What it costs
What fact-checking costs — and what you're actually buying
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 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
A separate free preview: A free outside view of your own pages
A separate editorial preview of one extract; it does not read the whole book or do the specialist job this page describes. Send up to 5,000 words. You get back what the draft appears to be doing to somebody who wasn't there when you wrote it, the strongest thing in it named, the exact place a reader starts to drift, and three revision priorities in order.
A separate editorial preview of one extract; it does not read the whole book or do the specialist job this page describes. An AI-assisted read of your own pages. Not a human edit, not a line edit, and not a scored report.
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.
About Your Book Pro
Your Book Pro is a book-writing platform built in Britain. Start with an idea, notes, half a draft, a podcast, or a finished manuscript, and use our purpose-built AI tools for planning, feedback, editing, proofreading, cover designs, and to create print-ready files. Writing is totally free: you can type, upload or speak your book as much as you like, and use only the editing tools you need with Plus, or go unlimited with Pro.
Produce world-class drafts at the fraction of the cost of hiring a human editorial team.
Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits, and a plain export of your own words is free.
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
Email me my free review linkQuestions 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.