How much does transcription cost per minute?

Automated transcription is cheap. Through the developer interfaces of large AI providers, a minute of audio costs a fraction of a cent to about six-tenths of a cent. OpenAI's list price for gpt-transcribe is $0.0045 per minute ¹. Human transcription costs far more: Rev charges $1.99 per minute for its human service, which is roughly 440 times the OpenAI price ^{2 3}. Those are list prices from October 2026, so check them before you budget.

AI transcription costs fractions of a cent per minute

Most AI transcription is sold per minute or per hour of audio, and the list prices differ by provider. AWS Transcribe's batch price is $0.006 per minute ⁴. OpenAI's smaller gpt-4o-mini-transcribe model is listed at $0.003 per minute ⁵. At that rate one hour of audio costs about $0.18 ⁶.

These are developer prices. You pay for the audio you send, not for a seat in an app, so a person who transcribes a few recordings a month through an app may pay a monthly fee rather than per minute. Some providers also give a free allowance. AWS includes 60 audio minutes a month for the first 12 months after signup ⁷.

Rev's human service costs about two dollars a minute

A human service charges for the people who listen and type. Rev's list price for human transcription is $1.99 per minute, with a stated accuracy guarantee of 99 percent or better and a delivery window of 12 hours or less ². For one hour of audio, that is about $119.40 ³. Court transcripts are priced by the page instead. A 2013 order from the District of Colorado set the ordinary transcript at $3.65 per original page ⁸, so the per-minute comparison does not apply to them.

It depends on the audio and on what you need

The cheapest headline price is not always the cheapest outcome. An AI draft with errors still needs a reader to check it, and that takes time. A transcript that needs an hour of correction can cost more in your time than a human service that delivers a finished file. The guide on human versus AI transcription explains the trade-off with accuracy figures.

Consumer transcription apps are priced differently

Many people search for transcription software, meaning an app with a monthly or annual plan. Those prices change often and vary by minutes included, file length and team size. We did not find a stable, independently checked price for consumer apps that we could verify today, so this answer covers the per-minute and per-hour prices that providers publish. Before you buy, read the current pricing page of the app and note the monthly minute limit and any per-file cap.

What to do

1. Estimate your minutes. Add up the audio you need transcribed each month. Multiply by the per-minute rate of the service you are considering.
2. Start with AI. At these prices, a first draft costs cents and gives you a text to correct.
3. Check the parts that matter. Spend your time on names, numbers and the sections your decisions depend on.
4. Pay for a human only for the hard sections. Use a human service for poor audio or for a record that must be certified.

For a fuller comparison, see the answer on how accurate AI transcription is and the time an hour of audio takes. If you want a transcript without any machine recognition at all, see how to get a transcript without AI. Our current prices are on the pricing page.