Copywriters make an average of $58,465, according to Glassdoor. But national averages are misleading. In New York, salaries are 13% higher, and if you specialize, your pay can climb even higher. In this article, we explore the factors that affect your pay and how to maximize it.
Writers are lucky—salaries are highly susceptible to clever wordplay. It’s a well-established fact that changing your job title from “data analyst” to “data scientist” confers a semantic pay bump—$51,000 more on average, if you trust Glassdoor data—despite the qualificatory differences being rather murky.
Similarly for writers, calling yourself a content manager qualifies you for an extra $7,000 (national average) in exchange for a few extra administrative duties. If you feel qualified to think through the process surrounding writing and how it’s used, you may be a content strategist, and so eligible for a salary of $78,000. For those keeping score, that’s a 34% pay bump over your run-of-the-mill copywriting job.
But beyond adapting your title to the industry you’re approaching, here are other factors to consider to understand what goes into a copywriter job salary:
Job salaries are often anchored to the city where the company is based, and fluctuate based on the cost of living there. At large corporations like AT&T, for example, employees are paid on a sliding scale of four tiers, with San Francisco and New York at the top, and Nome, Alaska and Bismark, North Dakota near the bottom. The same job in San Francisco will net you 25% higher pay than in Nome.
While you may not be able to move your family to capture that pay rate, this rule tends to hold true for remote jobs. A remote writing job for a San Francisco-based tech company tends to pay 25% more than elsewhere, and you’re free to be elsewhere.
You can use NerdWallet’s cost of living calculator to see what the San Francisco equivalent of your current salary is.
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Copywriting or content marketing agencies on the whole think of writing as a cost of goods sold, not a value proposition. That is, to them and their clients, writing is writing is writing. It’s a commodity. It’s going to happen no matter who does it, so whoever that someone is might as well be cheap because cheap means better margins. Thus, wages for agency copywriters tend to be depressed, whereas in-house writers—those who are directly employed by one company—tend to think of the writer as a team member and pay them accordingly. This comes with lots of caveats and there are many exceptions but on the whole, I have found it true.
Editor’s note: We’re an agency too, but our philosophy is different. I find the best writing comes from full-time writers who have the luxury of focusing on quality rather than whether or not the editor will pay them.
When an editor of Airbnb’s magazine landed the role after years as a journalist, she was floored by the pay—well into the six figures. She was being compensated like the highly skilled knowledge worker that she was, and that’s because of how most tech companies make money—by selling recurring software subscriptions.
Newspapers, magazines, and online publications, on the other hand, are struggling to stay profitable and must think carefully about their margins. They’re ad supported, and the media business is tough. The average online ad has a 0.05% click-through rate (that’s five clicks per 10,000 impressions) and despite new revenue streams like sponsored content, they’re struggling. As I related in an article for the Content Marketing Institute, your average journalist makes less than your average school teacher.
Thus, media companies and the agencies who feed them need to keep tight margins. To them, writing is an expense. But to tech companies like Google, which makes 70% of its revenue off those ads and who uses that money to fund all sorts of fun, long-term, civic-minded, and moonshot ideas, paying a writer to do exceptional work without considering the return is second nature.
Not every company is Google. But most tech companies tend to pay better than non-tech companies because they too value the writing differently.
The average senior copywriter makes $80,000 according to Glassdoor. There’s probably some sample-size errors in there: Likely, there are many more regular copywriters reporting their title than senior ones, but whatever the difference, it tells you that sticking around long enough to earn a senior title (and asking for it in performance reviews) can significantly improve your earnings, either at this company or the next. If in negotiating with a prospective employer you find that you can’t get the salary you want, at least negotiate a senior title as a fallback. It costs the company nothing, but sets you up for a 20% pay bump at the next company.
Of all the above factors, the most impactful thing you can do to increase your earnings is to develop a niche. I have much less data to support this assertion except for the fact that I quadrupled my rate as a freelance writer by calling myself “a B2B writer.” Before I had decided that was my route, I dabbled and had trouble getting clients to agree to anything over a rate of $0.25 per word. But after I’d begun to develop a reputation among B2B software marketers and had lots of highly relevant samples to share and show that I’d written for their competitors or companies they aspired to be like, I was able to increase my standard rate to $1 per word.
The niche issue is more difficult to capitalize on in a full-time role, but the principle holds true. Companies are willing to pay more (probably not four times more, but certainly something) for someone who requires less training. It costs thousands of dollars to onboard and train a new employee and most aren’t fully productive until six months in. If part of your value proposition is that you’ll be productive on day one, you have a huge advantage over other interviewees, and can likely command a higher salary.
It should go without saying but I’ll say it here: To take advantage of the aforementioned factors, your writing must be good. (See examples of good B2B writing here.) Goodness is painfully subjective, but it’s in the eye of the employer: Does your writing impress them and their clients? If yours does, you’re in a strong position. If it doesn’t and it needs work, you’ll find you have a lot less leverage. You’ll get fewer responses to your outreach, fewer interviews, and fewer “shots on goal” at asking for a higher rate. While you should position yourself for the highest possible salary based on geography, industry, and employer, the best long-term policy is to read a lot, write a lot, and learn a lot.
Very little data exists for how much freelance writers make. All the factors like geography, writing through an agency versus writing directly for a client, writing for tech companies, having seniority, and having a niche all play a part. In my experience, the rates range from $0.05 to $2 per word. As a skilled writer, never consider writing for less than $0.25 per word.
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