How much does a shooting day cost in 18 countries?

The comparison uses one unit for every country: the day rates of 13 local specialists for a 12-hour shift (director, director of photography, first assistant director, gaffer, two lighting technicians, key grip or camera technician, focus puller, sound recordist, line producer, unit manager, location manager and craft service) plus one day of rental of a standard camera package from a rental house in the capital.

The standard package is an ARRI Alexa Mini LF or equivalent, a set of six cinema prime lenses, two 1.8 kW HMI lights with four to six large LED panels, a dolly with 6 m of track and a basic grip kit, and a Sound Devices recorder with two boom microphones and four lavaliers. Flights, accommodation, per diems, locations, permits, cast and post-production are not included, because they depend on the project rather than on the country.

In this comparison the most affordable shooting day is in Kyrgyzstan ($2,600), followed by Argentina ($5,400), Romania ($6,200), South Korea ($7,200), Russia ($7,500) and India ($7,700). The gap comes mostly from crew fees: a crew of 13 costs $1,500 a day in Kyrgyzstan against $3,600 in Argentina and $7,600 in Germany, while equipment rental differs less between countries.

Cheap crew does not automatically mean a cheap shoot. Flights and accommodation for a visiting team, the distance from the airport to the locations and the number of shooting days usually decide the final budget. A rule of thumb from the table: if a project needs ten or more shooting days, the saving on local crew and equipment in Kyrgyzstan ($82,800 against Germany over ten days) leaves a wide margin for flights and accommodation of a visiting key team.

Rates and rental prices come from 514 sources collected in October 2026: union and collective agreement rate cards (quality A), dated production-service and film-commission rate guides (B), surveys, job boards and freelance markets (C). Single undated mentions (D) are used only when nothing better exists for a position. Templated pages that show identical rates for different countries were rejected. Every rate is one specialist, a 12-hour day, without equipment and without employer taxes or union fringes; rates for 8- or 10-hour days and weekly or monthly rates are converted to a 12-hour day with time-and-a-half overtime.

Directors are usually paid per project, so a project fee is divided by the number of shooting days it covers; top-tier directors and atypical projects are excluded. Local currencies are converted at market rates of 12 October 2026, the Kyrgyz som at the National Bank rate of 87.45 per dollar. Equipment prices are rental-house day rates in the capital, averaged per item across rental houses. Where a country has no published rate for a position, the crew total is scaled by the share of the found positions, and where an equipment item is missing the package total is lower than reality, so the comparison is conservative for those countries.

Countries without enough published crew rates (Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, Mongolia) and countries without a camera or lens price (Uzbekistan, Nepal, Morocco, Hungary) are left out of the table. The full dataset with every source is available on request; the summary table can be downloaded as CSV below.