Copy Editing Prices: A Comprehensive Roundup
- Melchior Antoine
- Jun 16
- 10 min read
Updated: Jun 21
Copy editing prices typically range between $0.03 and $0.06 per word, according to the EFA. If you are a business owner running a website, copy editing prices present you with a choice to be made. Is it worth it? This is a crucial question in a content marketing world dominated by cheap or even free AI-driven content. Why pay for content editing when AI makes writing and editing free?
Well, here’s how I think about it. Copy editing can determine whether or not the copy you write can capture, engage, and convert readers or turn them off and away from your site, product, or service. Therefore, we can say that paying for the services of a copy editor is more than worth it.
Now that we have established the importance of copy editing, we must ask how much should you pay for a copy editor. Well, there are many approaches that we can take to decide this question. However, in our case, we mostly rely on the Editorial Freelancers Association for our rates.
In addition, we provide rates from various copy editing sites and companies that can be easily found on the Internet. Lastly, we compare their copy editing prices and services with what we offer here at EminentEdit.
In this article, we discuss what copy editing is and the role it plays in making sure that you can write copy that sells. In particular, I also discuss the special role of copy editing services in terms of AI-generated content.
What Is Copy Editing?
Copy editing is a form of editing that focuses on reviewing and correcting already written content. This type of correction differs from developmental editing, which works with content that is not already complete.
Developmental editing involves correcting content briefs and rough first drafts. On the other hand, copy editing services aim to review, find, and correct errors in web-based content, such as blogs, and in documents (such as academic manuscripts), which have already been written.
The pricing and rates for copy editing can vary. However, generally speaking, copy editing prices range between $0.03 and $0.05 per word. This variation in pricing is based on several factors. Such factors include:
The field of the content (e.g., health content vs. academic content)
The seniority of the editor
The budget of the business or vendor
The goals of the content to be written
Copy editing is a service that is ubiquitous throughout the Internet. The service providers that offer this specialized assistance companies cover mostly academic documents such as theses, journal manuscripts, grant proposals, and so on.
They also provide business editing services. However, their business editing offers are almost always not nearly as complete and comprehensive as their academic editing offers. These businesses mostly seem to focus on offering services to university or college students and scholars aiming to publish in high-end English language academic journals.
If you’re a student and scholar, the question of copy editing may be less confusing for you. Copy editing goals for students and scholars are quite clear cut. You want your manuscript to be edited well enough that it is good enough for submission. However, if you are a business owner, things are different.
The point of content created by any business is to drive traffic, leads, and sales. When a business website produces content, you should ensure that it is made up of copy that sells. Such copy or documents may include the following:
Sales letters
Service pages
White papers
Technical manuals
Editing that focuses on academic content is called academic or manuscript editing, whereas editing that works with business-related copy or blogs is simply known as content editing. In academic editing, the goal is to edit content according to style guides such as APA, MLA, and CMoS while using language that is natural, accurate, and appropriate.
By contrast, with content editing, the focus is on creating content that engages readers or visitors to a website. Content copy editing may also focus on SEO editing, that is, editing that ensures you can rank on search engines. To learn more about SEO editing, you can check out this article: SEO Editing: A Comprehensive Guide.
In the next section, we look at the pricing for various online editing companies and compare those prices with those of the Editorial Freelancers Association or EFA, as well as with our prices here at EminentEdit.
Copy editing pricing: Comparing the EFA to editing websites
So let’s get right down to it. The table below shows the copy editing prices for the various copy editing companies that you can find throughout the Internet. Most of these proofreading or editing companies have the following characteristics:
They are online
They offer services 24-7
They mainly cater to students and scholars
They employ freelance editors and proofreaders around the world
Popular online editing companies include Scribbr, Scribendi, ProofreadingPal, and so on. The table below shows the prices they offer per word and other information, such as customer rating and the country in which they are located. To learn more about how I rate these various companies, you can check out this prior article: 10 Best Copy Editing Services.
Copy editing Service | Standard Price in USD Per Word | Customer Rating | Country |
Cambridge Proofreading | $0.03 | 4.9 | USA |
Paper True | $0.032 | 4.8 | India |
Proofreading Pal | $0.028 | 4.5 | USA |
Scribendi | $0.037 | 4.6 | Canada |
Scribbr | $0.042 | 4.4 | Netherlands |
Editor World | $0.028 | 4.5 | USA |
Proofed | $0.045 | 4.7 | South Africa |
Wordvice | $0.048 | 4.6 | UK |
Editage | $0.058 | 4.8 | USA |
Enago | $0.058 | 4.2 | USA |
The prices for these companies range wildly. For example, Editor World offers $0.028 per word, which is the lowest, whereas Enago and Editage offer $0.058 per word. Therefore, it would make more sense to rely on the median value than average value. And in our case, this would be roughly $0.04 per word.
Company | 1 Week | 72 Hours | 48 Hours | 24 Hours | 10 Hours | 12 Hours | 3–4 Hours |
Cambridge Proofreading | $0.02 | $0.024 | $0.026 | $0.029 | NA | $0.038 | NA |
Proofreading Pal | $0.02 | $0.023 | $0.025 | $0.032 | $0.036 | NA | $0.066 |
Paper True | $0.029 | $0.032 | $0.034 | $0.044 | NA | $0.058 | NA |
Scribendi | $0.037 | $0.116 | $0.07 | $0.047 | NA | $0.056 | $0.083 |
Scribbr | $0.042 | $0.051.00 | NA | $0.059 | NA | NA | NA |
EminentEdit | $0.03 | Negotiable | Negotiable | NA | NA | NA | NA |
At EminentEdit, we offer regular seven-day turnaround services at $0.03 per word. However, for 48 hours and 72 hour turnaround, prices are negotiable. Scribendi and Proofreading Pal offer the fastest turnaround times of three to four hours, but at steep prices — $0.083 and $0.065 per word.
Get in touch for help in editing your academic content |
We can think of these prices as market-based prices. It is useful to compare them to copy editing rates from the Editorial Freelancers Association or the EFA. What exactly is the EFA? It is a professional organization that supports and connects freelance editors, writers, and other editorial professionals. It also provides guidelines and best practices for things such as recommended editing rates.
According to the EFA, these rates provide median values and are based on data from a survey of EFA members carried out between November 2023 and mid-January 2024. In all, it included one thousand respondents and covers the 2023 calendar year.
Type of Editing | Price Per Word | Price Per Hour | Price Per Page |
Academic | $0.03–$0.06 | $40–$60 | $7.50–$15.00 |
Content | $0.03–$0.05 | $50–$60 | $7.50–$12.50 |
Fiction | $0.02–$0.03 | $40–$50 | $5.00–$7.50 |
Technical | $0.04–$0.06 | $50–$60 | $10.00–$15.00 |
The data from the EFA is more comprehensive as it includes rates per word, per hour, and per page. It also breaks them down according to the field. In this case, I chose to focus on four types of editing: 1. Academic Editing; 2. Content Editing; 3. Fiction Editing; and 4. Technical Editing.
For content editing, according to the EFA, prices fall between $0.03 and $0.05 per word. This is slightly lower than academic editing, where the upper limit can be as high as $0.06 per word. Technical editing appears to have the highest rate per word at $0.04–$0.06 per word, whereas fiction editing is the lowest and can be as cheap as $0.02 per word.
Why does fiction editing fetch the lowest prices? It can be argued that academic and technical editing are more challenging because of the difficult jargon, stylistic demands (e.g. APA, MLA, CMoS). However, fiction editing can be more difficult to pin down than any other type of editing.
A fiction editor needs to worry about intangible things like proper chracterization, mood and tone, and the proper use of literary devices. The lower pricing is probably due to the fact that there is a greater supply of fiction editors compared to the other types of editors.
It should also be noted that hour rates tend to be higher and have less variation between the different types of editing. For example, this can be seen in fiction editing, where the lower per word limit is $0.02, whereas the lower limit of the hourly rate is $40, which is the same as academic editing.
The differences between market-based copy editing prices and EFA prices is also worth commenting on. The median rate for the various online copy editing companies is $0.04 per word. This falls within the range of EFA’s academic editing and content editing rates.
Human copy editing pricing vs. AI copy editing pricing
A number of copy editing services provide the option of what they call AI editing. This simply refers to their proprietary software. Companies that include such software include:
The pricing for their proofreading software is subscription-based, meaning you mostly pay every month. Here is a table breaking down the subscription fees for these various software applications:
Name of Company | Software Name | Monthly Price |
Scribbr | Scribbr Online Proofreader | $9.95 |
Scribendi | Scribendi AI | $4.99 |
Wordvice | Wordvice AI | $19.95 |
Editage | Paperpal | $25.00 |
This means you pay every month. In the case of Scribendi, the cost of this software is $4.99 per month. For Wordvice and Scribbr, it can begin as low as $9.95/per month. Lastly, Paperpal software is $25.00 per month. Now, is this copy editing software any good?
This type of software is only as good as the person using it. Most of these applications were more or less designed as tools for professional human copy editors. To simply rely on these tools as a substitute for human editors would be a mistaken approach to take. The end result would be copy that sounds “off” and oddly not human.
It is recommended that you should employ copy editing software as a tool to be sed by your in-house editors. They may help in improving speed, efficiency, and consistency.
Copy editing AI-generated content
AI-generated content has grown in popularity. In the world of content marketing, it is often used in relation to the concept of content scaling. This refers to publishing a large volume of content within a relatively short period of time.
At first look, AI-generated content would seem the best option if you own a business and website. However, one should remember that the point of content writing is to sell, not to scale content for the sake of scaling content. We have much reason to believe that AI-generated content may not always be able to do that.
Using AI-generated copy comes with several advantages. It's fast, cheap, and easy. However, there are several setbacks with the technology. AI-generated content is still relatively new. We can even go so far as to say that it is only at the developmental stage.
As a result, if you use AI to generated content, then you should expect the following disadvantages:
Hallucinations
Lack of originality
Robotic tone of voice
Hallucinations refers to the tendency for AI chatbots like ChatGPT and other AI-generated content to make things up. Lack of originality means that generative AI cannot produce original content. Instead what it does is simply spin content found on other sites.
Lastly, CHatGPT and other generative AI tools are robots, and they sound like it. This means that the tone of voice or ToV is simply off. Now, this presents a problem for content marketers and managers. As mentioned earlier, copy is designed to drive sales. People are instinctively turned off by content that does not sound like something by written by a human.
Some writers tend to focus on scaling content and SEO or search engine optimization. Such an approach may end up ranking your website or content. However, this may not end up achieving your business goals. If readers are turned off by your AI-generated content, they will simply leave the page.
Therefore, if you rely on AI-generated content for your website, you will have special needs in terms of copy editing. These special needs inlclude fact-checking to deal with hallucinations. You also need that special human touch that can transform the weird robotic tone of AI into something that can gain customer trust.
At EminentEdit, our editors and proofreaders by now are used to both using AI to generate content, as well as editing such content. We understand well enough both the pros and cons of relying on AI-produced content. And we know exactly how to use human editing to bridge that gap.
Get in touch for help in editing your content |
How EminentEdit can help with editing your content
EminentEdit provides high-quality copy editing services at reasonable rates to ensure that your content does what good copy is supposed to do — Sell. If you’re a content manager, this means your blog articles can be published in the right tone and style and are optimized for search engines.
EminentEdit is unique in that we focus equally on academic and business-related content.
Take a look at our pricing to see how we match low costs with high value. Our editing prices can begin as low as $0.03/word:
Type of Editing | Description | Price Per Word ($) |
Regular Copy editing | Line-by-line editing to improve tone and sentence structure. | $0.03 |
AI Editing | Editing to improve tone and fact-checking. | $0.05 |
AI Editing Without Fact-Checking | Editing to improve tone and to humanify. | $0.02 |
Regular Proofreading | Editing to uncover and fix minor grammar, punctuation, and style errors. | $0.02 |
SEO Editing | Editing to improve search engine performance and keyword usage. | $0.1 |
Our copy editing services don't just start with copy editing the final product. It also includes help from the very beginning of your project. Take a quick look at all what we cover:
Proofreading and editing for theses and dissertations
Reviewing and correcting long-form blog copy
Reviewing and correcting short-form copy
Correcting AI-generated content
Get in touch with one of our representatives: CONTACT US AT EMINENT EDIT.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, June). Copy Editing Prices: A Comprehensive Roundup. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/copy-editing-prices |
