Take somebody else's draft and make it clear, correct and worth reading, then put your name nowhere near it.
Click through it
Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$77,920
Editorial assistant
$41,250
Executive or senior editor
$153,700
The national median is $77,920 a year, and the bottom tenth start near $41,250. That single occupation covers a book publisher's assistant in New York and a technical editor at a software company, so the spread is enormous.
$41,000 to $52,000
Editorial assistant at a publisher, magazine or local newsroom
Book publishing pays the least and sits mostly in New York, which is also where rent is highest. Corporate and technical editing starts higher and nobody writes films about it.
$153,700 and up
Editorial directors, technical and medical editors, big content teams
The pay jump in this field is almost never from getting better at commas. It comes from moving into a specialty nobody else can edit, or from managing a team.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
There is no licence and no legally required qualification, so the low end is somebody who learns by doing, two or three style manuals and a professional membership for the job listings, and builds a portfolio through student papers, small publications or freelance work. That cheap door is real but it is harder to walk through: most job adverts still ask for a degree and you are competing against people who have one. The high end is a four year degree at an in state public university plus a professional editing certificate. Be careful borrowing here, because first salaries in editing are low relative to the debt.
File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) every year. Be careful borrowing for this one: a private college degree plus a first salary in the low $40,000s is one of the worst debt ratios in any creative field.
Salary
Newsrooms, publishers, agencies and in-house content teams.
Freelance by the hour
Common for copy editing and proofreading. Rates climb with speed and specialty.
Freelance by the project
Book manuscripts are usually priced per project or per thousand words.
Contract and shift work
Many newsrooms now hire copy editors for night shifts on rolling contracts rather than staff jobs.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Nobody hires an editor who has not written. You come in through writing and move sideways.
High school diploma
Grade 12
Write constantly and get edited. Work on the school paper, the yearbook or a website where somebody else changes your words.
Bachelor's degree
4 years
English, journalism or communications is typical, but a science or history degree plus proven writing is worth more in specialist editing.
Student paper and internships
During college
The actual qualification. A summer on a real copy desk or at a publishing house beats any course.
First job: writer or editorial assistant
1 to 3 years
Fact checking, proofreading, chasing permissions, writing headlines. This is the apprenticeship and it is badly paid.
Editor
3 to 5 years in
Copy editor, section editor, managing editor. From here the ladder runs through specialty or management.
English
Obviously, but the grammar half matters as much as the literature half.
Journalism or media studies
Deadlines and house style are learned habits, not talents.
A second language
Teaches you how sentences are built, and translation editing pays well.
Any science course
Editors who can read a study are rare and expensive.
There is no license, no exam and no protected title. Anyone may call themselves an editor. What employers actually look at is an edit test: they hand you a messy draft and time you. Voluntary certificates exist, and the best known are the tiered editing certificates run jointly by Poynter and the Society for Editing. They help a freelancer look credible. They will not get you a staff job on their own.
Journalism schools dominate the newsroom route, but the degree matters less here than almost anywhere else.
Big journalism schools
Missouri, Northwestern, Syracuse and Arizona State run programs with real student newsrooms attached.
Any state university with a student paper
The paper is the training. The campus name is not.
Publishing courses
Short summer publishing institutes run at several universities and feed directly into book publishing hiring.
Online editing courses
Poynter and the Society for Editing run on-demand training you can take while working.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Technical editing
Software documentation, engineering manuals, standards. Steady, corporate and well paid.
Medical and scientific editing
Journals, drug companies and research institutes. Needs a science background, pays for it.
Developmental editing
Working on structure and argument with an author before the sentences matter. The hardest kind and the best paid in books.
Video and newsletter editing
Where most new editing jobs actually are, because that is where audiences went.
Knowing one style manual cold
The Associated Press Stylebook for news, the Chicago Manual of Style for books.
Basic HTML and a publishing system
WordPress and similar tools. Editors who can publish the page themselves get hired first.
Fact-checking practice
Verifying dates, quotes and statistics is a named part of the job description.
Fast, clean typing
Unglamorous, and it decides how much you can take on.
A large share of editing now happens outside staff jobs. You build a handful of steady clients, charge by the hour or the project, and chase invoices. The upside is real: you choose the work, you can live anywhere, and a specialty lets you set your own rate. The downside is that you buy your own health insurance, income arrives unevenly, and January is always quiet. Most freelancers start part time while holding a salaried job.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
A queue of drafts and a clock. You read for sense first, then for accuracy, then line by line for grammar and style. You write the headline, check the facts and the names, cut 200 words because the space shrank, and send questions back to a writer who will not like them. Meetings about what is running tomorrow. In news the day ends when the page closes, which is often late.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
In 2017 a federal appeals court sided with delivery drivers at Oakhurst Dairy in Maine because a state overtime law had no comma before the last item in a list. The wording was genuinely ambiguous, the drivers won, and the company settled for $5 million.
The Associated Press Stylebook, first published in the 1950s, decides things like whether to write percent or the symbol. New editions land regularly and editors genuinely fight about the changes.
The byline goes to the writer. An editor who rebuilt a story from the ground up gets no credit line, and that is the deal. You have to be the kind of person who finds that satisfying rather than infuriating.
Poynter, a journalism nonprofit in Florida, runs tiered editing certificates with the Society for Editing, alongside PolitiFact and a global network of fact checkers. Editing and fact checking live in the same building for a reason.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise.