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Working out licensing costs

Get an idea of the costs to license a work through DACS

Costs will vary depending on the industry and the intended usage that permission is being requested for. But generally a charge is made per artistic work and for each use.

Our pricing model is based on how an artwork will be used and how commercial the project is. For example, the more prominently an image is featured, like on the front cover of a book, or in an advertising campaign, the higher the licensing fee.

Example licensing and image file price ranges

For book publishing, licensing prices range from around £50 to license an image for a small print run of 500, to approximately £250 to license the same image for the front cover of an ebook with 50,000+ downloads and its hard copy. There are different price ranges for academic books.

For merchandising, the copyright licence price is usually an agreed percentage of the price, multiplied by the number of items produced. With retail, the percentage rate starts at 10%.

We can also supply high-res image file at an additional cost through our image bank, DACS Images. This cost is in addition to the copyright licence fee.

Read more detail on our costs for different uses 

Our fee, and how we pay copyright holders

We retain 25% of the royalties collected to cover our costs. The remaining 75% goes directly to artists and rights holders. We distribute these royalties four times a year.

Find out more about what we do

Read our annual report

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Process and timescale to license a work