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The Wrapbook Team consists of individuals who are thrilled about building modern software tools for creators. We’re a team of compassionate and curious people dedicated to solving complex problems with sophisticated solutions. You can find us across the U.S. and Canada.
At Wrapbook, we pride ourselves on providing outstanding free resources to producers and their crews, but this post is for informational purposes only as of the date above. The content on our website is not intended to provide and should not be relied on for legal, accounting, or tax advice. You should consult with your own legal, accounting, or tax advisors to determine how this general information may apply to your specific circumstances.
Union scale rates are exact for a reason. The right number depends on the role, the union and local, the specific agreement, the region, and the schedule someone is working. Change any one of those and the rate changes with it.
The rates don't hold still, either. Guilds renegotiate on multi-year cycles, so a wage table that was right last season can be out of date by the time you open it.
For years, finding the right figure meant going to the agreement itself. Producers and production accountants keep folders of union PDFs, then hunt through wage tables for the one line that applies. It works. It's also slow.
The Rate Finder puts those rates in one place and lets you search them like a database instead of a document.
We built the Rate Finder on a simple idea: looking up a rate should be faster than reading a contract.
Since it launched a year ago, it's grown into a reference that production teams reach for by default, and it keeps pace as agreements are negotiated and ratified. When a union settles a new deal, the updated scale and fringe rates make their way into the tool.
The Rate Finder covers the agreements most productions actually budget against, from the Directors Guild and SAG-AFTRA to IATSE and the Teamsters. Here's what that looks like in practice.
At its core, the Rate Finder is a search engine for union rates. Type in a role, a union, or a keyword, then narrow the results with filters for union and local, agreement, region, and schedule.
Every result gives you the full picture in a single row: the role and its occupation (OCC) code, the union and local, the governing agreement, the region, the schedule, the rate, the rate type (per hour, per day, or per week), guarantee hours, and the effective and expiration dates.
Say you're budgeting a grip for a West Coast shoot. Search “grip,” filter to the IATSE Basic Agreement and the West Coast region, , then use the effective and expiration dates to confirm which rate applies to your production period. You'll see the scale rate, schedule, and guarantee. No PDF required.
The filters do more than surface a single number. Working across departments? Filter by union and page through every local under it. Need to compare the same role across two agreements? Pull both up and read them side by side. Because schedule is a filter too, you can separate a studio rate from a distant-location rate when the two differ.
Nobody on set says “Director of Photography” when they're moving fast. The Rate Finder knows that. Search “DP” and you'll get the Director of Photography. “AD” brings up the Assistant Director. “Crafty” finds Crafts Service. You can look up a rate by formal title, by occupation code, or by the shorthand you'd actually use on a call sheet.
When you find rates you need, save them to a My Project view so they live together instead of scattered across browser tabs and PDFs.
Saved rates remain available for later reference. Build the list as you go, and it's ready when you sit down to budget.
The Rate Finder spans the agreements that show up on most call sheets.
On the scale-rate side, that includes:
Under those agreements sit the individual locals a production hires from: camera (Local 600), editors (Local 700), grips (Local 80), studio electricians (Local 728), hair and makeup (Locals 706 and 798), the Animation Guild (Local 839), publicists, Casting Directors (Teamsters Local 399), and many more. Whether you're budgeting above-the-line talent or a full below-the-line crew, the rates are there.
Because the rates reflect the current agreements, you're budgeting against the numbers in force today, not last term's tables.
Rates also change by geography, so the Rate Finder includes the region distinctions that quietly break budgets: West Coast and East Coast below-the-line, national rates, the Area Standards Agreement's Maryland and Non-Maryland split, and the Los Angeles Production Cities and Non-Production Cities boundary.
These geographic distinctions aren’t always obvious. The tool makes them clear.
Scale rates are only half of a union labor budget. The other half is fringes: the employer contributions for pension, health, and welfare that ride on top of wages.
The Rate Finder covers fringes too, on a companion fringes page. You'll find fringe rates for the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, the WGA, and Los Angeles IATSE, with the calculation basis for each one spelled out, whether that's a percentage of gross, an amount per hour, or a percentage of straight-time earnings.
Fringes are where a lot of budgets go sideways. Keeping the rate and the way to calculate it in the same place saves real time, and real mistakes.
Overtime is one of the hardest things to look up in a union agreement. The multipliers shift based on how many hours someone works, which day of the week it is, and whether it's a holiday.
Every local writes its schedule a little differently, only compounding the complexity.
The Rate Finder brings those overtime rate schedules into the tool. For IATSE agreements, open the overtime dropdown on a rate and you'll see the published schedule: when time-and-a-half kicks in, when double time applies, and how a long day's hours ladder up.
On many IATSE agreements, hours past the standard workday move to time-and-a-half, a long enough day tips into double time, and sixth days, seventh days, and holidays carry their own rules. The Rate Finder lays that ladder out so you can see exactly where each threshold falls.
The Rate Finder shows you the published overtime schedule. It doesn't calculate a paycheck.
Looking up IATSE overtime rates used to mean flipping through the agreement itself. Now it's a click. Overtime schedules are available for the IATSE agreements productions lean on most, including the West Coast locals, the Videotape Agreement, the Long-Form and MOW schedules, the Area Standards Agreement, and the Low Budget Theatrical Agreements.
A rate tool is only as good as its rates. The Rate Finder is validated by Wrapbook's Labor Relations team, the same experts who track union deals as they're negotiated and ratified, and it's updated as agreements change.
That accuracy is the entire point of the tool. It's built for general budgeting, and it isn't a substitute for the union agreements themselves. When you're locking numbers, the agreement is always the final word.
Whether you're building a budget for a feature, a series, a commercial, or a short, the Rate Finder puts the union rates you need in one fast, searchable place, so you can spend less time in PDFs and more time in prep. A year in, the tool is faster, more complete, and more useful than it was at launch, and we're just getting started.
Ready to look up a rate? Open the Rate Finder and run a search. If you're new to it, our guide on how to use the Rate Finder walks through the filters and everything you need to get started.
Anyone who pays a crew knows the feeling. You need one scale rate, and it's sitting somewhere inside a 100-page union agreement.
Wrapbook's Rate Finder turns that search into a few seconds. It's a free tool for looking up union scale and fringe rates across the major film, TV, and commercial agreements.
Here's how the Rate Finder works today, and everything it can do for your next budget.
