Usage fees are one of the easiest ways to undercharge on commercial jobs without realizing it. When a small local client pays the same rate for images as a national brand running a big campaign, you leave serious money on the table and take on huge responsibility for a fraction of its value.
Coming to you from Karl Taylor with Visual Education, this practical video walks through when usage fees make sense and when they only scare off smaller clients. Taylor draws a clear line between work for a local company that wants a few images for a website or brochure and work for regional, national, or global campaigns with serious media spend behind them. You see how local jobs are usually covered by your day rate and post-production, while campaign work is where licensing starts to matter. Taylor also explains why pushing usage fees on small local companies often just kills the job instead of raising your income.
In the heart of the video, Taylor explains usage fees as a separate licensing charge, not an extra way to pad your day rate. Your creative fee covers planning, preproduction, shoot days, and post-production, and it can already run into many thousands once you factor in assistants, studio, and equipment. Usage fees sit on top of that and are tied to exposure: media types, territories, duration, and print volumes. Taylor frames it as a kind of responsibility fee, reflecting the scale of the campaign and the financial weight of the ad placements that will feature your images. You start to see why a brand paying for billboards, magazines, and digital campaigns across several countries expects to pay more than a neighborhood business printing a flyer.
Taylor then introduces the Association of Photographers usage calculator, which is built around a Base Usage Rate, or BUR. The idea is simple in theory: set a base number that reflects the value of your work, then let the calculator apply percentages based on media, territory, and time period. In practice, picking that base number is where things get messy. If your BUR is tied to your day rate and your day rate is much higher than a competitor’s, your usage fees will spike too, which is often where negotiations begin. Taylor talks through how he sometimes adjusts the BUR downward for regular clients or larger projects so the total remains realistic without throwing away the concept of licensing.
You also get to see Taylor plug real example numbers into the calculator so you can watch how usage fees rise and fall as he changes options. A one-year, multi-country, all-media campaign can easily produce a usage figure that is higher than the entire shoot fee. Narrow that down to a website, brochures, and point of sale materials and the number drops sharply. Hearing Taylor compare those usage fees to what big brands spend on the actual media buys puts the pricing in perspective and makes it easier to quote confidently instead of apologetically. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Taylor.
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