How much does a video podcast cost to make in the UK?

By James Jones, founder of Granary Digital · 28 September 2026

Anything from about £60 an hour to more than £1,000 an episode. Those two numbers aren't measuring the same thing, which is why the question is so hard to answer from a search. At one end you rent a room and leave with raw files. At the other an agency hands you a finished show. Most prices sit somewhere between, and the cheapest-looking one often leaves the most work on your desk.

The market ranges below come from published rate cards we checked across the UK in September 2026. Our own prices are the ones on podcast.granary.digital, current since 1 September 2026, all +VAT.

What the market charges for each piece

Studio hire by the hour. The most competitive part of the London market sits at about £60–£120 an hour for a podcast room. Fully engineered 4K rooms at the top of the market reach about £170 an hour. Some rooms at the cheaper end are self-service, with nobody on the desk, so check what the hour includes before comparing.

Editing. Standard editing runs at £75–£150 an episode at market rates. Add-ons such as show notes, transcripts and artwork add a further £50–£150 an episode at market rates.

Full-service production. Agencies that record, edit and deliver a finished episode charge £350–£1,000 or more an episode on market rate cards.

Monthly retainers. Packages that bundle studio time and post-production run at £1,200–£3,500 a month at market rates.

Launch costs. Branding and cover artwork alone come in at £500–£2,000 at market rates. Hosting platforms typically charge £10–£24 a month.

What we charge, and what each price includes

• Solo, from £108+VAT an hour. The room, the kit and an engineer by the clock. Right for a solo host or a one-to-one where the editing happens elsewhere.
• Classic, £395+VAT per recorded episode. Up to 90 minutes of recording in the 4.5m by 4.5m podcast studio, three-camera video, the audio and video edit, thirty short-form cuts, an engineer and a producer, and files within five working days.
• Content in a Day, £1,395+VAT. One fully edited video podcast episode, ten retouched headshots and six captioned 30–60 second social cuts, for two people on camera, delivered within a week.
• The Launch, £2,495+VAT. Our end-to-end package for a show that doesn't exist yet.
• The Series Monthly, £1,195+VAT a month. One episode a month, on thirty days' notice.
• The Series Quarterly, £2,950+VAT a quarter. One recording day each quarter producing two episodes, eight a year.
• Publishing, £195+VAT an episode as an add-on to a recording, or £295+VAT an episode standalone with £450+VAT onboarding.

What happens between arriving and getting the files is set out step by step in what is in a produced episode, so we won't repeat it here.

Compare finished episode with finished episode

The hourly rate is the number people compare first, and it tells you the least. Say you book two hours at the Solo starting rate of £108+VAT an hour, which is £216+VAT, then pay an editor £150 at the top of the market range for standard editing. You're at about £366 before VAT, and you still have no clips, no producer, and your own evening spent working out which bits were good.

For £29 more, the Classic at £395+VAT adds a producer, a finished three-camera edit and thirty vertical, captioned clips. On a like-for-like basis, the market's full-service range is £350–£1,000 or more an episode, and a produced episode here sits near the bottom of it.

That's why we price the Classic per episode. Hourly hire isn't wrong, though. If your show is audio-first, you have your own editor and you want to record often, Solo is the right product, and we'll tell you so.

The costs nobody puts on the quote

• Your guest's time. A guest coming from London is giving you most of a day: about two hours by road off-peak, or 75 minutes on the fastest Waterloo to Havant trains and 15 minutes in a taxi. Be generous with it. A guest who arrives rushed gives a rushed interview.
• Your own time. Booking guests, writing questions and approving edits all land on the host, whoever does the production. It's the cost that decides whether a show is still going in six months.
• Clips. If they aren't in the price, somebody cuts them later, often a marketing team with other things to do. The Classic includes thirty. Content in a Day includes six.
• Artwork. £500–£2,000 at market rates for branding and cover art. You pay it once and it sits on every episode, so it's worth getting right.
• Hosting. £10–£24 a month typically, every month the show is live.

Two ways to spend less

The first-session offer takes 15% off a first booking, capped at £100, with the code FIRST. On a Classic episode that's £59.25 off the price before VAT. On Content in a Day it reaches the £100 cap.

The second costs nothing. Record in blocks rather than one episode at a time. Your own travel and preparation then happen once instead of every fortnight, which adds up over a season. How to plan that is in the first six episodes of a business podcast, and the full range of what we make in the room is on podcast production.

If you tell us the format and how often you want to publish, we'll price a season both ways, hourly and per episode, and say honestly which works out cheaper for you.

More from the Journal

• Planning the first six episodes of a business podcast
• YouTube is now the UK's most-used podcast app. What that changes for a business show
• Five generations, one message: what 4,067 people told me about being understood at work
• All Journal articles

The picture at the top of this article is an illustration generated to show the set-up. It is not a photograph of a client or of a real job.