Wedding Photographer Cost by State and City (2026 Data)
Median wedding photographer prices across 17 states and 22 US cities, from 1,126 photographers who publish their rates. New York runs $4,000; Texas runs $1,500. Charlottesville beats Manhattan.
Photography is the category where couples most often feel they are being quoted a number from thin air, and it is also the category where we have the most data: 1,126 US wedding photographers who publish what they charge.
The short answer is that the median entry price is $2,000, the middle half of the market runs $1,200 to $3,538, and where you are getting married moves that number more than anything else about your wedding.
By state
With the quartiles, which matter more than the median when you are budgeting:
| State | n | 25th | Median | 75th |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York | 96 | $1,888 | $4,000 | $6,900 |
| Virginia | 34 | $2,563 | $3,700 | $6,375 |
| Pennsylvania | 17 | $1,500 | $3,600 | $5,500 |
| Michigan | 16 | $1,625 | $3,345 | $4,975 |
| Tennessee | 46 | $1,996 | $2,950 | $3,800 |
| South Carolina | 24 | $1,438 | $2,800 | $3,713 |
| Massachusetts | 18 | $1,463 | $2,800 | $3,875 |
| Washington | 61 | $1,800 | $2,500 | $3,900 |
| Colorado | 18 | $975 | $2,300 | $4,450 |
| Arizona | 50 | $813 | $2,250 | $3,500 |
| Ohio | 49 | $1,500 | $2,100 | $3,400 |
| Georgia | 65 | $1,200 | $1,995 | $3,000 |
| Florida | 116 | $1,000 | $1,995 | $2,900 |
| California | 91 | $1,000 | $1,900 | $3,160 |
| North Carolina | 49 | $1,200 | $1,800 | $3,750 |
| Texas | 192 | $700 | $1,500 | $2,713 |
| Illinois | 24 | $918 | $1,295 | $2,625 |
Virginia is the surprise near the top. It has the highest 25th percentile of any state at $2,563 — meaning Virginia has almost no cheap end. Even the bottom quarter of Virginian photographers starts above the national median.
Texas is the opposite: 192 priced photographers, a 25th percentile of $700, and a 75th percentile below New York's median. It is the deepest and cheapest large market in our data.
By city
State averages hide a lot. Here are the 22 US cities where at least ten photographers publish prices.
Three things stand out.
Charlottesville, Virginia is the most expensive city in our data, at $6,700 — above Brooklyn and above Manhattan. That is not a fluke of one studio; it is a wedding destination with a concentrated luxury market serving the Virginia wine country, and it explains why Virginia's statewide 25th percentile is so high. The sample is only ten photographers, though, so treat it as directional.
Brooklyn is dearer than Manhattan — $4,600 against $4,000. Photographers increasingly live and market from Brooklyn while shooting weddings across the whole city, so the Brooklyn cohort skews toward the established end.
Nashville at $3,500 is the highest non-coastal city by a wide margin, ahead of Seattle and Phoenix, and roughly triple Dallas. It has become a destination wedding market, and its photographer prices have followed.
The California problem
San Francisco at $1,650 and Los Angeles at $1,499 are the two results in this piece we would least like to see quoted without context. Both sit below Houston. That is almost certainly wrong as a description of those markets.
Here is what we think is happening. Our data only sees photographers who publish a starting price. In most of the country that is a broad cross-section. In Los Angeles and San Francisco it is not: the established end of those markets almost universally says "enquire for pricing", while the photographers who do publish rates tend to be competing on volume and accessibility.
So the Californian figures measure the floor of a market whose middle is invisible to us, and the floor is genuinely low — there really are $1,500 wedding photographers in Los Angeles. It is just not what most couples marrying in Los Angeles will pay.
We are publishing the number with the warning rather than suppressing it, because the alternative is a table with a conspicuous hole in it. But if you are budgeting for a Californian wedding, use the 75th percentile — $3,160 statewide — as your planning figure, not the median.
What moves a photographer's price
Beyond geography, the pattern in the data is straightforward.
Coverage hours are the main lever inside any one photographer's packages. Entry packages typically cover six hours; the jump to eight or ten is where the second tier of pricing sits.
A second shooter is the most common single add-on and is rarely in the entry price. Budget for it separately if you want getting-ready coverage of two people in two places.
Album and print credits are usually excluded at entry level. The published starting price is nearly always digital files only.
This is why we report entry prices rather than "average packages": the entry price is the one number that is defined consistently across photographers. Everything above it is a different bundle at every studio.
Method
One row per photographer, carrying the lowest listed base price across their published packages. US photographers matched to a city and state. State cells require at least 15 photographers; city cells at least 10. Sample sizes are printed beside every figure.
The population is photographers who publish prices. Those who quote privately are, on the whole, dearer — so every figure here is a conservative reading, and most conservative in the largest coastal markets.
Rebuilt quarterly from the same query. Free to reproduce with attribution under CC BY 4.0. Cite as: Everly, "The Everly Wedding Price Index", September 2026.
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