A crew day rate is a quote. Your budget needs the cost, and they are not the same number

The quote you receive is a labour price for a working day of an agreed length, on the days you book. It is not a price for the position, and it is not a price for the week. Two misreadings follow from treating it as either. The first is budgeting the crew line as rate times shoot days, which omits prep, travel and wrap entirely. The second is assuming the rate absorbs whatever the day turns into — that a twelve-hour call on a rate agreed for a shorter day costs the same. It does not, and the difference arrives on a timecard you will see weeks later. Knowing which elements sit inside the quote and which sit outside it is the whole job.

Crew are hired on day rates or on weekly rates, and the two are not interchangeable. A weekly rate buys a defined number of working days, and dividing it to produce a day rate removes the discount the production was given for booking continuity — which is exactly why the crew member quoted a week in the first place. More importantly, both rates are quoted against an assumed length of day. Whether that assumption is ten hours, twelve, or something set by an agreement, it is the hinge of the whole deal: the same rate against a shorter day is a materially more expensive hire, and the same rate against a longer day is a materially cheaper one. A rate recorded in a budget without the day length it assumes is an incomplete figure, and it will be read wrong by whoever inherits the file.

This is the part productions consistently treat as a contingency when it is in fact a consequence. Overtime, premium hours, short turnaround between wrap and the next call, meal penalties where an agreement provides for them — none of these are random. They are the direct result of planning decisions: a scene moved to a night, a pickup day scheduled on a weekend, a company move that eats two hours, a sixth day added to hit a delivery date. Each of those choices has a payroll price, and that price is set when the decision is made, not when the timecards arrive. A budget whose crew line does not move when the shooting schedule moves is not a stable budget — it is a wrong one that will correct itself in the cost report, in the wrong direction.

Many crew members bring their own tools: a sound mixer's bag, a script supervisor's rig, a gaffer's personal kit, a DIT's hardware and licences. That equipment is normally charged as a kit fee or box rental, quoted per day or per week, separate from the labour rate. Keeping it separate matters for three reasons. It is usually treated differently from wages for tax and fringe purposes, so folding it into the rate quietly inflates everything calculated on gross wages. It belongs to the equipment side of the budget, where it can be compared against the cost of renting the same gear. And it does not scale with the day the way labour does — a long day costs more in overtime, not more in kit. Productions that negotiate a single blended figure lose all three distinctions at once.

The crew line is a rate multiplied by a number of days, and the number of days is almost never the number of shoot days. Heads of department prep for days or weeks before the first call: the production designer and the gaffer early, the first AD through the whole schedule, the script supervisor from the final draft onwards. Travel days to and from a location are usually paid, often at a reduced rate agreed in advance. Wrap and return of equipment takes time after the last shot. Each of those blocks is visible in the shooting schedule, which is precisely why the day count should be read from the schedule rather than estimated. Estimating it is how a department is budgeted at twenty days and invoiced at twenty-nine.

In most territories where crews work regularly, some form of collective agreement sets minimum rates by position — union agreements in North America and the UK, industry-wide collective agreements in continental Europe. In France, for instance, rates for film and television technicians sit above floors fixed by branch collective agreements and revised by periodic amendments, with adjusted floors for lower-budget features; Soldum checks engagements against those French minimums, which matters if you shoot in France or co-produce there. Wherever you are, the principle is the same and so is the limit: a floor tells you what you cannot pay below, never what a position costs. On in-demand roles, market rates sit well above the floor, and the gap widens whenever several productions are crewing in the same window. Budgeting an entire crew at the floor produces a plan that is roughly right on junior positions and badly short on heads of department — the ones carrying the largest numbers.

Turning rates into a crew budget means carrying every layer separately and keeping each one attached to the thing that actually drives it. The order below is the order in which the layers stack, and the right-hand column is the point: the difficulty is never knowing that these costs exist, it is keeping them current while the schedule is still moving. A spreadsheet knows the rates, because someone typed them once. It does not know that two days moved to nights last Thursday.

In Soldum, crew engagements are attached to the days of the shooting schedule rather than typed into a separate sheet. The number of paid days comes from the plan — prep, travel and wrap included — and the wage total and its associated charges are recalculated every time the schedule changes. Rates entered are checked against the collective minimums for French film and television production, so an engagement below the floor surfaces before the contract instead of after payroll. The resulting figure feeds the budget alongside the rest of the production. Full disclosure: Soldum publishes one of the solutions described on this page. What no tool decides for you: which agreement governs the hire, how an unusual position should be classified, what a head of department is worth in a crowded window, or anything your production lawyer and payroll provider are there to confirm. The value is recalculation and early warning, not legal advice.