Fact-checking costs £25–£60 an hour, so roughly £600–£2,500 for a non-fiction book. The total is driven by claim density rather than length — a memoir with forty checkable claims and a business book with four hundred are different jobs at the same word count.
What it costs
What fact-checking costs — and what you're actually buying
What good looks like
- Every checkable claim traced to a source, not to another secondary account
- Quotations verified against the original, not against what the internet says
- A log of what could not be verified
- Willingness to say a well-known fact is wrong
What your book will actually cost
Four questions — genre, length, what you have already, what you want at the end — and we send a costed plan for your book.
What you are actually buying
Fact-checking verifies the claims, quotes, dates and statistics in a manuscript against primary sources. It is standard for journalism and increasingly expected for serious non-fiction.
Why it costs that
Fact-checking is priced by the hour and the total is driven by claim density rather than length. A memoir with forty checkable claims and a business book with four hundred are different jobs at the same word count — which is why quotes vary so widely and why any checker will want to see the manuscript before pricing it.
How to spend less
Extract the claim list yourself first. Building the list — every number, date, quotation and named person, located by page — is where the first several billable hours go, and it is mechanical work you can do. Then rank by consequence and have a professional verify only the claims where being wrong actually matters.
What good looks like
- Every checkable claim traced to a source, not to another secondary account
- Quotations verified against the original, not against what the internet says
- A log of what could not be verified
- Willingness to say a well-known fact is wrong
Questions to ask them
- Do you check against primary sources?
- What do you do with claims you cannot verify?
- Have you fact-checked in my subject area?
Red flags
- Checking that consists of searching the web
- No log of unverifiable claims
- A flat fee regardless of how claim-heavy the book is
Honestly
The dangerous claims are not the ones you were unsure about — you checked those. They are the ones you were certain of: the famous quotation nobody said, the statistic that was true in 2019, the date you have repeated until it stopped feeling like a fact.
What Your Book Pro does here
Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.
These prices are here to be used, not to sell you something — brief a freelancer with them, sanity-check a quote, or work out what you actually need. Where Your Book Pro changes the arithmetic, the page says so; where it does not, it says that too.
The dangerous claims are not the ones you were unsure about — you checked those. They are the ones you were certain of: the famous quotation nobody said, the statistic that was true in 2019, the date you have repeated until it stopped feeling like a fact.
What it costs
| What you are buying | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly | £30–£60/hr | Comparable to copyediting band, upward for specialist subjects |
| Non-fiction book, claim-heavy | £600–£2,000 | 20–35 hrs at the above |
CIEP suggested minimum rates effective 1 March 2026; Books.by; publishing.co.uk; The Ghostwriters Agency. Dated 9 September 2026.
Check your claims
Get my costed planQuestions people ask
- Do publishers fact-check books?
- Most trade publishers do not systematically. The author warranty in a standard contract places accuracy on the author.
- How much does fact-checking cost?
- £25–£60 an hour; roughly £600–£2,500 for a non-fiction book, driven by claim density.
- Does a copy-editor fact-check?
- No. A good one raises queries when something looks wrong, and that is a courtesy, not a scope.
- What counts as a primary source?
- The original record: the study, the census return, the filing, the judgment. A news article's summary of a study is not one.