Makeup Artist Price List Template: Build Bridal Rates With AI

Work from your hourly target, not a template. Price each service as its minutes multiplied by that target plus consumables, rounded up, then add separate lines for the on-site fee, travel beyond a free radius and early starts. Let AI do the arithmetic and layout, and check every total by hand before clients see it.

Template sites give you a layout and leave the numbers blank, which is the hard part. A price list built from your own time and costs also survives the questions that matter: why the bride costs more than a bridesmaid, why a 5 a.m. start carries a premium, and what happens when the venue is 25 miles away. Every figure below is illustrative, so swap in your own. I'm deliberately not quoting market rates, because they vary too much with place and experience for any number I gave you to hold.

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Start from an hourly target, not a template

A price is a promise to be paid for a certain amount of time, so the first number on the card isn't a price at all. It is your hourly target for working time, and it comes from the income you need, not from what other artists charge.

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Say a makeup artist needs $42,000 a year before tax and spends $6,000 a year on insurance, kit replenishment, software and training. That is $48,000 to earn. Now count the hours that actually earn money. Travelling, answering enquiries, trials that don't convert and washing brushes don't, so a week with 17 billable hours across 47 working weeks gives about 800. Dividing $48,000 by 800 gives $60 an hour. Be honest about the billable hours, because it is the number people overestimate, and an overestimate quietly lowers every price on the card.

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Where does AI come in? Not here. It will happily suggest a rate, but it knows nothing about your costs, and the limits of AI pricing research explain why. Give the assistant your target and let it do the arithmetic. A sense-check against a handful of other artists' cards is worth ten minutes, done by you, with the cards open in front of you. For a similar build in a neighbouring trade, a salon pricing calculator built from real costs follows the same logic.

Kit cost per face: a quick sum from your receipts

Consumables go on top of the time cost. Work them out per face from what you actually buy, using the number of faces each product really covers rather than the number the label suggests, because you waste some on palettes and swatches.

Redo the table whenever a supplier raises prices. If you paste a list of receipts into an assistant it can recompute the divisions quickly, but check two of them yourself, because a slipped decimal turns $0.38 into $3.80 without looking odd.

Per-face prices from minutes: the formula and the table

The formula is the same for every service: minutes divided by 60, times your hourly target, plus consumables, rounded up to the next $5. Rounding up keeps the card tidy and leaves a little margin. The minutes should be the real time in the chair, so time five recent clients and use the average.

The lesson row is marked "first pass" on purpose. It will be wrong, for a reason that a later section finds. This is how the same formula looks in a spreadsheet, with your hourly target in H1:

A: Service   B: Minutes   C: Consumables   D: Time cost   E: Raw price   F: Card price
D2:  =B2/60*$H$1
E2:  =D2+C2
F2:  =CEILING(E2,5)          rounds up to the next 5
H1:  60                      your hourly target

On-site fee, travel and early starts: three add-ons priced apart

Keep the add-ons off the per-face prices. Mixing them in makes the card impossible to explain and impossible to adjust when a party changes size.

• On-site fee: $70. It covers 30 minutes of setting up and packing down and about 40 minutes of travel inside the free radius, so 70 minutes at $60 an hour. Calling travel "free" inside the radius doesn't make it free to you, because you still spend the time. This fee is where you recover it.
• Travel beyond the free radius: $1.50 a mile, both ways. With a free radius of 10 miles (16 km), a venue 22 miles away is charged on 12 miles each way, so 12 x 2 x $1.50 = $36. Start the per-mile figure from your own running costs per mile (fuel, servicing, wear) and add a margin for the time on the road, rather than from a number you saw on someone else's card.
• Early start: arrival before 7:00 a.m. adds $40, before 5:30 a.m. adds $80. The tiers don't stack: only the earliest one that applies is charged. The premium prices what an early start costs you, the sleep and the morning you can't sell twice. The two figures are placeholders for your own judgement.

In a spreadsheet the tiers are one formula, so they can't stack by accident (the cell "arrival" holds the arrival time):

Travel:  =MAX(0, miles-10)*2*1.5
Early:   =IF(arrival<TIME(5,30,0), 80, IF(arrival<TIME(7,0,0), 40, 0))

Two further lines complete the card. A second artist for large parties is $65, which covers their setup, pack-down and travel, because the faces they do are priced like any other. A non-wedding party has a minimum of three faces. Both are choices, and the point of writing the logic down is that you can defend each one.

A bridal party of eight, quoted two ways

Here is the booking that tests the card. The party is a bride, four bridesmaids, two mothers and a junior aged eight, at a venue 22 miles from the artist's base. Photos are at 12:00, so everyone must be finished by 11:30. The faces take 75 + (4 x 45) + (2 x 45) + 20 = 365 minutes, or just over six hours.

Working backwards, with one artist: 11:30 minus 365 minutes is a 5:25 start, 15 minutes of setup before that puts arrival at 5:10, and 40 minutes of driving means leaving home at 4:30. That arrival is before 5:30, so the $80 tier applies. With two artists, the lead does the bride, both mothers and the junior (185 minutes) and the assistant does the four bridesmaids (180 minutes). They can start at 8:25 and 8:30, arrive after 8:00, and no premium applies.

Now the artist's side, using an assumed assistant wage of $35 an hour (illustrative). The eight faces use $30 of consumables ($4 each, $2 for the junior). In option A the artist nets $591 minus $30, so $561, over 7 hours 55 minutes from leaving home to getting back: about $70.90 for every hour spent. In option B the lead nets $576 minus the assistant's pay of about $169 (4.83 hours at $35) and the $30 of consumables, so $377, over 4 hours 55 minutes: about $76.70 an hour, with the afternoon free for another booking.

So option B is $15 cheaper for the couple, starts the bridal party's day three hours later, and pays the lead more per hour but less in total, while option A keeps $184 more in take-home on the day. Neither is wrong. What the card has done is turn a feeling ("a 5 a.m. start is too early") into two numbers that the couple and the artist can compare. Give both quotes when the schedule is tight, and let the couple choose.

Prompts that build and quote the card, and the slips to catch

An assistant is good at the repetitive sums and the layout, and poor at silently following your rules. Give it your inputs and ask it to show its working. Don't paste client names or photos: the card needs none of them.

I'm a freelance makeup artist. Build a price table from my inputs and show the working.
Hourly target: $60. Round every price up to the next $5.
Price = minutes / 60 x hourly target + consumables.
Services (minutes, consumables): Bride 75, $4; Bridesmaid, mother or guest 45, $4; Junior under 12 20, $2; Bridal trial 90, $4; Makeup lesson 90, $3; Party face 40, $4.
Add-ons: on-site fee $70; travel beyond 10 miles $1.50 per mile both ways; early start (arrival before 7:00 a.m. $40, before 5:30 a.m. $80); second artist $65.
Output a table with the raw price and the card price, then list any assumptions you made.

An illustrative answer, with the slip in it:

Bride: 75/60 x 60 = $75 + $4 = $79, card price $80. Bridesmaid: $49, card price $50. Junior: $22, card price $25. Trial: $94, card price $95. Lesson: $93, card price $95. Party face: $44, card price $45. Early start: arrival before 7:00 a.m. is $40, plus the before 5:30 a.m. tier of $80, so a 5 a.m. arrival is $120 in total. Assumption: prices exclude tax.

Every service line is right, and the early-start line is wrong. The assistant stacked the tiers, giving $120 where the card says $80. The fix is a sentence in the prompt, "the tiers don't stack; only the earliest applicable tier is charged", and a habit of recomputing the odd line by hand. The assumption about tax is a good one to keep: whether your prices must include tax is a question for your accountant.

The second prompt turns the card into a quote.

Using only the rate card below, write a quote for this party and show every line. Do not add discounts or extras that aren't on the card. If something is missing, ask me.

RATE CARD
[paste the one-page card]

PARTY: bride, 4 bridesmaids, 2 mothers, 1 junior (age 8). Venue 22 miles from my base. Photos at 12:00, so everyone must be finished by 11:30. One artist.

An illustrative answer lists the faces at $405, the on-site fee at $70 and travel at $36, and then adds "bridal party discount, 10%: minus $40.50". No such discount is on the card, so it goes. The assistant also left out the early-start premium, because the prompt never asked it to work out the start time. The repair is to add "work out the start time backwards from the finish time using the minutes on the card, then apply the early-start tier". For wording the reply that carries the quote, how wedding suppliers reply to enquiries in minutes with AI has templates, and seven ChatGPT prompts for makeup artists covers timelines and kit lists.

Stress-testing the card against three past bookings

Before the card goes live, test it on bookings you've already done. For each one, apply the card, subtract consumables, and divide by elapsed time from leaving home to getting back, not by minutes in the chair. Compare the result with your target of $60.

The lesson failed for a reason the formula could never see: it was fed 90 minutes, and the real booking takes two hours once you count preparing the face chart and resetting the room. The fix is to feed it 120 minutes: $120 + $3 = $123, rounded up to $125, which gives $122 net over two hours, or $61 an hour. The party of five is within a few per cent of target, so I'd leave it and watch it. If many bookings look like this, raise the party face by $5.

You can ask an assistant to run this test if you paste in the card and three bookings, with times left, arrived, started, finished and got home. Tell it to divide by elapsed hours and to show each step. Left alone, it tends to divide by working minutes, which flatters every line.

Deposits, balance dates and cancellation wording

A deposit protects a date, so size it by what an empty Saturday would cost you. The party above is $591, and 30% is $177. The balance falls due a week before. Beyond the amount, write the rules once, in plain words, and have your insurer or a solicitor look at them, because rules on deposits and cancellation fees vary. This is an example of the shape, not legal advice:

BOOKING TERMS (example wording, to be checked before use)
1. A 30% deposit secures your date. The balance is due 7 days before.
2. If you cancel more than 60 days before, [your refund rule here]. Inside 30 days, [your rule here].
3. If I am ill, I will arrange a suitably experienced replacement or return your deposit in full.
4. The quote covers the people named. Extra people are added at the card price if time allows.
5. Please tell me about allergies and skin conditions when you book, and send the final head count 14 days before.
6. Arrival times are agreed in writing. A late start can shorten appointments, because I can't overrun into the next person's slot.

AI is good at drafting this in friendly language and at asking questions you haven't thought of, such as what happens if the bride's schedule slips by an hour. It is not good at knowing what your insurer requires or what your local rules say, so the square-bracket lines stay yours to fill in. Cutting salon no-shows with AI reminders and deposits shows how reminders reduce the cancellations these terms are for.

The finished rate card, one page

Once the numbers hold, the card is only layout. Put prices at the top and the add-ons underneath, show minutes beside each service so the logic is visible, and keep the formulas out of sight. Canva's Free plan is plenty for one page; this is a text version you can paste into any design tool or document:

BRIDAL AND PARTY RATES   (valid from [date])

Bride (75 min)                                   $80
Bridal trial (90 min, at the studio)             $95
Bridesmaid, mother or guest (45 min)             $50 each
Junior, under 12 (20 min)                        $25
Makeup lesson (2 hours including chart)          $125
Party face (40 min), minimum 3 faces             $45 each

ON LOCATION
On-site fee per booking                          $70
Travel: free within 10 miles (16 km); beyond that $1.50 per mile, both ways
Early start: arrival before 7:00 a.m. +$40; before 5:30 a.m. +$80 (not added together)
Second artist for large parties                  $65

DEPOSIT 30% to secure your date. Balance 7 days before. Full terms on request.

Ask an assistant for three layout variations if you like, and pick the one that is easiest to read on a phone, because most enquiries are opened there. Date the card, and replace it rather than editing old copies, so nobody quotes last year's prices at you.

What building it costs, and how the totals scale

The build itself is cheap. A spreadsheet is free, Canva's Free plan is $0 a year, and the AI work usually fits inside the free tier of the major assistants. The real cost is your time: about three hours for the first build and an hour each quarter to re-time services and refresh kit costs. At your own $60 target, the first build is worth $180 of your time. A paid assistant plan at about $20 a month only earns its place if you are quoting dozens of parties a month.

The totals the card produces scale in a predictable way, which makes a handy cheap, mid and high view for a bridal enquiry. All of these use the corrected card:

The hidden costs sit outside the card: unpaid enquiry time, trials that don't book, kit that goes out of date, insurance, and cancellations. The card covers them only through the hourly target, which is why that first number matters. To cut the time of keeping it current, keep the spreadsheet as the single source, regenerate the one-page card from it each quarter, and let an assistant check that the two match.

Seven ways a bridal rate card quietly loses money

• Stacked or missing early-start tiers. It shows up as a quote that is $40 too high or $80 too low. The fix is the single IF formula and a hand check.
• Unpaid travel inside the free radius. It shows up as short bookings that barely earn. The fix is an on-site fee that includes average travel time.
• Prep and reset time left out. It shows up in lessons and trials that feel busy but pay below target. The fix is timing the whole booking, not just the time in the chair.
• Discounts promised in messages. A "friend rate" typed into a DM isn't on the card, so it never gets costed. Decide discounts once, in writing, or have none.
• A deposit too small to matter. It shows up when a date is cancelled at short notice and you can't resell it. Size the deposit to the cost of an empty day.
• Last year's kit costs. It shows up as a slowly shrinking margin. Redo the kit table each quarter.
• A package price that hides its parts. It shows up when a bridesmaid drops out and you can't explain the new total. Show the per-person prices and quote the total beneath them.

None of this needs a clever tool. It needs an hourly target you believe in, a formula you can read, and a card that says the same thing as the quote you send.

Questions makeup artists ask about their price list

Should I show per-person prices or one package price?

Show per-person prices on the card and quote a package total for each party. Per-person prices let you adjust when guest numbers change, and a single total feels simpler to the client. Avoid hiding the add-ons inside a package, because then you can't explain the total when someone drops a bridesmaid or the start time moves.

How do I set an hourly target without knowing market rates?

Work backwards from the income you need. Add your business costs, then divide by the billable hours you can realistically work in a year, which is far fewer than the hours you are awake. Test the result against a handful of other artists' cards afterwards. The first number is yours, and the comparison is only a sense-check.

Can AI set my prices for me?

It can do the arithmetic and draft the layout, but it can't know your costs, your market or your confidence. It also slips on sums, for example by adding early-start tiers together. Give it your inputs and the formula, ask it to show its working, and recompute a few lines by hand before a client sees the card.

Is a deposit enough, or do I need a written agreement?

A deposit secures a date, but a short written agreement covering the balance date, the cancellation steps and what happens if you are ill protects both sides. AI can draft it, but your insurer or a solicitor should check the wording, because rules on deposits and cancellation fees vary from place to place.

Further reads

• How Much to Charge as a DJ: Wedding, Party and Corporate Packages — The same per-booking method for another wedding supplier.
• Florist Wedding Quote Template: Price Stems, Labour and Hire With AI — A quote template where materials and labour are priced apart.
• How Much to Charge for Hair Extensions: Fitting, Hair and Aftercare — Pricing a beauty service with several parts and add-ons.
• How to Price Photography Packages: A Cost-per-Shoot Model With AI — A cost-per-shoot model you can borrow for packages.
• DJ Contract Template: Deposit, Overtime and Cancellation Terms With AI — Deposit, overtime and cancellation wording from another trade.
• Can AI Qualify Wedding Leads by Date, Budget and Guest Count? — Sort enquiries by date, budget and guest count before quoting.
• How to Write a Salon Service Menu and Price List With AI — Laying out a service menu once the numbers are settled.
• Bridal Shop Marketing: Appointment Slots and Real-Bride Posts With AI — Find the appointment slots that stay empty, invite the right brides with AI drafts, and post real-bride content only with consent you can show.
• How to Price Tattoos: A Rate Card for Hourly, Piece and Flash Work — Cost per chair hour, a minimum charge, a piece grid, flash tiers and deposit credit, then a back-test against twelve past bookings.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Canva pricing page (Free plan, checked 28 October 2026) and the list prices of individual ChatGPT and Claude plans. Every other figure is an illustrative worked example, not a market rate or a vendor price.