Turn hours of raw footage into something people want to watch. The job where the story is actually decided.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$75,420
Assistant editor
$40,280
Senior or union editor
$148,550
The national median is $75,420 a year, and the bottom tenth start near $40,280. This is the wage survey's figure for film and video editors specifically. It is a national average of a job whose pay is stacked in Los Angeles and New York.
$40,000 to $55,000
Assistant editor or post-production assistant
The first job is organizing footage, syncing sound and keeping the project files clean. You are in the room while someone else cuts. Most editors spend two to five years there.
$148,550 and up
Union editors on scripted television and features
On union work the Motion Picture Editors Guild, which is Local 700 of the stagehands and technicians union, negotiates minimum rates plus a health plan and a pension. Getting in normally means logging paid days on covered productions first.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
There is no licence and no exam, and this is a field where reels get hired, so the low end is somebody who learns on free software, DaVinci Resolve has a genuinely good free version, and spends a few hundred dollars on a subscription and practice footage. That cheap door is harder than it sounds, because you have to find real projects to cut with nobody assigning them to you. The high end is a four year film or media degree at roughly $11,000 a year at an in state public university, or about $4,000 a year at a community college media program. Private film schools cost several times that and film school debt is the most common regret in this field. A capable editing computer runs $2,000 to $4,000 on top.
File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) before you pay for any program. A Pell Grant does not have to be paid back, and film school debt is the single most common regret in this field.
Staff jobs are steady and capped
News stations, in-house brand teams and agencies pay a salary every two weeks and rarely reach the top of the range.
Freelance is a day rate
You are quoted by the day or the week, and the year is lumpy. Three busy months can carry two quiet ones.
Union work pays the most
Scripted television and features, with negotiated minimums, overtime and benefits.
Corporate video pays the bills
Training videos, conference recaps and social media edits are unglamorous and reliably funded.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
There is no license and no required degree. There is a reel, and there are the people who have seen it.
High school diploma
Grade 12
Start cutting now. Phone footage, a friend's band, a school game. Nobody will ask what year you started.
Learn one program properly
6 to 12 months of real practice
Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer or DaVinci Resolve. Scripted television runs on Avid, almost everything else on the other two.
Degree, or not
0 to 4 years
About 65% of people in the job hold a bachelor's degree and 16% have only a high school diploma. A program buys you equipment, deadlines and a network, not a credential anyone checks.
Get in the building
1 to 2 years
Post-production assistant, media manager, loader. Low pay, long hours, and the only reliable way anyone learns you exist.
Assistant editor, then editor
2 to 5 years
You start cutting scenes when the editor trusts you, then take your own projects.
English and creative writing
Editing is structure. Knowing why a scene works is worth more than knowing a shortcut.
Music
Rhythm and timing are most of the craft, and you will be cutting to music constantly.
Art or photography
Framing, color and what the eye looks at first.
Computer class
File systems, storage and backups. Losing a project is the classic beginner disaster.
No state issues a video editor license, there is no exam, and anyone can print the title on a business card. The only real gate is your reel and the people who will vouch for you. On big scripted productions there is a second gate: the Motion Picture Editors Guild, the post-production union, which covers most union film and television work in Los Angeles and New York. You normally qualify by working a set number of paid days on covered shows before you can join.
Four-year film schools
The University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts is the best known. Expensive, and the value is the network as much as the teaching.
State universities
Most have a film, media or communications major with editing suites you can book for free.
Community college
Two-year media programs, cheap, and enough to get you a first job in local news or corporate video.
On your own
The software has free tutorials for everything. What you cannot get alone is footage worth cutting, so work on other people's shoots.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Color grading
DaVinci Resolve started as a grading tool. Editors who can also grade get hired for small jobs that cannot afford two people.
Motion graphics
Adobe After Effects. Titles, lower thirds and explainer animation are constant paid work.
Sound
Dialogue cleanup and a rough mix. Bad sound ruins a good cut faster than bad pictures do.
Avid Media Composer
The industry standard for scripted television. Learning it is how you get considered for union shows.
A short, ruthless reel
Ninety seconds of your best work. Nobody watches the second minute.
Being easy to sit next to
Directors spend weeks in a dark room with their editor. Temperament gets people rehired more than talent does.
Fast, boring reliability
Delivering on time in the right format wins more repeat work than any creative flourish.
A machine that can keep up
Waiting on renders in front of a client is how you lose the client.
Most editors are not cutting films. They are cutting wedding videos, product launches, training modules, real estate tours, podcasts turned into clips, and social media cutdowns for brands. It pays regularly, it is repeatable, and clients come back. A lot of people run that as the business and take unpaid or low-paid film work on the side because they want to. Being honest with yourself about which one is funding your rent is worth doing early.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Start around 10am because post-production hours run late. Check what came in overnight, sync and organize it, then cut. Long silent stretches of watching the same twelve seconds forty times. A director or producer drops in to review, gives notes, leaves. Recut. Export a version for the client, upload it, write the notes. Some days you will not speak to anyone for four hours. On a deadline week you are there until midnight.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Cut the same neutral face against a bowl of soup and an audience reads hunger. Cut it against a coffin and they read grief. The face never changed. Editors have been using that trick since the 1920s and it is the closest thing the craft has to a founding law.
The government occupation profile for film and video editors names Adobe After Effects and Adobe Creative Cloud as tools of the trade, and then lists TikTok and YouTube right beside them. Short-form social editing is now counted as the same job as cutting television.
About 43,500 people work as film and video editors in the United States, and the field is projected to grow at roughly the average rate through 2034. Every one of them got in through somebody who already knew them.
The assistant's day is importing footage, syncing audio, matching takes to the script, chasing missing files and keeping the project from corrupting. It is a technical job with a creative title, and it is the apprenticeship almost every working editor served.
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.