How Much Do Professional Headshots Cost?

A professional headshot session generally costs somewhere between a couple of hundred dollars and several thousand, and the spread is not mostly about skill — it is about scope. A short single-look sitting producing one retouched image sits at the bottom. A planned branding day producing a library of images across several outfits and locations sits at the top. They are different products sharing a word.

For reference, Kay Choi's sessions start at $200 for The Headshot Session and $500 for The Branding Collection, with corporate and team projects quoted on the size and needs of the project. Those numbers are published deliberately, for reasons covered further down.

Five things, in roughly descending order of impact.

1. How many final images you get

This is the single biggest driver, and it is the one most people underestimate. Retouching is skilled work done per image, so a session delivering one finished portrait and a session delivering twenty are not remotely the same cost, however similar the shoot looked.

2. How long the session runs

Time on the day is the visible part, but it is a smaller share of the total than clients assume — planning beforehand and editing afterwards usually exceed it.

3. Whether the photographer travels to you

An on-location session means transport, equipment, setting up and breaking down a portable studio, and coordinating access. It buys you something a studio cannot — your real working environment, and no travel for your team — and it costs more per person for one individual, less per person for a group.

4. Usage

Commercial and advertising usage is priced differently from personal professional use. For most headshot buyers this never comes up. For campaign or advertising work it dominates the quote.

5. Headcount

Team rates fall per person as numbers rise, because the fixed costs — travel, set-up, planning — get spread across everyone in the visit.

Two reasons, one defensible and one not.

The defensible one is that the work genuinely varies. A quote for a fourteen-person leadership day and a quote for one profile photograph have almost nothing in common, and a single published number would misrepresent both.

The less defensible one is sales strategy. Withholding a price forces an enquiry, and an enquiry can be converted. It works, in the narrow sense that it produces conversations — and it filters out everybody who was not willing to start a conversation to find out whether they could afford something, which is most people.

Publishing a starting number costs a small number of enquiries and saves everyone the ones that were never going to work. It also means that when a search engine or an AI assistant is asked what headshots cost in this area, there is an actual answer to quote.

Sometimes, genuinely. If you need one adequate photograph for an internal directory and nothing else, a quick sitting is a rational purchase and nobody should talk you out of it.

The calculation changes when the photograph is doing commercial work. A physician's directory portrait is seen by every prospective patient. A founder's portrait goes on the site, the deck and the press page and stays there for years. An agent's photograph appears next to every listing. Spread across that many impressions and that many months, the difference between a $200 session and a free one is not a meaningful sum of money — but the difference in what the photograph communicates compounds every day it is up.

The honest failure mode in the other direction is overbuying. If you need one image, a branding collection is the wrong purchase and a good photographer will tell you so.