How Much Does Transcription Pay?

According to Indeed, transcribers in the US earn an average of $19.50 per hour, with a fairly wide range of $12.49–$30.44 per hour. 1 As a freelancer, you can expect to earn around $0.40–$3 per audio minute transcribed.

However, you may earn significantly more or less, depending on a wide range of factors.

One is the type of material you’re transcribing. For example, specialized jobs (e.g., legal transcription) tend to pay better than general transcription work.

We’ve broken down the rates for several of the main types of transcription below.

General transcription

General transcriptionists (who work with non-specialized material that can span a wide range of disciplines) earn a mean average wage of $21.63 per hour. 2

You don’t need any specialized training to do general transcription, which is why it’s the most common type to start out with.

Here’s a look at how the wages for this type of transcription break down:

Average Earnings of General Transcriptionists

Source: BLS data from May 2022. All figures represent the salaries of employed individuals (not self-employed workers). Annual wages represent the hourly mean wage multiplied by a “year-round, full-time” figure of 2,080 hours.

Medical transcription

Medical transcriptionists earn a mean average wage of $17.83 per hour. 3 Despite the specialized nature of this work, this is a lower rate than you’ll find for other types of transcription.

Average Earnings of Medical Transcriptionists

Source: BLS data from May 2022.

Legal transcription

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) doesn’t publish data on the earnings of legal transcriptionists. Transcriptionists working in legal services fall under the broad umbrella of “word processors and typists,” who earn a mean average wage of $21.63 per hour. 2

In general, you can expect to earn slightly more money than average when transcribing legal recordings than when you’re doing general work. That said, the higher average rate also means that you may be required to have a high degree of expertise and specialized training.

Court reporting and live captioning

Court reporters and simultaneous captioners earn a mean average wage of $33.79 per hour. 4 This is much higher than the typical rate for other types of transcription.

Average Earnings of Court Reporters and Live Captioners

Source: BLS data from May 2022.

Part of why court transcription pays so highly is that it requires strict adherence to form and deadlines. You’ll often need to add complex elements like timestamps, line numbers, and headings to the verbatim transcription, while also noting down nonverbal sounds such as laughter or crying.

To understand why transcription rates can vary so widely, it’s helpful to look at the factors that determine your income.

Distinguishing between the ones that lie within your control and those you can’t change will help you direct your efforts and optimize your earnings.

1. Employment type

In general, you can make more money from transcription as a freelancer than as a traditional employee.

We collaborated on this article with Carolina Solomon, a transcriptionist with several decades of experience, who told us, “In my experience, freelancing transcriptionists can comfortably out-earn their salaried peers.”

However, as a freelancer, you’ll lose out on certain perks, like employee benefits and a consistent influx of new assignments.

Breaking down transcription rates by employment structure

In more detail, here’s roughly how much you can expect to earn as each type of transcriptionist:

• Salaried employee: Salaried transcriptionists can earn anything from $5 to $30 per hour, with an average rate of around $16 per hour. This translates to a salary of approximately $3,500 per month.
• Independent freelancer: Many freelancers charge by audio minute or hour. The freelance rates for transcribing a minute of audio vary from $0.40 to $3 per minute transcribed, or $24 to $180 per audio hour transcribed. If you’re a quick typist, you might be able to transcribe 1 hour of audio in 4 hours, equating to an income of up to $45 per hour, which is 50% higher than the $30 per hour you could earn as a salaried worker.
• Agency/member freelancer: You can earn the same rates as a freelancer working through an agency or freelancer portal, but some of these companies will shave as much as 20% off your earnings for projects that you undertake through them.

2. Your transcription speed (and the audio quality)

If you charge by the audio minute or hour, your speed will heavily affect your take-home pay.

According to Solomon, it can take 4–8 hours to transcribe 1 hour of audio, but that’s not always entirely in your control. In particular, it’s heavily dependent on the quality of the audio.

If the recording suffers from issues like the speaker standing too far from the microphone or someone scribbling on a page right next to the microphone, you can quickly find yourself in a nightmare scenario where your effective hourly rate from the job decreases with every hour you spend struggling through it.

By contrast, a clean and high-quality audio recording or video clip is a breeze to get through, which means quick and easy money.

For this reason, Solomon recommends insisting on clean audio (and rejecting clients and jobs that don’t provide it), a piece of advice that we’ll return to in more detail later.

Typing speed

As you’d expect, typing speed is a major factor that influences your earnings as a transcriptionist.

You’ll typically be paid by audio hour rather than working hour, so the faster you can type, the more you’ll be able to earn. The usual advice is that to get into transcription work, you should be able to maintain a speed of at least 50–60 words per minute, and the faster, the better.

3. Type of client

There’s a rough correlation between the type of client you’re working for and the income you can expect.

Below are the main categories of transcription clients, ranked from highest to lowest paying:

High-paying clients

• Private clients: According to Solomon, these are the highest-paying clients. They view confidentiality as paramount and do not want to work through a third party, such as a transcription or temping agency. Since there’s no agent or portal taking a commission from the transaction, all of the earnings go straight to you, the transcriptionist.
• Industry-specific transcription agencies: These companies offer very high pay, but they’ll take a cut of your profits, and you won’t be able to negotiate your rates or schedule. They handle specialized material, such as medical or legal dictations.

Mid-paying clients

• General transcription agencies: These companies offer reasonable pay, with the option to earn more from urgent and overnight work. They handle audio files of all types. You could find yourself transcribing music videos, podcasts, interviews for academic research, focus group discussions, disciplinary hearings, radio interviews, and more.
• Private clients on freelancer platforms: These clients generally offer lower rates when you’re just starting off, and the platform will take a cut of your earnings, but you can eventually move off-platform and earn more once you’ve built up a client base. You can find clients like this on many sites, including Upwork, Freelancer, Fiverr, and PeoplePerHour.
• Legal, medical, and other corporate entities: These companies offer a steady income but minimal opportunities to negotiate raises. They employ transcriptionists on a permanent, salaried basis and offer various benefits, such as health insurance and annual leave.

Lower-paying clients

• Temping agencies: Pay from these agencies is low to moderate, and they’ll take a cut of your earnings. The work can be irregular, and it’s difficult to snag private clients this way. They source typists and may place them for short-term work at their clients’ premises.
• Transcription agencies with government contracts: These agencies sometimes offer regular work, but rates can be low and the sound quality of the files you’ll be transcribing can be very poor. They often employ typists working from home on a part-time but long-term basis to transcribe court cases and formal hearings.
• Agencies participating in machine learning projects: These companies offer the lowest rates, and their portals have a steep learning curve. They contract with transcriptionists to do online captioning or transcription work.

When it comes to picking work, Solomon’s advice is to explore more than one avenue.

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” she said. “Choose one agency that will send you a steady but not overwhelming amount of work, and choose two or three high-paying direct clients to boost that base income.”

4. Experience and skill level

As you might expect, your earnings will be lower when you’re a total newbie who’s just starting out than when you’re a seasoned transcriber with many years of experience under your belt.

When starting out, you can expect to receive around $1.00–$1.50 per audio minute with many clients. Over time, you can raise this rate, but the real perks come in the form of easier projects with higher earning potential.

Projects offered to beginners can be incredibly time-consuming, leading to a lower effective pay rate, even with a solid base rate. This is because you may have to take extra steps, like segmenting audio files and tediously selecting and submitting small audio clips that are only a few seconds long.

More experienced transcriptionists can qualify for larger, simpler tasks with clearer audio and less admin work, meaning you’ll be able to earn more money for each hour you work, even if your per-audio-minute rate isn’t any higher.

Of course, the more experience you have, the faster you’ll get at doing the actual work, too.

5. Your work equipment

Transcription requires sitting in a quiet environment, in the same position, for many hours at a stretch. This is hard to do if your body is sore (which will also make you much less efficient).

You can make money as a transcriptionist without any fancy equipment (as long as you have a computer), but you should invest in an ergonomic chair and put some effort into establishing a comfortable workspace for yourself. This will help you put in the long hours needed to earn a substantial income from transcription.

You’ll also earn more money if you have a decent software toolkit, including the following:

• Audio-scrubbing software to enhance audio file quality
• Professional transcription software with advanced navigation features
• Software that can save collections of hotkeys and autocorrect cues by subject matter (e.g., one set of hotkeys for medical work and another for religious work)

“Having the proper tools helps me fly through a transcription case,” Solomon told us. “This can reduce the amount of time it takes me to transcribe a 30-minute audio file by as much as 1 hour.”

6. How you market yourself

If you’re like many freelance transcriptionists, you’ll set your own rates for your transcription services.

“One thing I’ve learned as a transcriptionist is that you get paid according to how much you value your own skills,” Solomon said. “It’s important to know which jobs to pitch for so that you neither sell yourself short and get underpaid nor take on work that’s beyond your skill level.”

To some extent, how much you can earn will depend on how good you are at striking a delicate balance between cost and value. Charge too little and you’ll lower your earning potential, but charge too much and you risk not getting any job offers.

Transcription wages can be calculated in any of the following ways:

• Salaried (monthly, bimonthly, or weekly)
• Per hour worked
• Per audio hour
• Per audio minute

As you’d expect, most salaried roles are traditional, full-time jobs. When it comes to other types of work, it’s rare for transcription to be charged per hour of work done. More commonly, payment is based on the duration of the audio transcribed.

In the case of work with very short sound bites (such as machine learning platforms and captioning, where you’ll be often working with clips of 1–2 minutes), you can expect to work on a per audio minute rate. Longer projects, on the other hand, may be paid per audio hour.

Which payment structure is better?

No one payment structure is superior to the others, but working on a salaried (or a per-hour-worked) basis is more stable. You can predict how much you’ll earn regardless of the quality of the audio that you have to transcribe, and you don’t risk a loss of income due to a poorly recorded audio file.

Audio minute and audio hour rates are more dependent on your transcription speed. If you’re a fast worker, you can sometimes earn a higher income, but if the recording is bad, you risk losing out.

Payment frequency and method

The details of how (and how often) you’ll get paid depend on the type of client you’re working for.

• Transcription agencies: You’ll often get paid for transcription work on a fortnightly or monthly basis. The payment will go directly into your bank account.
• Freelance clients: Clients who hire you directly or through a freelancing platform typically pay on a per-batch basis at the end of every project. They’ll usually make these payments via PayPal, Escrow, or a similar financial service.

Choosing a mix of different types of clients can help you maintain a steady income stream from transcription.

As long as you’re flexible about your schedule and think creatively about your path as a transcriptionist, you’ll see your income grow.

There are a few things you can do to maximize your earnings:

1. Nurture your client relationships

To do well in transcription, you need to do more than just type. Work consistently on your client relations, let people know that you’re available, and make the most of every opportunity to display your skills and experience.

“The sense of accomplishment I get from delivering a transcription text that not only does justice to but perfectly reflects the audio file is a significant motivator,” said Solomon. “But this dedication isn’t just rewarding to me as a transcriptionist—it also gets noticed by clients.”

She added that “It’s the dedicated transcribers who usually get approached with long-term, after-hour, or urgent assignments, which also happen to be the jobs that carry the highest rates.”

Don’t be afraid to take on work with tight deadlines

Clients in private practice often require someone to transcribe an urgent report or take on overnight work that can’t be completed by anyone else in time.

If a reliable client calls on you in such circumstances, accommodate them. The next time they need work done, it’s your phone that will ring.

It takes time to build a relationship with a client, but once they realize you’re a transcriptionist who’s available when they need you and delivers accurate work in a timely manner, the work will keep coming, and so will opportunities to negotiate better rates.

2. Hone your skills

Constantly look for new ways to improve your skills and optimize your workflow. In addition to letting you get more work done, this will also let you charge higher fees for your services.

You’ll encounter many opportunities to hone your skills in the course of doing business. For instance, many agencies require applicants to complete a short test to be considered for transcription projects, and applicants who pass these tests are often given in-depth training.

Every one of these tests and training events will help you develop your skills. Grasp these opportunities whenever possible to keep improving your work quality and leveling up in the field.

3. Only accept clear audio

Although some people regard audio quality as a factor that cannot be changed (which is encouraged by agencies who would like transcriptionists to accept badly recorded audio without batting an eye), there’s a lot you can do to ensure that you only ever have to transcribe properly recorded audio files.

Insisting on clear audio will not only increase your income per hour worked and reduce stress but also benefit the entire industry. Clients will realize that if they want something transcribed, they have to record it properly—or settle for the least experienced workers.

4. Promote yourself as an independent transcriber

There’s no denying it—taking on freelance gigs is one of the best ways to earn lots of money. But in order to succeed, you have to market yourself effectively, fight for new work, and be willing to put in the effort to build a client list.

A good starting point is to register your own website. You can use this space to showcase your skills and experience and give potential clients an easy way to hire you. You should also network and use your existing social connections to spread the word about your work.

In addition to transcribing, Solomon also works in IT, and she sometimes uses her IT client base to get new work as an independent transcriptionist. “I let them know that I am available for transcription work and invite them to spread the word,” she said.

5. Seek out new opportunities

Don’t wait for transcription work to come to you—go after it yourself. Keep trying, even if you get rejected.

To keep your finger on the pulse of the industry, join transcriptionist communities. There, you’ll be able to find new upcoming projects and overflow work, and even stay tuned in to developments in transcription technology and changes in various dictionaries.

Additionally, don’t be shy to tell people what you do when the topic arises at social or sporting group get-togethers.

As an example, Solomon told us about a group that she joined years ago called The HOBOs (short for home office business owners). It was a group that was “set up for people who worked independently but felt a bit lonely around teatime and, importantly, wanted to collaborate with other self-employed business owners.”

“We would communicate on our online forum and meet up once a month on a regular basis, where a few of us would do short presentations on our specialties,” she said. “That generated incredibly valuable contacts for me that have endured for decades, and I was also able to refer work to other HOBOs.”

Exploring other domains

You can also branch out into a different but related industry, like editing or proofreading, which have a lot of overlap with transcription, especially in the legal field.

Legal transcription agencies generally have a team of proofreaders who review transcribed texts before printing, binding, and submitting them to the courts.

Although these companies tend to favor dedicated proofreaders over transcriptionists, you may still be able to find interested parties who are expanding their proofreading team and are willing to give you a chance. Doing proofreading work can increase your earning potential and add an additional arrow in your quiver of skills.

Lucrative as transcription work can be, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. If you’ve never done it, it might sound easy, but it can be very hard work.

However, if you love working with words, have a slightly introverted disposition, and feel energized by exposure to a diversity of opinions, topics, and experiences, then transcription could be a dream job for you.

“Over the years, transcription work has been a constant source of enrichment,” said Solomon. “In addition to boosting my income, it’s given me insight into many things I would most likely never have encountered, and it’s the perfect companion to my main source of income.”