A speech is the only kind of writing that fails in public. A weak blog post underperforms. A weak keynote is watched by a room of people who paid attention for the first few minutes and remember none of it. That is why speechwriting pricing differs so much from other freelance writing, and why the cheapest option is often the most expensive mistake.
I have hired writers on both sides of this market. I ran a ghostwriting agency in Los Angeles, and I have hired more than one hundred people across my companies, so I have read a lot of writing samples that looked impressive on the page and collapsed the moment someone had to say the words out loud. Those are different skills. A speechwriter has to write for the ear, for one specific voice, and for a fixed number of minutes.
I researched the six options below from their public service pages, posted rates, stated processes, and platform fee documentation. I have not commissioned a speech from each of them, so treat this as a shortlist built from verifiable public information rather than a set of firsthand testimonials. Prices and terms change, so confirm the current scope in writing before you pay.
Where I Would Look to Hire a Speechwriter
West Wing Writers: Best for high-stakes keynotes and events
Ghostwriters Central: Best for published per-minute rates
The Speechwriter: Best for wedding and after-dinner speeches
European Speechwriter Network: Best for multilingual European speakers
Upwork: Best for budget control and visible work history
Fiverr Pro: Best for a fast fixed-price draft
Two of these are firms, two are specialist practitioners or networks, and two are marketplaces. That mix is deliberate. The right answer for a father-of-the-bride toast is nowhere near the right answer for an investor day keynote, and pretending one list serves both is how buyers end up disappointed. Start with the occasion and the consequences of getting it wrong, then pick the tier that matches.
My Detailed Look at Each Option
For each option, I looked at who writes, what the published process covers, what is documented about price, and where I would expect friction. Anything not stated is listed as a question to ask, not a guess.
West Wing Writers for high-stakes keynotes and events
West Wing Writers is a Washington-based firm founded by former White House speechwriters. Its public materials describe a team of senior staffers from the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations, along with campaign and Capitol Hill veterans, and the firm says it has worked on major events for a quarter century.
What makes it different from a single freelancer is the event scope. The firm offers narrative development for a whole program, keynote scripting, guest speaker alignment, rehearsals, delivery coaching, and on-site support. If you are producing a conference where six speakers have to sound like one coherent story, that coordination is the product you are buying, not just the pages.
The tradeoff is obvious. A firm at this level does not publish prices, works on a quoted basis, and is aimed at organizations rather than individuals. I would approach it when the audience is large, the message carries commercial or political consequence, and a failed speech would cost more than the writing fee. Ask who on the team is assigned, how many drafts are included, and whether rehearsal time is included in the bill.
Ghostwriters Central for published per-minute rates
Ghostwriters Central is a long-running Los Angeles ghostwriting company that covers speechwriting alongside books, screenplays, and business writing. Its rates page lists speechwriting from $60 per minute of speaking time, billed per double-spaced page, and it explains the convention that one double-spaced page runs one minute of delivery. Wedding vow writing is listed as a separate unit, starting at $100 for one person and $175 for a couple.
Published starting rates are rare in this category, and they are useful even if you hire someone else, because they give you a floor to compare quotes against. A twenty-minute conference talk at that starting rate prices out very differently from a five-minute toast, which is how speech pricing should work.
The caution is that a posted starting price is not a quote. Research depth, interviews, turnaround, and revision rounds all move the number. I would confirm the final page count, how many revision passes are included, whether a phone interview with the speaker is part of the fee, and how rush work is charged before committing.
The Speechwriter for wedding and after-dinner speeches
The Speechwriter is the practice of Brian Jenner in the United Kingdom, and it is the most transparent example I found of a working speechwriter publishing real jobs with real numbers. The costs page describes writing keynotes for a FTSE 100 chairman at £5,000 to £8,000 per speech, per hour, rewriting work at £150 per hour, and groom, best man, father of the bride, and birthday speeches in a £500 to £1,500 band.
I like the way that page is written, because it teaches you what you are buying. One entry describes cutting a forty-five-minute groom speech down to five minutes so it would not run into a booked live act. That is the part inexperienced buyers underestimate. Much of the value of a speechwriter is subtraction, timing, and knowing what an audience will tolerate.
The limits are geography and capacity. This is one person, working by phone and email, with pricing in pounds. If you need a same-week turnaround during wedding season or an American corporate frame of reference, ask about availability first. For a personal occasion where warmth and timing matter more than scale, a single experienced practitioner is often a better buy than an agency.
European Speechwriter Network for multilingual speakers
The European Speechwriter Network is a membership network of speechwriters based across Europe, and it offers to connect clients with a writer from its membership. Its site says members work in many different languages and come from backgrounds in banking, insurance, law, education, health, entertainment, and the European institutions.
That matters more than it sounds. Humor, formality, and audience expectations do not travel well across languages. A speech that lands in Chicago can read as glib in Brussels or Frankfurt. Hiring through a network whose members already write inside those conventions saves you from paying for a translation of the wrong instincts.
This is an introduction route, not a productized service, so expect to make contact and be matched rather than to check out online. Ask which member is being proposed, which is their native language, whether they have handled your sector, and who holds the contract and the confidentiality obligation.
Upwork for budget control and visible work history
Upwork is the general marketplace I would use when I want to see a writer's history before committing. You can post a brief, review proposals, read prior client feedback, and run a small paid trial before scaling to the full speech. Its published client fee guidance describes service fees of three or five percent on the Basic plan and eight or ten percent on Business Plus, plus a contract initiation fee, so the platform cost is knowable in advance.
The way to win on a marketplace is to write a brief that filters for you. State the occasion, audience size, exact speaking time, tone, the three things the audience must remember, and the deadline for the rehearsal draft rather than the event. A good speechwriter will ask to interview the speaker. Anyone who offers to write from a bullet list alone is selling you a document, not a speech.
The tradeoff is variance. The same search returns career speechwriters and generalists who added the keyword last month. Ask for a recorded delivery of previous work if any exists, since hearing a speech is more informative than reading one, and confirm that the person who wrote the sample is the person doing your work.
Fiverr Pro for a fast fixed-price draft
Fiverr Pro is the vetted tier of Fiverr, where sellers apply and are reviewed on portfolio and professional experience rather than paying for the badge. For a short, well-defined speech with a hard date, the fixed-price format removes the scoping conversation. You know the deliverable and the price before you order.
I would use it for a best man speech, a short award acceptance, a retirement tribute, or a five-minute internal address. Fiverr documents a buyer service fee added at checkout, described as a percentage of the order with an additional fixed fee on smaller orders, so read the checkout total rather than the listed gig price.
Where it struggles is the discovery work. Executive speechwriting requires interviews, message development, and iteration, which does not fit into a packaged gig. If your speech depends on internal material, sensitive numbers, or a message that has to survive scrutiny, move up a tier rather than buying three revisions and hoping.
What a Speech Costs
Speechwriting prices look chaotic until you see the market from the writer's side. The Professional Speechwriters Association surveys its members, and its survey of what speechwriters charge from 2024 reports that project pricing is the most common arrangement, that independent speechwriters charging by the project for a twenty-minute speech split into thirds between the $2,000 to $5,000, $5,000 to $10,000, and $10,000 to $20,000 bands, and that per-hour rates cluster between $100 and $400.
Set against the $60 per delivered minute starting rate at Ghostwriters Central and the £500 to £1,500 wedding band at The Speechwriter, the picture becomes coherent. Occasion speeches are a few hundred to a few thousand. Corporate and executive speeches are a few thousand and up. Anything cheaper than that is buying you a template with your name typed into it.
Cost is driven by research and interviews more than by word count. A ten-minute speech that requires three stakeholder conversations and a policy review is a bigger job than a thirty-minute talk assembled from material you already wrote. When you get a quote, ask what portion of it is research time, because that is the line that predicts quality.
What I Check Before I Hire
Every speech project I have seen go wrong went wrong in the brief, not in the writing. The checks below take an hour and remove most of the risk.
Ask for audio, not just pages
Read a sample out loud with a timer running. Speech prose has short clauses, concrete nouns, repeated structures, and deliberate pauses. If a sample needs to be reread to be understood, an audience will lose it the first time through. Where a writer can share a recording or a video of a delivered speech, that is the strongest evidence available.
Insist on a speaker interview
The job is to sound like the speaker, which means the writer needs the speaker's vocabulary, rhythm, and stories. Early in my career, I learned this in a different context, interviewing subject matter experts to write software documentation, and the principle held: you cannot write in someone's voice from a summary. A writer who skips the interview is guessing. Build it into the fee rather than treating it as an extra.
Fix the timing before the writing
Agree the exact speaking length, then agree the word budget that goes with it. Most speakers run between 120 and 150 words a minute, which is why the industry treats one double-spaced page as one minute. A speech that overruns forces cuts on the day, and cuts made in a green room damage the structure the writer built.
Settle credit, confidentiality, and ownership
Speechwriting is ghostwritten, so the agreement should confirm that the speaker is credited as the author, that the writer will not publicize the engagement, that the material stays confidential, and that the finished text belongs to you. The same terms I would negotiate when you hire a ghostwriter for a book project apply here, and they are easier to agree before the first draft than after.
Book a rehearsal pass
The best money in a speech budget is the revision that happens after the speaker reads the draft aloud. Words that look elegant on the page can be unsayable. Ask for one revision round that is reserved for post-rehearsal changes, and schedule the rehearsal at least a week before the event so the change is not made in panic.
Matching the Occasion to the Right Tier
For a wedding, a retirement, or a eulogy, hire a practitioner who writes personal speeches on the regular. The skill is emotional judgment: what to include, what to leave out, and how to land a joke without embarrassing anyone in the room. Published bands from specialists make this tier easy to budget.
For an internal company address, a sales kickoff, or a product launch, you need someone comfortable with business material who will not bury the message in abstraction. The same discipline behind strong business writing skills that hold an audience shows up here, and it is often the deciding factor between a talk people quote and a talk people endure. If you need supporting collateral around the event as well, a broader roundup of business writing providers covers the documents that surround a launch.
For a keynote, a policy address, a commencement, or an investor event, move to a firm or a career speechwriter with matching credentials. At that level, you are buying message development, stakeholder management, and rehearsal support, not just a manuscript.
There is also the case where a speech is one part of a larger production. If the event includes video, staging, or a scripted run of show, the person who writes the remarks may not be the person who writes the show. I have made more than a hundred YouTube videos, and the structure of a video script has almost nothing in common with a keynote. In that situation, you may need to hire a script writer for the produced segments and keep the speech with a specialist.
Red Flags I Would Not Ignore
I would walk away from anyone who promises a standing ovation, quotes a flat price without asking the speaking length, or refuses to name the writer doing the work. I would also be wary of a portfolio made of written speeches with no evidence any of them were delivered.
Other warnings: unlimited revisions with no definition, no interview in the process, no confidentiality clause for a sensitive engagement, and delivery scheduled for the day of the event. Reputable writers protect rehearsal time because they know that is where a speech stops being a document and starts being a performance.
If you are also weighing whether to keep this work in-house, one useful test is whether anyone on your team can write to time. A person who can deliver eight tight minutes is worth more than a talented writer who hands you fourteen. When nobody can do that, paying a specialist is the cheaper path. If you would rather build the skill, a structured business writing course for professional communication is a reasonable starting point, and studying how tone shifts meaning in a sentence will do more for your next talk than another round of slide edits.
Whichever route you take, agree the brief, the speaking time, the interview, the revision reserved for rehearsal, and the ownership terms in writing. Those five items decide the outcome long before anyone writes an opening line. If your needs run wider than a single event, a general guide to finding and vetting freelance writers covers the contracting basics that apply to every category.
Final Thoughts
The right speechwriter depends less on the length of the speech than on what is at stake, because a personal toast, a corporate address, and a major keynote demand very different levels of expertise and support. Whatever the occasion, agree on the audience, timing, speaker interview, rehearsal process, and ownership upfront, because those details shape the speech long before the first draft is written.
Related Resources
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are the answers to the most frequently asked questions about hiring a speechwriter.
How much does it cost to hire a speechwriter?
Personal occasion speeches fall between a few hundred and two thousand dollars or pounds. Corporate and executive work starts in the low thousands and rises with research depth. Published specialist rates start around $60 per delivered minute, and association survey data puts most twenty-minute project fees between $2,000 and $20,000.
How long does it take to write a speech?
A short personal speech can be drafted in a few days once the writer has interviewed you. A researched corporate keynote needs two to six weeks because interviews, message development, drafting, review, and a rehearsal pass are separate stages. Book the writer earlier than feels necessary, since the rehearsal revision is the one that matters most.
What should I give a speechwriter before they start?
Provide the occasion, audience, venue, exact speaking length, position on the program, the three points you want remembered, anything you must not say, previous talks you have given, and a recording of you speaking. The recording is the single most useful item, because it lets the writer match your natural rhythm.
Is it acceptable to have someone write your speech?
Yes, and it is standard practice for executives, politicians, and public figures. The speaker supplies the ideas, the judgment, and the delivery, and the writer shapes the language. Speechwriting is confidential, so the speaker is credited as the author unless both parties agree otherwise.
How many words is a ten-minute speech?
Most speakers deliver between 120 and 150 words a minute, so a ten-minute speech runs about 1,200 to 1,500 words. The industry shorthand of one double-spaced page per minute reflects the same math. Nervous speakers speed up, so build in a small buffer and always time the read aloud.
Should I hire a speechwriter or a speech coach?
Hire a writer when the content, structure, and language need work. Hire a coach when the material is right, but delivery, pacing, or nerves are the problem. Some firms and practitioners offer both, and for a high-stakes event, the combination of a written draft plus rehearsal coaching is the better investment.