Most magazines won't tell you what they pay

Over five days in September 2026 I opened roughly 285 publication websites across the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, looking for one thing: a stated rate of pay.

Thirty-three made it into BRYME's database. That is a hit rate of about 12%.

The failures are more interesting than the successes.

What actually goes wrong

Roughly a third of guideline pages don't exist where you'd expect. Guessing URLs is a losing strategy — I learned this expensively. Across two early batches of guessed addresses, about a third resolved. The rate, when it exists, almost never lives at `/submit` or `/contact`. It lives at paths like `/pages/about/the-magazine/submissions/` or `/submissions/short-story-submission-guidelines.php`. You have to search for the exact page, not navigate to it.

Many publications 403 an automated request but are perfectly alive. Litro, History Today, Aesthetica, The Critic, Vittles, New Internationalist and Granta all refused a plain request while working fine in a browser. A dead-looking magazine is often just a firewall.

Mainstream consumer magazines publish nothing. I checked twenty-five — New Scientist, Prospect, New Statesman, Woman's Weekly, Dalesman, The Great Outdoors, Slightly Foxed, The Bookseller, Physics World, Chemistry World, The Wire. Zero published a rate. Not one. If you want to know what a big consumer title pays, you have to pitch, get commissioned, and ask.

And a large share of small magazines simply do not say. Granta, The London Magazine, Mslexia, Hinterland, Modern Poetry in Translation, Australian Book Review and Island all confirm in writing that they pay contributors. None publishes a figure.

The three that don't pay at all

This is the part that should bother you.

Three publications that appear on widely circulated "magazines that pay writers" lists state plainly on their own pages that they do not pay:

• Acumen — "We cannot pay for published poems or articles."
• The Learned Pig — does not pay contributors.
• Elsewhere — "no member of the Elsewhere team is paid."

These were not hard to find. Each statement is on the magazine's own submissions page, in plain English. Anybody compiling a paying-markets list who had opened the page would have caught it.

Which tells you how those lists are actually made: copied from each other, and from older versions of themselves.

The aggregators are wrong more often than you'd think

I used directories and listicles to find candidate URLs — that is what they are good for. Every figure was then re-checked at source. The corrections were not marginal:

Two of those are underestimates, which merely costs a writer confidence. Two are overestimates, which wastes a writer's time. One sends people to submit unpaid work to a market they believe pays.

There is no malice in this. Rates change, magazines update pages, lists ossify. But it means a rate you read anywhere other than the publication's own current page is a rumour, and it should be treated as one.

Why publications stay quiet

Having read several hundred of these pages, I think there are four honest reasons, only one of which is bad.

The rate genuinely varies. Commissioned journalism is negotiated per piece. A single figure would be a lie.

Funding is unstable. Small magazines run on grants. Westerly says it aims to pay Australian Society of Authors rates "when possible, depending on Westerly's funding." That is honest, and it is also why they cannot print a number.

They are embarrassed. A magazine paying £20 a poem knows how that reads. Publishing it invites a conversation they would rather not have.

Or the quiet part: ambiguity is cheaper. A writer who does not know the rate does not negotiate it. This is the reason nobody states, and it is the reason a rate-transparency norm would help writers more than almost any other change in the market.

What the transparent ones have in common

The publications that do publish exact figures skew heavily toward one profile: small, grant-funded, and constitutionally committed to treating writers well.

Pellicle publishes a full rate card — £375 features, £525 long reads, £675 photo essays, on a £0.25/word basis. Briarpatch publishes three tiers by article type. Prairie Fire publishes a whole rate sheet, by genre, with maximums. Westerly lists five rates and names the association standard it is aiming at.

None of these are large. All of them are explicit. Transparency here is a values position, not a function of budget.

What to do with this

Never trust a rate you did not read on the publication's own current page. Including the ones in BRYME — every record links to its source so you can check it yourself, and every record carries the date it was verified.

Treat "we pay" without a figure as a real signal, not a dodge. Granta, Mslexia, MPT and ABR all pay. They just won't say how much. That is worth pitching; it is not worth assuming a number.

Ask. The rate is a normal thing to ask about after a commission and before you start. Writers treat this as impolite. Editors do not — they deal with it every day.

Expect the deep path. If a magazine's submissions page has no rate, look for a separate "contributor payments" or "rates of payment" page. Prairie Fire keeps its rate sheet on a completely separate URL from its guidelines. So do others.

The number that stays with me

Two hundred and eighty-five sites. Thirty-three usable records.

The gap is not laziness on the part of magazines, mostly. It is a market convention that has never been challenged, in which the price is the one piece of information the buyer does not publish.

Writers are the only professionals I can think of who routinely begin work without knowing the fee. That is not because the fee is unknowable. It is because nobody makes it easy to find out — and because the alternative has never been built.

The 33 records from this research are live now, covering the UK, Canada and Australia. Every one links to the guidelines page it came from and the date it was checked.