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You know the moment. It's 6.45pm on a Friday, you're in a room booked 10am–7pm, the hair stylist has run over, makeup is still finishing the last talent, and the studio manager is standing politely at the door with one finger on the door release. You ask about five extra minutes. And then you find out what extra minutes cost.

This post is a sweep through what I've been charged for weekend hire and overtime across London studios in the last twelve months. I've got receipts. Some of these numbers will make you laugh. One or two will make you change how you book.

The baseline: what a 'day' actually is

Most London studios sell a 'day rate' that's either 9 or 10 hours. The common shapes are:

9am–6pm (9 hours, most common)
9am–7pm (10 hours, premium rooms)
8am–6pm (10 hours, fashion-friendly)
10am–8pm (10 hours, a few east London rooms that attract music video hire)

The numbers I'll throw around in this post assume a 10-hour day. A 9-hour day is roughly 10% cheaper but has less headroom.

Weekend surcharges: the spread is bigger than you think

From my invoices in the last year, weekend surcharges across London breakdown roughly like this:

Park Royal and outer west: 10–20% surcharge Saturdays, 20–30% Sundays
Hackney Wick, Bow, Stratford: 15–25% both days
Shoreditch, Dalston, Bethnal Green: 20–35% Saturdays, often 35–50% Sundays
Central-adjacent (Clerkenwell, Bermondsey): 25–40% either day
Daylight studios (anywhere): Variable — some charge zero weekend surcharge because they've already lost the good light hours, others charge a full 30%

My highest weekend premium was a Clerkenwell room that billed £1,650 for a Sunday against its weekday rate of £1,050 — a 57% uplift. The lowest was a Park Royal cyc that charged exactly the same Saturday rate as midweek, on the logic that their clients mostly shoot weekdays and they wanted weekend utilisation up.

Small point: bank holidays are usually billed at 'Sunday rate' even when they fall on a Monday. Worth checking before you quote a client.

Overtime: the bit that really stings

Here's where studios make real money. Overtime pricing comes in roughly four shapes:

Hourly, pro-rata. Day rate divided by 10, charged per hour over. Fair. Not common.
Hourly, uplifted. Day rate divided by 8, charged per hour over (so effectively 125% of pro-rata). Common. Reasonable.
Hourly, penal. A flat £100–£200 per hour over, unrelated to the day rate. Common in the premium rooms and any studio that really doesn't want people running late.
Minimum charge. Even if you're 15 minutes late, they charge a full hour or two hours minimum. Genuine punishment tier.

The highest per-hour overtime I've ever paid was £220 for one hour in a premium daylight studio in Shoreditch. The lowest was £35/hour in a small Hackney Wick room run by the owner himself, who was in the room anyway and didn't mind.

Averaged across 18 overtime charges I've been billed for in the last two years: £95/hour is roughly the middle. Plan £100/hour in your shoot budget for any London day rate that doesn't spell out the overtime rate in the quote.

The grace period fiction

Most studios have some form of grace period — 15 or 30 minutes — where they won't charge. Some explicitly write it into their terms. Others leave it vague.

Don't count on it. I've had a room that had 'up to 15 minutes grace' in their written terms bill me for a full hour when the previous booking had started early and I'd needed 20 minutes to load out. The logic, I was told, was that my overrun delayed their cleaning window. This is why the wording on the invoice matters.

Specific fees to watch for

Beyond the obvious day rate, here are the line items I've seen in the last year (frequency rough, price range roughly accurate for London 2026):

Cleaning fee: £30–£150 standard, £200+ for food/wet/messy work
Rubbish removal: £25–£80, some studios bundle this with cleaning
Power surcharge: £25–£80 for a 32A hookup beyond the standard 13A rings
Three-phase power: £60–£150 per day extra if available
Parking: £15–£30 per car per day, some included, most not
Kitchen/catering use: £20–£60 to use the studio kitchen for crew lunch
Prep day (day before): 40–60% of day rate
Wrap day (day after): 40–60% of day rate, rarely offered
Last-minute booking: +10–20% if you book within 72 hours
Cancellation within 48 hours: 50–100% of booking
Model release / sign-off on published images: 0–10% depending on the studio. Most won't charge but some are starting to.

A properly padded day in London — 10 hours, 32A power, parking for two, cleaning, one hour overtime — can easily add £250–£400 to a £750 day rate. That's a 35–55% markup on top of the headline number.

Platform booking fees on top

If you're booking through Peerspace, their host service fee is currently 20% (that's what the host pays, not you — but it's absolutely priced into the rate). The guest-side processing fee is a smaller separate charge that shows up at checkout.

Giggster's host-side take is around 10–15% depending on tier. Splacer is gone — they shut down in 2024 and haven't come back.

Direct booking from the studio's own website almost always saves you 10–20%, though it takes more phone work. For any booking over £500 I now go direct by default.

What I negotiate on, and what I don't

Negotiable, in my experience:

Overtime rate — swap 'penal' for 'pro-rata' if you're committing to multiple days
Prep-day rate — often talkable down to 30–40% of full rate
Cleaning fee — sometimes waived if you agree to leave the room pristine
Multi-day discount — 5–15% off for 3+ consecutive days is normal

Rarely negotiable:

Weekend surcharge — this is baseline pricing, not a discretionary extra
Peak-season pricing — December, September fashion week — rooms are full, don't bother
Power surcharge — it's a real cost for the studio
Parking — the studio doesn't own the spaces and can't discount them

The conversation that saves a lot of money

Before you sign the booking form, have a five-minute phone call with the studio manager. Literally ask, in order:

'What's included in the day rate? Can you walk me through what's NOT included?'
'If we run over by 30 minutes, what does it cost? What about 90 minutes?'
'Is there a grace period in writing?'
'If we need 32A power, is that extra? How much?'
'What's your weekend surcharge if we need to bump days?'
'Cancellation terms?'

Write down the answers. Email them a summary to confirm. This isn't paranoia — it's the cheapest way to avoid a £600 invoice surprise at the end of a long Friday.

The hidden one: producer's wait time

A few premium studios — I'd say five rooms across London — charge for a producer's presence even if you don't need one. The logic is their higher-end rooms require someone on site at all times for safety/insurance reasons. That person might cost you £300–£500 for a full day added to the hire. If the studio has a producer included, great. If not, and the room says 'producer required for hires over £X', that's a real cost.

A specific invoice walkthrough

This one still winds me up a bit. Last autumn, booked a mid-range daylight studio in Dalston for a Thursday. Headline rate: £680 for 10 hours (9am–7pm). Here's the actual final invoice:

Studio day rate: £680
32A three-phase power: £95
Two parking spaces: £28
Cleaning fee: £65
Rubbish removal: £40
Overtime (1.5 hours, billed as 2 hours minimum): £280
Producer supervision fee (non-optional on their premium rooms): £180

Total: £1,368 against a £680 headline. Close to exactly 2x.

The producer fee wasn't in the original booking email. It was mentioned once in a footer of the T&Cs I'd skimmed. I paid it because the shoot was done and the client was happy, but I won't book that studio again without negotiating it out. I probably could have. Hindsight's cheap.

Multi-day negotiation

If you're booking 3+ days, the negotiation is different. Studios value the guaranteed utilisation. Fair ask, in my experience:

10% discount on day rate for 3 consecutive days
15% for 5 consecutive days
Prep day at 30–40% of day rate (often quoted at 50%)
Overtime rate fixed at pro-rata (day rate / 10) not 'penal' hourly
Cleaning fee bundled into the day rate rather than charged separately

Walk in asking for all of these together. You probably won't get all of them. You'll typically get two or three, which is still a couple of hundred quid off a multi-day booking.

Insurance and liability

One thing I've learned the hard way: if you run into overtime AND the studio's insurance policy has cutoff hours, you might technically be shooting uninsured. I've had one studio where the PL policy runs 7am–10pm and after 10pm the room is considered 'out of hours' — not just surcharged, but liability sits back on you unless you've informed them in writing.

Ask about this. If the studio has a 9am–6pm 'normal hours' insurance window and you're shooting into the evening, either get a copy of their confirmation that extended hours are covered, or add your own rider for the evening hours. It's almost certainly fine, but 'almost certainly' isn't something to rely on if someone trips on a C-stand at 10.45pm.

Booking out of hours: when the numbers don't work

Some studios offer night hire — 8pm–6am or similar. The headline rates look competitive, often 70–80% of daytime. Then the catch: overnight cleaning is extra, security is extra, any heating you need is metered, and the lighting power load on the building sometimes steps up to a different tariff. I've seen a 'cheap night rate' of £450 turn into a £740 final invoice once security and heating were added.

If you genuinely need to shoot through the night — a big 24-hour production, or a music video that needs particular ambient conditions — price it carefully and don't trust the headline. Two rooms I know do night rates genuinely well (all-in, no surprise extras), but they're the exception. Most night rates are advertised as cheap to get bookings; the total cost lands similar to a weekday day rate.

One tip on paying the invoice

If the final invoice has something you didn't expect and don't think you agreed to, don't pay it then email later asking for a correction. Query it before paying. Email the studio manager with the specific line item, ask for the clause in the T&Cs that authorises it, and offer to pay the undisputed portion immediately. This is a polite way to get refunds that's worked for me about 4 out of 7 times I've tried it. If you pay first and raise it later, success rate drops to roughly zero.

The summary, if you skimmed

A London studio day rate is roughly 60–75% of what you'll actually pay when you include extras. Weekend is 15–35% on top. Overtime is £60–£220 per hour depending on the room. Plan for a full cost that's 1.5x the headline day rate for any real production. And always — always — get the overtime terms in writing before you turn up.

If you want to filter by total day cost rather than headline rate, I've been adding 'typical all-in day cost' tags to the rooms on creativestudiohire.com. Imperfect, but closer to reality than the day rate alone.

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