Subtitle translation rates

A subtitler has a client. Often the client is an agency or a vendor, and the vendor has its own client, such as a broadcaster or a streaming service. Each step keeps a share. The price at the top is higher than the pay at the bottom.

Two public cases show the gap.

• Arte, 2026. A report says the vendor TransPerfect billed the broadcaster Arte EUR 10 per minute for human translation. The translators received EUR 4 to 5 of it. Source: Next.ink.
• Netflix, 2021 and now. The Netflix rate card allows vendors to bill up to USD 13.00 per video minute for Korean audio into English. In 2021, Rest of World wrote that only a fraction of that reaches the translator, and gave no figure. An ATAA blog post put the translator share at about $5, and named no source for it. Sources: Netflix rate card, Rest of World, ATAA blog.

This guide keeps the two apart. The translator pay tables show what subtitlers receive. The client price tables show what buyers pay. Do not compare the two row by row, and do not add them.

How we show the numbers

• Each number keeps its original currency and unit. We did not convert anything.
• A "$" with no currency code on the source page stays "$". It is probably US dollars, but the page does not say.
• We did not average numbers from different sources. A range comes from one source, or it shows the lowest and highest of several named sources.
• "Old" means the data is more than three years old, from before 2023.10.13. Check old numbers before you use them.
• Many price pages show no date. For those, the year is the year we read the page: 2026.

We found no survey of per-minute pay for subtitlers. The numbers below are press reports about one client, a survey of French translators, and minimum rates that a French translators' group recommends. They do not describe the whole market.

The ATAA and SNAC minimums apply to orders from 2025.04.01. They assume that the company supplies a conforming script. They leave out spotting, simulation, and timing. The groups say those tasks are technical work that the company should pay as wages. The minimums are recommendations, not law.

Income, not rates: the AVTE survey (old)

AVTE, the European federation of audiovisual translators, ran a survey called 2022-2023. That puts the data before 2023.10, so it is old. 1,966 translators from 35 European countries answered. 95% were freelancers. AVTE did not publish per-minute rates. It compared income with each country's median wage.

• 61% earned the median wage of their country or less. 36.63% earned less than the median.
• 5.94% earned three times the median wage or more.
• Education made no significant difference to income. Income did not rise after the first five years of experience.
• Four things did: the number of clients, how often the translator works for end clients, working mainly for international clients, and how often the translator negotiates the rate.

Source: AVTE survey. AVTE lists calculators for several countries on its calculators page.

These are prices on public price lists and rate cards. A client pays them. The translator receives less. Many lists say "from", so a real quote can be higher.

Translated subtitles, per video minute

Rev's FAQ gives a range of $6.99 to $15.99. That does not match the lowest price on its price list, $6.49. See the Rev FAQ.

Japan: client price guides

We found no public price list from a Japanese subtitling company. The CrowdWorks guide gives market estimates per video of 10 minutes or less, updated 2026.01.12. For subtitle translation from a foreign language into Japanese, the estimate is JPY 15,000 to 50,000. From Japanese into a foreign language, it is JPY 25,000 to 100,000.

The Netflix rate card for its vendors

Netflix publishes a rate card for its preferred fulfillment partners, the vendors that deliver subtitles to Netflix for its content partners. The rates are "do not exceed" ceilings, in USD per video minute: the most a vendor may bill. Netflix says it re-evaluates them each year. The page shows no date. This is a client price: the vendor keeps a share before the translator is paid.

• These rates apply to new timed text only. The card allows them when no timed text exists, or when the existing text is too poor to use.
• The card says there may be a runtime minimum of 10 minutes for the per-minute rates.
• Netflix deems timed text that comes only from machine translation or machine origination as rejected.
• We checked 16 language pairs against a copy of the 2016.12 card. All 16 have the same price today. One other pair we checked, Japanese into Japanese, rose from 13.00 to 14.00. Sources: Netflix rate card, 2016 copy of the card.

Same-language captions, SDH, and timing

Language pair

Japanese is at the top of the Netflix, Rev, and 3Play lists. The Netflix card allows up to USD 30.00 per minute for English audio into Japanese and USD 8.00 into Latin American Spanish. Rev charges $15.99 for Japanese and Korean and $6.49 for Spanish. 3Play puts Japanese alone in its top tier.

The direction matters, and it does not work the same way everywhere. The Netflix card allows USD 12.00 for Latin American Spanish into English and USD 8.00 for English into Latin American Spanish. Happy Scribe lists Spanish into English at EUR 6.75 and English into Spanish at EUR 7.50.

Script or template, or audio only

A translator who gets a finished, timed script does less work than one who starts from audio. The price lists show it. Absolute Translations charges GBP 9 per minute to build a file from the client's own translation, and GBP 16 for translated subtitling. The ATAA and SNAC minimums leave out spotting and timing. The Netflix card applies its origination rate only when no usable timed text exists.

Client type

The AVTE survey (old) asked who the translators work for. Of those who never work for end clients, 67% earned the median wage of their country or less. Of those who always do, 45% did. Of those who work mainly for international intermediaries, 52% did. For those who work mainly for local intermediaries, it was 67%.

The AVTE data covers income, not a rate for one job. It shows which kind of client goes with a higher income. Source: AVTE survey.

Region

We found translator pay for France, the Netherlands, and Brazil, and a European survey of income. We found no rates for North America, the UK, or Asia.

Cost of living changes what a rate means. AVTE counted how many minutes a translator must translate to cover the basic household costs of one adult. The average is 245 minutes a month. In Greece, Portugal, and Turkey it is more than 350 minutes. AVTE adds that the gap between countries does not exactly match the cost of living.

Content and difficulty

No source gives a surcharge for technical text, songs, or many speakers. The sources do show that the work per minute changes. In a 2019 report, a Dutch subtitler said a 45-minute episode takes about 8 hours to subtitle in Dutch. Translating an English episode of the same length into Dutch takes about 15 hours. Source: NOS.

AI post-editing

See AI and post-editing.

The same job gives a different total in each unit. Keep every rate in the unit its source used. Do not convert a rate from one unit to another unless you know the numbers behind it.

• Per video minute. The unit on the Netflix card and on most price lists above. It does not depend on how many subtitles or words the minute holds.
• Per subtitle. The unit in France. The ATAA and SNAC minimum and the 2018 survey both use it.
• Per word. 3Play lists the translation vendor Gengo at $0.07 per source word for standard translation and $0.14 for advanced. These are prices for general translation. 3Play turns them into $10.50 and $21.00 per minute, and it assumes 150 words per minute. We found no per-word price made for subtitle work.
• Per hour. We found no current hourly rate that is specific to subtitling.
• Per video. The CrowdWorks guide in Japan quotes a price for a video of 10 minutes or less.

A conversion needs an assumption about the file. One translator turned an offer of EUR 16 per minute into about EUR 0.88 per subtitle because she assumed 18 subtitles per minute. Your file may have more or fewer. Count the real numbers before you agree to a rate. The two free tools below do this in your browser. The calculators from AVTE and SUBTLE calculator turn an offered rate into a monthly take-home wage.

These are client-side terms. We found no source on rush or difficulty fees that a translator receives.

Unpaid work also changes the real rate. In the 2018 French survey, 43% of subtitlers said that they were never paid for conformation, which is updating the subtitles after the picture changes. AVTE reports an average of 3 hours 45 minutes a week of work that is not translation, and 1 hour 56 minutes a week of unpaid work for the client. See SCAM, ATAA, SNAC survey and AVTE survey.

We found no survey of post-editing rates for subtitles. We found one pay report, one case study, one study of effort, and a rule from Netflix.

• Pay report, 2026. The vendor for Arte pays EUR 2 to 2.5 per minute when an AI system writes the first draft. Before, the translator received EUR 4 to 5. The translators say post-editing saves them little time. The article is a short report on a Mediapart story. Source: Next.ink.
• Case study, undated. A localization company took on a project with machine-translated subtitles from English into Slovak. It paid translators per minute of content, not per hour. One episode took 4 to 6 hours to correct, and that did not include full retiming. The project did not work for several freelancers. The source gives no rates. Source: Presto.
• Effort study, 2020. Old. Researchers measured how 12 professional subtitlers worked with and without machine translation, using task time and keystrokes. They name segmentation and timing as important issues. Source: Koponen et al..
• Netflix rule. Timed text that comes only from machine translation or origination is deemed rejected. Source: Netflix rate card.
• Price lists. Happy Scribe sells extra AI subtitle minutes at $0.20 per minute on its plans. Its human subtitle translation costs EUR 6.75 to 7.50 per minute for four language pairs. These are two products, not a change in pay. Sources: Happy Scribe, Happy Scribe.

If a client offers a post-editing rate, ask four questions. What is the unit? Does it include timing? What did the client check on a test minute? How many hours did you spend on that minute?

No source sets one correct rate. Use the numbers above as context. Then work from your own costs.

• Decide the monthly income you need. Use the SUBTLE calculator or a country calculator from AVTE to find the rate that gives it.
• Ask what the unit means. A video minute can mean the runtime of the picture or the minutes that have speech.
• Ask what the price includes: the script, spotting, quality checks, rounds of changes, and conformation.
• Count the words and subtitles in the real file before you quote.
• Negotiate. In the AVTE survey, 78% of translators negotiated their rate only sometimes, rarely, or never. Those who negotiated more often were more often in the higher income bands.

Studios and agencies can do the same check from the other side. Count the minutes and words per language with the word count and quote tool, and compare the quote with the price lists above.

Some data does not exist in public, and some sites block automated reading. We list the gaps so that you can weigh the numbers above.

• No survey of per-minute pay for subtitle translators. The AVTE survey reports income, not rates. The public summary of the ATA compensation survey that we read (fifth edition, 2016) does not cover audiovisual work, and the full report is free only to ATA members.
• No sourced translator pay for translation from a template, for review and quality checks, for SDH, for spotting only, or for template creation.
• No translator pay for the pairs English into Spanish, German, Portuguese (Brazil), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), or Arabic, or for Spanish and Japanese into English. Client prices exist for all of them. The Netflix card has each one.
• No rates for translators in North America, the UK, or Asia. No split by agency, direct client, or marketplace with amounts.
• Upwork, Fiverr, and the ProZ forums block automated reading, so we used none of their numbers. A translator forum thread is also one person's account.
• Most of the translator pay sources are old. Only two are from 2025 or 2026. Most price pages show no date.

Rates change. Check the date of any rate before you use it. We checked every source on 2026.10.13.