What It Actually Costs
Every price you have read online was published by somebody who sells headshots. This page is not. Below are real numbers, from real photographers’ live pricing pages, with the cities attached — and then the costs that are not on any pricing page and that nobody warns you about.
The published prices, with names and cities attached
We are not going to give you a vague “$200 to $800” band and leave. Here is what actual studios actually publish, as of July 2026. We are not affiliated with any of them and we are not recommending any of them. They are here because their prices are public, which makes them checkable.
Los Angeles. Marc Cartwright (Studio City) publishes $345 for one outfit with one retouched image, $525 for two outfits and two retouches, $625 for three. Extra outfits $75. Extra retouches $35. Hair and makeup $250. At the budget end, LA Photo Spot publishes $150 for one look, $225 for two, $300 for three — a functioning LA studio with a public portfolio.
New York. Ari Scott (Upper West Side): $490 for two looks, $690 for four, $890 for six. Joe Jenkins (Brooklyn): $495 for a fifteen-minute mini session, $795 for the working-actor tier, $1,200 at the top.
Atlanta. The Actor Headshot: $350 for one look, rising to $725 for four. Austin. Steven Noreyko: $240.19 basic, $304.85 agency. Chicago. John Gress: $599 express, $1,999 for a full portfolio session — though Gress sits at the top of that market and shoots commercially, so he is not a fair proxy for Chicago actor pricing.
London. Mad Photography: £300 for a two-hour session with three retouched images, £250 returning, £225 student, and £150 each if two students share a slot. The current London working range for a mainstream session with two or three retouched images sits at roughly £225 to £350.
The Actors’ Guild of Great Britain’s “Comparing London Headshot Photographers” still ranks in search and is still quoted by 2025 blogs as if it were current. It is copyright 2011. Its price bands are fifteen years old. Its reasoning is still good — we use it in the next chapter — but if a site is quoting those figures at you as today’s London prices, it did not check.
The costs that are not on the pricing page
This is where the bill actually gets made, and it is the reason the number in your head is always wrong.
Retouching, per additional image. LA Photo Spot: $20. Marc Cartwright: $35. Ari Scott: $40. The Actor Headshot: $45. Steven Noreyko: $60. Mad Photography: £25. John Gress: $129. That is a six-fold spread on the same line item, and it is almost never compared. A “$150” package with three retouched images is really $210.
Hair and makeup. The verified market range is $150 to $275. You will see “from $75” quoted on blogs. We could not find a single photographer charging it. Budget $200 and be pleasantly surprised.
The retainer. Non-refundable, and it ranges from $25 to $175 to 30% of the total, depending on who you book.
And the one nobody compares: paying to own your own proofs. John Gress charges $199 for medium-res or $299 for high-res to hand you the unretouched images from your own shoot. Steven Noreyko charges $50 for the watermarked archive. Ari Scott does not sell raw files at all — “for the same reasons a writer doesn’t turn in a first draft, I do not deliver unretouched photos.” Meanwhile Cartwright, Joe Jenkins and LA Photo Spot all include every image, free.
That is a four-figure swing over a career and it is invisible on the price page. Ask before you book.
And then the casting platform sends you a bill
You paid the photographer. You are not finished.
Actors Access gives you two photos free. Those two are swappable as often as you like. Every additional photo costs $10 to post — and paid photos cannot be swapped for free. Change your hair and you pay again. (Breakdown Services help centre, page modified February 2025.)
Now the part that catches almost everybody: Actors Access PLUS — $68 a year — includes no discount whatsoever on photo uploads. PLUS buys unlimited submissions. It does not buy photos. This is one of the most widespread misconceptions in the business and it costs actors real money.
Casting Networks is stricter still. Its free tier gives you “2 Pictures, 1 Video, 1 Audio File” — and, verbatim, “This media can not be swapped for new media, nor can it be deleted.” Premium is $29.99 a month or $299.90 a year in the US and Canada, £9.99 or £99.90 in the UK.
Sit with what that does to the “how many looks do I need” argument, because it settles it on arithmetic rather than opinion. A six-look session produces four images you must pay to post, and pay again to replace. If you cannot afford to shelve them, you did not buy a portfolio. You bought a warehouse. There is a whole chapter on why two or three looks is the honest number, and this is the reason underneath it.
The fully loaded bill — the number to actually put in your budget
Mid-market US actor, two looks, done properly:
Session $490–$525 + one extra retouch $35–$40 + hair and makeup $200 + two paid Actors Access photo slots $20 + twenty-five prints $40 = roughly $785 to $825.
The advertised number was $490. That gap — about sixty per cent — is the honest answer to “how much do headshots cost,” and you will not find it on a photographer’s pricing page, because it is not a photographer’s job to tell you.
Getting a usable headshot cheaply, without being ashamed of it
Discount studios are real and they work. $150 for one look at a functioning LA studio with a public portfolio is a legitimate first headshot. The trade-off is honest: unbundled retouching, and a conveyor-belt session. That is far better advice than “save up $600,” which is advice for people who have $600.
Student rates are real, and in the UK they are formalised. £225 student, or £150 each if two of you share a two-hour slot. That is the cheapest verified route to an agent-acceptable London headshot that exists.
Ask about the returning-client discount before you shop around. Ari Scott takes $100 off. Mad drops £300 to £250. Nobody advertises this loudly.
And DIY is a real answer, not a consolation prize. A window, a friend and a bedsheet produces a photograph of your actual face. Chapter VII shows you exactly how, and where the line is.
Two routes we are not going to recommend, because we went looking for evidence and did not find it. TFP — trade for print. Backstage’s TFP guidance is aimed at models, and no casting director or agent is on record endorsing a TFP headshot as a primary image. And “free photography-school shoots.” Everyone mentions them. We could not find a single current, named, reputable programme. We are not going to invent one for you.
How often do you actually need new ones? Print the conflict.
This is the question the industry dodges, and the reason it dodges it is that the answer costs somebody money.
The photographer’s position comes from Anthony Mongiello, a headshot photographer, in Backstage:
⚠️ At his own quoted rate of $250 a look, that is a $1,500 to $2,500 prescription written by the man holding the camera. He may be right. He is also not a neutral party, and nobody else on the internet will tell you that.
The casting director’s position is different, and it is not about a calendar at all. Thom Hammond, on Spotlight:
And Jane Anderson makes the strongest pro-update argument in the entire literature — notice that it is about age accuracy, not about a schedule, and notice that it is an argument in your favour rather than against you:
We went looking, specifically and hard, for any casting director on record recommending annual headshots. There is not one. The “every year” line comes from photographers and from blogs written by photographers. Not a single casting director says it.
The only casting director who names an interval says “every couple of years” — and he frames it as a maximum staleness, not a shopping schedule. The trigger is not the calendar. The trigger is a material change in your face: weight, hair length or colour, a beard on or off, ageing out of a bracket, or a genuine change in your casting. If nothing about you has changed, no casting director in any source we could find says you owe anybody new photographs.
So: budget eight hundred dollars if you have it, one hundred and fifty if you don’t, and nothing at all if this is the month the rent is the problem — because a well-lit photograph of your real face, taken by a friend at a window, will outperform a stale, beautiful, three-year-old lie every single time.
Want Will to Coach You Through It?
Reading is one thing. Working 1-on-1 with a working actor who booked Oppenheimer is another.