We have developed a simple method for calculating the ionospheric photoelectron flux that uses the concept of average electron energy loss to simplify the calculation of the degraded electron spectrum. This method, which requires only a knowledge of the total inelastic electron impact cross sections, rather than a detailed knowledge of the many partial cross sections can be used for the calculation of all secondary ion and excited state production rates. We estimate that the use of an average energy loss reduces the computation time by a factor of 10 and considerably reduces storage requirements. The simple model is designed to provide ionospheric chemistry workers with a convenient means of obtaining photoelectron spectra similar to that which is currently available for obtaining neutral densities. It is shown that the ionospheric photoelectron flux in the local equilibrium region is directly proportional to the attenuated solar EUV flux, which is a function only of the total neutral column density, and is independent of the neutral density composition. Therefore, electron impact cross sections can be chosen so that the simple method may also be used to parametrize the measured ionospheric photoelectron fluxes.