30 miles is charged at the prevailing government business rate. Travel time beyond 30 minutes each way is charged at half the photographer's hourly rate. Accommodation, where required, is billed at cost.
Where the client changes the venue after booking, travel is recalculated from the new location.
That second one exists because venue changes happen more often than you would think, and a couple who moves a wedding 60 miles will not think to mention the travel implication. If your contract terms are still improvised per booking, the cancellation policy generator handles the neighbouring clauses about weather and rescheduling that tend to be missing at the same time.
Travel fees do not lose you bookings. Clients who live an hour away already assume there will be one, and they are far more surprised when there is not. What loses you money is arriving at the end of a season having driven 4,000 miles you never billed for, which is only visible once someone adds it up. Add it up once, set the radius, and let the quote do the work.
