Storyboard Cost Per Frame — UK 2026 Guide

Expect to pay roughly £8 to £80 per storyboard frame in 2026, depending on finish and the artist's experience. Rough black-and-white thumbnails sit at the bottom of that range; tonal or full-colour presentation frames sit at the top. But for commercial work the per-frame number is the wrong unit to budget against — professional boards are almost always priced by the day or by the project, and the per-frame figure is something you back-calculate afterwards as a sanity check.

Here is what the per-frame numbers actually are, where they come from, and why the day rate is the figure that should be in your budget.

Per-frame rates in 2026

Per-frame pricing scales with two things: how finished the frame is, and how senior the artist is. The international benchmarks from Vox Illustration put entry-level work at roughly $10 to $25 per frame and professional or studio-level work at $40 to $100+ per frame. Converted and adjusted for the UK commercial market in 2026, that maps to the following ranges.

The jump from line to colour is the single biggest driver. A clean black-and-white shooting frame and a full-colour pitch frame can be the same composition, but the colour version takes three to four times as long to produce, and the price reflects that. The style decision is covered in more depth in the storyboard styles guide.

Why commercial boards are rarely priced per frame

The per-frame model breaks down on real commercial work because the value is in the thinking, not the drawing count. Three reasons it is the wrong unit for a TVC, a brand film or a music video:

• The hard frames take longest and look identical on an invoice. A complex VFX-handover frame with a camera move can take an hour; a static product end-card takes ten minutes. A flat per-frame rate either overcharges the easy ones or undercharges the hard ones.
• Revisions are where the time goes. A board that is right in one pass and a board that takes three rounds of director notes can have the same final frame count and very different real costs. Per-frame pricing has nowhere to put that.
• Pre-production thinking is unbilled in a per-frame model. A senior boarder reads the script, solves the staging, and spots the problems before the shoot. That work produces no extra frames but is most of the value.

This is why UK freelancers and the agencies who hire them work to day rates and project fees. The YunoJuno freelance benchmarks and the wider UK rates guide both price the work by time, not by panel.

How to back-calculate a per-frame figure from a day rate

If you want a per-frame number for budgeting, derive it from the day rate and the realistic frame throughput. A mid-to-senior UK boarder produces roughly 8 to 15 clean black-and-white shooting frames in a working day, more for rough thumbnails, fewer for full-colour.

At a day rate of around £450 to £550, that maths out as follows:

• Rough thumbnails, ~20 per day: roughly £22 to £28 per frame.
• Clean B&W shooting frames, ~12 per day: roughly £38 to £46 per frame.
• Full-colour presentation frames, ~5 per day: roughly £90 to £110 per frame.

The numbers land inside the per-frame table above, which is the point: the day rate and the per-frame figure describe the same work from two directions. The day rate is just the honest one, because it prices the thinking and the revisions, not only the visible output.

What a full commercial storyboard costs

For a complete commercial board, the figure that matters is the project total, not the per-frame rate. Marketplace data from Fiverr puts a commercial storyboard at roughly $1,500 to $5,000 in 2026, which aligns with UK project fees once you account for senior, brand-grade work.

A rough guide to the total, by deliverable:

The full breakdown by project type is in the budget-by-deliverable guide, and the choice between booking a day rate or agreeing a fixed fee is covered in day rate vs project fee.

What pushes the per-frame cost up

Four factors move a frame toward the top of its range or beyond.

• Colour and finish. As above — the biggest single lever.
• Turnaround. Same-day or weekend work carries a rush uplift, typically 40 to 100 percent, covered in the rush-fees guide.
• Likeness and brand accuracy. Frames that have to show a recognisable talent, a specific vehicle, or exact brand assets take longer and cost more. A Bentley hero frame or a recognisable athlete in a Premier League board is not a generic figure in a box.
• Usage and licensing. Boards used only internally for the shoot are priced differently from frames that appear in a published pitch or get reused as key art.

The short version for a budget line

Put a project fee in the budget, not a per-frame rate. If procurement needs a per-frame figure, use £20 to £40 for clean black-and-white shooting frames and £55 to £120 for full-colour presentation frames, and state the finish you are pricing. Then sense-check the total against the deliverable table above. If a quote comes in far below those ranges, it is usually rough thumbnails or AI-assisted output rather than shootable, brand-grade boards — worth reading the AI in storyboarding guide before you compare those quotes like for like.

For Seb's own rates and what a typical commission includes, see the rates page.