The Post-Production Percentage Rule We Don't Follow

Opening observation

Every producer who calls us has already done the math. Fifteen to twenty-five percent of the total budget, set aside for post. It's the number they bring into the first conversation, usually before a single deliverable has been named. As a starting point for a financing conversation, fine. As a way to actually build a post schedule, it doesn't hold up — and we don't build ours from it.

The number isn't wrong, exactly. It's a placeholder for a scope of work nobody has written yet. Once that scope exists, the percentage stops being useful.

Where the Rule Comes From

The published range is narrower than people assume. Post-production sound veteran Jon Vogl frames 15-20% of total budget as a working guideline for independent and low-budget productions — a starting point for a conversation with a post supervisor, not a fixed target. Other budgeting guides push the baseline higher, putting post at 20-25% of the total and then splitting that further: editorial around 30-35%, sound design and mix 25-30%, visual effects 20-25%, color 15-20%.

Both sources qualify the number the moment they publish it. Vogl's figure is framed as a conversation-opener with a post supervisor, not a target to hit. The higher published baseline comes with the same caveat — the split changes with a project's complexity, and post costs can eat closer to a quarter of the budget once a film gets ambitious about visual effects or a full theatrical mix. The rule ships with its own disclaimer attached. That disclaimer is usually what gets dropped in the retelling.

Independent music video budgets, in our experience, run smaller than people think than these department splits assume, which is part of why the percentage rule persists at all. It's a fast shorthand for a producer sitting across from a financier who needs a number today, not a schedule. Nobody has scoped stage time or booked a mixer yet. The percentage buys time.

Where the Percentage Breaks

The trouble starts once an actual project has a shape. A dialogue-driven feature and a visual-effects-heavy short don't split the same way, and the department percentages inside the rule assume a project that doesn't exist. A film built around an original score — one of the projects we take on most often — can put well over 40% of its post spend into music and clearance, not the 15-20% "sound" bucket the rule has in mind. The final ten percent of a color grade is a good example of a line item a flat percentage can't see at all. It isn't proportional to anything. It's a fixed cost that shows up whether the film's total post budget is thin or generous.

There's a second problem, quieter than the first. A flat percentage bundles two very different kinds of spending into one number: the department costs you can plan for, and the contingency you need for the revisions you can't. When the two share a pool and the schedule slips, the contingency gets raided first, silently, and nobody notices until the mix stage runs out of days. A picture-locked film that needs a second color pass, or a festival that changes its deliverable spec two weeks before the print traffic deadline, doesn't care which bucket the percentage rule assumed that money would sit in.

What We Scope Instead

We build post budgets from the deliverable list, not the top line. Stage time, personnel, specific outputs — a scope built the way a well-itemized independent line budget gets built, from vendor quotes and named line items rather than a percentage applied downward. A bottom-up budget assembled this way often lands close to the published heuristic anyway. The number isn't wrong. It's just the wrong place to start.

Two things shape that bottom-up number more than any percentage would. One is what a music supervision budget actually buys on a given project — clearance costs and original scoring don't scale with runtime the way editorial time does. The other is infrastructure: we own the room instead of renting studio time, which changes what a percentage-based budget would assume about day rates before we've even opened a session.

And we keep the contingency separate — a dedicated 10-15% held apart from department costs, so a color re-pass doesn't quietly eat into the mix budget three weeks later. It sits in its own line on the budget, untouched until picture lock actually happens, which is usually later than anyone planned for.

Closing working note

The percentage rule isn't wrong. It's a stand-in for a conversation we'd rather have on day one, with an actual deliverable list instead of a placeholder number. In practice, that conversation usually starts with the score, because on most of the films we take on, the music budget is the first thing that refuses to fit inside somebody else's percentage.