How to price your art, from the first sale to the gallery

Why does pricing art feel so arbitrary?

Because nobody hands you a number. A gallery that represents an artist sets prices with them, from a record of what has already sold. Without a gallery you are setting the first price in that record yourself, and every later price will be read against it.

A price does not have to be right in some absolute sense. It has to be consistent, meaning the same kind of work costs the same wherever someone meets it, and defensible, meaning you can say in one sentence why this painting costs what it does.

How do you price art by size?

Pick a rate and multiply it by a measurement of the work. It is the method most artists use for a body of work in one medium, because it makes a series internally consistent: two paintings of the same size cost the same, and nobody has to ask why.

There are two versions, and they behave very differently.

• By area. Height times width, times a rate per square centimetre.
• By height plus width. Add the two sides, then multiply by a rate per centimetre. In the English-speaking world this is usually called the linear inch method, after the unit.

The rate should not be borrowed from a blog. Derive it from a sale you have already made. Say a 60 x 50 cm painting sold for €880.

Pricing by area makes small works very cheap and large works expensive quickly, because area grows faster than the sides do. Height plus width gives gentler steps, which usually suits an artist who works across many sizes and does not want the small pieces to be worth less than the evening they took. Neither is correct. Choose one, and use it for every work in the same medium.

The method is the same in kronor, złoty or pounds. Only the rate changes.

How do you price art by time and materials?

Add what the work cost to make and pay yourself for the hours. Artquest, the London artists' advice service, puts the direct sale price as the cost of making the work plus an artist's fee for the time it took, and counts in a share of studio rent and other running costs, not only paint and canvas.

1. Materials actually used in the work, not everything you bought.
2. A share of the studio: rent, heating, insurance, divided across the works you make in a year.
3. Your hours, at a rate you would accept for skilled work.

Thirty hours at €25, €120 in materials and €60 of studio costs comes to €930. That is your floor, the figure below which a sale costs you money. It is not necessarily the price. Time and materials tells you where not to go, rather than where to stop.

How do you find comparable prices for your art?

Look at what artists at your stage, working in a similar medium and size, are asking for in the kind of place you would sell. Artquest calls this benchmarking, and it is the check that stops a price from being out of step with the market in either direction.

Look at selling exhibitions that publish prices beside each work, price lists at degree shows and artist-run spaces, and the shops of artists whose careers look like yours. Compare like with like. An artist with two solo shows and a museum acquisition is not your comparison yet, and a hobby painter selling at a weekend market is not either.

An asking price is a hope. What sold, and for how much, is the evidence, and your own sales record is the only place you will reliably find it.

In practice most artists combine the three. Time and materials sets the floor. Comparables tell you whether the floor is near the market or far below it. A size rate then turns that decision into a consistent price across a whole series.

What does a gallery take, and how does that change your price?

There is no standard commission. Artquest notes that galleries often add between 33 and 100 per cent on top of the artist's price, which works out at between a quarter and a half of the final price. Half is common enough to be treated as a convention, and it is increasingly questioned: the artist Damien Davis, writing in Hyperallergic in 2025, argued that a 50/50 split should be weighed against what a gallery actually does for the artist.

Commission is the share of the sale price the gallery keeps. The practical rule is to quote one retail price, the price a buyer pays, with the commission already inside it. If you want €600 from a sale and the gallery takes half, the work is priced at €1,200.

That retail price then applies everywhere. Artquest puts it plainly: if a work sells for £1,000 in the gallery, it should sell for £1,000 everywhere, and selling more cheaply direct to a collector without commission is bad form. A collector who finds the same painting for less on your website stops trusting both prices, and the gallery stops trusting you. When you sell directly at the full retail price, the difference is not a windfall. It pays for the selling you did yourself.

It is sensible to set your prices as if a gallery commission exists even when you have no gallery. Otherwise the first gallery that takes you on will either double your prices overnight or halve your income.

Should your price include VAT?

Say clearly whether it does, every time. Rules on VAT for art differ between countries, and many treat an artist selling their own work differently from other sellers. In Sweden, for example, Skatteverket applies a 12 per cent rate to an artist's sale of their own artworks, and allows sales without VAT while the year's taxable turnover stays below 300,000 kronor.

This is not tax advice, and the figures change. Check with your own tax authority before the first sale, and write on every price list and consignment agreement whether the price is with or without VAT, so that the gallery's commission is calculated on the figure you both mean.

How and when should you raise your prices?

Raise them gradually, after something has changed, and never lower them. Artquest notes that it is much harder to lower a price than to raise it, and that a cut also lowers the value of the work your earlier buyers already own. Those buyers are the people most likely to buy again.

Good reasons to raise are the ones a buyer can see: a solo exhibition, a prize, a residency, press, a museum or public acquisition, or simply that work at the current price keeps selling. Artlogic, writing for galleries in 2026, advises tying increases to milestones like these and keeping them predictable rather than sudden.

If work is not selling, the price is rarely the only reason. Smaller works at your existing rate, works on paper, or an edition give a buyer a way in without undercutting the paintings.

How do you price editions against unique works?

A unique work is priced as itself. An edition, a set of identical works made from the same plate, screen, negative or mould and numbered in sequence, is priced per print, lower than a unique work of similar size, and the size of the edition affects the figure: ten prints are scarcer than a hundred.

A common practice, which Artquest describes, is to step the price up as an edition sells, so the last prints cost more than the first. Keep the artist's proofs, the copies held back outside the numbered run, at the price of the edition or above, never below.

Two things are worth keeping apart. An original print, an etching or screenprint conceived as a print, is an edition. A giclée reproduction of a painting is a copy of another work, and calling it a limited edition does not make it one. Price and describe each for what it is. How to write a work list shows how to number both.

How do you keep your prices consistent over time?

Write every price down on the work it belongs to, with every sale beside it: date, price, where it sold and what you received. That record is where the next size rate comes from, what you show a gallery that asks about your market, and what you give as an insurance value, the figure an exhibition or open call uses to insure a work that is not for sale. For a work you would sell, the honest insurance value is usually its current retail price.

A spreadsheet can hold this. So can a notebook. What fails is keeping prices in one place and sales in another, because then the history disappears the first time someone asks. Samlio keeps the asking price and the sale on the work itself, and a viewing room can show the price you set, so the figure a buyer sees is the one in your record. How to catalogue your artwork covers the rest of that record, and what belongs on a gallery consignment list covers the moment the prices leave the studio.