How to price your services as a freelancer
Pricing your services as a freelancer can be tricky. Even some of the most experienced freelancers still have trouble figuring out what to charge.
And the reason it’s so tough is that there is no right or wrong price.
So if there’s no right or wrong, how do you decide what to charge? How much should your clients be paying? How do you price your freelance services fairly and still make a decent living?
Why pricing matters so much
Lots of people think setting their prices high makes them greedy.
But that’s just not true.
It’s not greedy to want enough money to live a happy, comfortable life.
If you earn enough to be happy, you’re in a better position to help other people. If you’re barely making ends meet, you will be distracted by your financial stress and anxiety.
You are not being greedy by wanting to get paid for your time, knowledge, skills and experience. Those things are valuable, even if you are just starting your freelance career.
And if you genuinely sell something of value, it’s not unreasonable to sell it for what it is worth.
There’s this idea that keeping our prices low is honourable – it means we can help more of the people who need us. But often the opposite turns out to be true.
Low pricing is bad for your clients
Let’s say you charge £500 per project and you need to earn £2000 a week to cover all your costs. This means you need four projects a week. You have to divide your attention between four clients.
But if you charge £1000 a project, you only need two clients, and you can give those two clients double your time.
How much better is the quality of your service going to be if you only have to split your attention between two projects instead of four?
And let’s say you charge £2000 a project. Now you only have one client to give all your attention to. How much better is the quality of work going to be compared to when you were splitting your time between four clients?
That’s why I limit my 12-week programme to three new places per month. That way, I can give all my clients the best possible service. I could take on more, but then the quality of my service wouldn’t be at the level I want it to be.
Low pricing means more work for you
The problem with charging low prices is it means you need to do more work.
If we stick with the example above, we can see that working with one or two clients is going to involve less work than working with four.
But it’s not just the time spent doing the work that you need to consider. It’s the time it takes to actually generate those clients in the first place.
How many leads do you have to generate to attract four new clients? How many hours do you need to dedicate to marketing to generate those leads? How many calls, meetings and proposals do you need to make time for to convert those leads into paying clients?
If you only have to do work for one client per week and you only need to win one new client per week, that’s going to be a lot less work than having to do work for four clients a week and win four new clients each week.
Low pricing can lead to burnout
Let’s say your target is £4000 per month. You set an hourly rate of £50 so you need to bill 80 hours per month – around 20 hours per week.
But what if you can’t generate 20 hours of work every week? What if you have a really slow couple of weeks? You only do 40 hours of billable work for the whole month. You’re 40 hours short.
So the next month you need to make it up by working the extra 40 hours on top of the 80 you already need – a total of 120 hours (average 30 per week).
There are two problems with this. Firstly, how will you get the extra work? You’re going to need to get more clients which means you need time for marketing and sales, onboarding and so on.
And that’s on top of now having to find an extra 10 hours per week for doing the billable work.
So what if you can’t make up the extra and you’re in deficit the following month too? And you’re already cancelling plans so you can take on more work. You’re working evenings and weekends to fit in the extra hours. You’re starting to get anxious.
Maybe you offer a special rate – £40 an hour. But now you need to work even more hours to make the money you need.
You’re going to wind up miserable, overworked and burnt out.
This is why setting your rates based on the minimum you need to earn is a bad idea. Using hourly pricing is also a bad idea (I’ll explain why shortly).
Low pricing limits your ability to grow your business
If you’re filling your time with low-paid work, you’re never going to have time to work on your business.
Your time will be spent trying to get as many clients as possible and then trying to give those clients a great service. This is how so many freelancers get stuck in the feast and famine cycle.
When freelancers hit a famine phase, they usually have a big push on sales and marketing.
They go to networking events, spend more time on social media, write blog posts or make videos. They have more time for calls and meetings, following up on emails, and putting together detailed proposals.
All that effort pays off, and they get an influx of work. But now they have so much work they don’t have time for all that other stuff. Marketing gets neglected. Calls, emails and proposals get missed or rushed.
So then, when the busy period is over, they have no more work lined up. And then what happens? Another mad push on marketing and business development.
And round and round the cycle goes.
You need to find a price point that means you don’t have to take on as much work as possible every month.
If you do, you’ll have more time to work on your business so you can generate leads consistently, do more of the work you actually enjoy doing, and grow your business or create passive income streams.
What needs to be covered in your pricing
One of the biggest traps new freelancers fall into is pricing their services based on what they want to earn.
Let’s say, you decide that matching your old salary is a realistic target for year one. So you divide that amount by 12 months and base your pricing on that figure.
Unfortunately, that’s not going to work. Your pricing needs to cover more than just your personal income, so here are some of the things you need to think about before you pluck a figure out of thin air:
Business costs
Your expenses will depend on what your business does. Do you need an office? Do you need to travel? Do you need software and licences? Do you need IT support? Do you need an accountant?
Don’t go mad with your spending, but don’t scrimp either.
Prioritise. Don’t spend thousands on a fancy new website you don’t need and then make do with free versions of stuff because you don’t want to spend £10 a month on the paid version.
When setting your budget, account for the essentials, but also give yourself a budget for stuff that will help you build your business (e.g. training and development) and emergencies (e.g. laptop breakdowns).
Your personal income
This will depend on your personal circumstances, which differ for everyone. I need my business to generate a full-time income for me, but that’s not the case for everyone.
Some people freelance around employment. Some people have financial support from other people (a partner or parent). If you don’t need to earn much from your business, you’ll have more flexibility in what you charge and you can be selective about the type of work you take on.
But if you do want your business to be your full-time income, then you need to think about what that needs to be.
What do you need for the essentials – mortgage or rent, bills and food? Add a bit on for non-essentials and luxuries. Be realistic. It can take time to build your business, so don’t expect to be earning millions in year one.
Tax
Your tax bill will depend on how your business is structured (sole trader or limited company) and how much you earn. It’s a good idea to set aside 20% of your earnings each month to cover your tax. If you have some extra after you’ve paid your tax bill, you can always pay yourself a bonus.
Pension
Consider whether you want to pay into a pension – you’ll need to account for this in your pricing if you do. How much you pay in is up to you (and will depend on your personal circumstances). A quick Google search suggests that somewhere between 8% and 20% of your annual earnings is a good starting point.
Holidays, sickness and other time off
Too many freelancers go years without a holiday because they just can’t afford to lose a week’s work. This is not a healthy way to live. You might not be interested in taking holidays abroad, but you should take breaks from work. You can’t give your best to your business or your clients if you are burnt out and stressed.
You’ll also need to make provisions for sickness, emergencies and other unforeseen situations that mean you can’t work. You might have weeks where you can work 50 or 60 hours. You might have weeks where you can’t do any work at all. Your pricing will need to account for this.
Non-paid work
You’ll also need to consider how much of your time is needed for non-paid tasks. This is different for every business and will vary.
In the early days of freelancing when you don’t have many clients, a higher percentage of your time will be spent on lead generation. As you build up your client base, you might find you can ease off on some of the marketing. You’ll also need to account for any admin tasks.
If you’re new to freelancing and have no idea how much time will be taken up on calls, meetings, admin, marketing, finance, travel, email, proposals and so on, I would suggest you base it on 50% of your working hours being non-billable work. It might be higher or lower, but this could be used as a starting point on which to base your pricing.
If you are already an experienced freelancer, track your time for the next two to four weeks. How much time do you spend on non-paying tasks?
Setting your rates
Let’s get real for a minute. If you think you can start a freelance business on Monday and be making six figures a month by Friday, you’re in for a big fat shock.
Despite what the get-rich-quick-gurus would have you believe, you can’t have a six figure business overnight.
It doesn’t happen.
According to government data published in July 2024, the average annual pre-tax salary in the UK is £35,828.
So if it really was easy to make a six-figure salary as a freelancer, more people would be quitting their average pay jobs to do it.
But they’re not.
Because it’s not easy.
So even though you might have a huge earnings target in mind, you need to be realistic about what you can charge and earn when you’re starting out.
And this will depend on how many hours you want to work, how many clients you can attract, your skills, your ability to deliver, the way your services are packaged and so much more.
What others in your industry are charging
You can decide your hourly rate is £100, but if the industry average is £40, you’ll need to be able to convince people you’re worth more than double.
That’s not to say you should just look at what your competitors are charging and then charge the same. Their circumstances might not be the same as yours. Their costs might be lower – they might be mortgage-free with someone else paying all their bills.
Or they might not be as good as you. They might not have as much experience. They might not deliver as high-quality service.
And their pricing might not be right. They might have to work twice as many hours as they’d like to just to make enough to live on.
So look at what others are charging – it can be a useful guide when you’re starting out – but don’t base your prices purely on the industry average.
Your experience
You might have worked in the industry for a long time and have built a great network of contacts who are queuing up to work with you. Or you might be starting with no clients.
If it’s the first one, and you’re in demand, you can set your prices as high as you like (until people stop agreeing to them).
But if it’s the second one, you might have to work a bit harder to build up to those high prices.
Now that doesn’t mean you should charge lower than everybody else. You might be new to freelancing, but that doesn’t mean you’re not offering something of value.
But you do need to be able to attract clients. And if you’re quoting higher than average prices, but have no proven experience of delivering what you say you can, you’ll need to have some good sales skills.
The hours you can work
You might have grand plans of working five hours a week and earning a six-figure salary. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it doesn’t really work like that.
In the early days of your business when it’s just you, you’re going to need to put in some work.
Now, that’s not to say you have to be working 80-hour weeks – you don’t. But if you can only dedicate yourself to your business part-time, you’ll need to factor this into your earning potential.
Remember, what you earn will depend on how many clients you can attract. If you’re only working one day a week, you will be limited.
The way your services are packaged
This will depend entirely on what you sell.
Some people charge an hourly or daily rate. Some people charge a fixed rate, for example, £X per blog post. Some people have retainer packages.
The way you package your services and the services you sell will influence your pricing.
For example, let’s say you offer one-to-one services and a one-hour session is £200.
However, if you deliver your service as a one-hour group session, you could charge £100 per person. If you get five people, you make £500 for the same amount of time.
And if you turn it into a pre-recorded webinar, it might take you a couple of hours to create it, but you can sell it at any price and there is no limit on how many times you sell it.
This is why the way you package your services is important. Do your services require your time? And how are you going to charge for that time?
Your sales and marketing ability
The biggest mistake new freelancers make is underestimating how important marketing and sales are. Being good at what you do isn’t enough – you have to convince people to pay you for it.
And if you can’t do that, it doesn’t matter what your fees are because nobody is paying them.
But if you learn how to market yourself effectively, you can attract the right kind of clients – clients who want to work with you because they believe you are the best fit.
Ideally, you want to put yourself in a position where potential clients are already 80 or 90% sure they want to work with you before they get in touch. That way, all you have to do is nudge them over the line.
What you don’t want is people contacting you who are only concerned with cost. Why spend hours on calls, in meetings, and putting together proposals for people who are only interested in finding the cheapest option. Leave the price buyers for your competitors – focus on getting the clients who are going to value what you do.
When people value what you do, they are happy to pay a decent rate for it. And when you’re getting paid what you’re worth, you’ll be able to deliver a much better service.
Why pricing by the hour is a bad idea
Are you thinking about pricing your freelance services by the hour? Do you already base your fees on an hourly rate?
It might seem like the easiest way to structure your pricing, but it’s actually a bad idea. Charging by the hour is not good for you and it’s not good for your clients.
So if you are charging by the hour, it might be time to rethink the way you price your work.
Hourly pricing limits your earning potential
There are only so many hours in a day, which means there are only so many hours you can work.
Let’s say your price is £50 per hour. The maximum hours you can work in a day is 24 so the maximum you can earn in a day is £1200. And that’s if you work all day with no sleep and no breaks, which we both know is not realistic or sustainable.
So let’s be realistic and say you can work eight hours a day, five days a week. Your maximum earnings per day is now £400 a day, which works out at £2000 per week.
Not a bad income. But chances are you won’t earn that every week. Some weeks you’ll want or need to take time off for holidays, sickness, emergencies and a whole host of other things.
Also, you won’t necessarily have enough work to fill eight hours a day every week. A client might suddenly decide they no longer need your services and that work might make up 25% of your weekly hours.
Plus, if you’re working eight-hour days doing billable work, when are you doing non-billable work such as marketing, networking, travelling, calls, meetings, replying to emails, admin, invoicing, dealing with tech issues and all the other things that go with running a business.
So you’re probably not going to hit your £2000 max every week. In fact, chances are you’ll only hit it occasionally.
Hourly pricing offers less flexibility
If you’ve based your pricing on what you need to earn to cover costs, income, tax, holidays and so on, you’ll have a target for what you need to bill each month.
But what happens if you don’t hit those targets?
What happens if you have a slow month or a couple of slow months?
What if you need to complete 80 hours of work per month to hit your target, but you only generate 40 hours one month? You can try and make it up the following month by working 120 hours, but what if you still can’t generate enough work?
Because you’re limited as to how many hours you can physically work, there’s only so long you can stand to be in deficit before it becomes impossible to catch up.
You might go on holiday for two weeks – that’s two weeks of no income.
You might lose a big client who accounts for 25% of your billable work.
There might be a downturn in the market so you just don’t win enough business.
There are lots of things that can impact your earning potential. And if you price by the hour based on your need to work a set number of hours each week or month, you create an inflexible business.
Billing by the hour makes it difficult for clients to budget
Let’s say you are a content writer who specialises in writing blog posts. When you start out, you set a rate of £50 per hour.
The first post takes you six hours so you bill £300.
But the next post causes you some problems. You spend longer on the research stage because you can’t find the information you need. Then the editing takes longer because you aren’t happy with the way the post flows so you end up rewriting a big chunk of it. Then the client asks for a few changes which adds another hour of work.
In total, it takes you 12 hours so you bill £600.
How do you think the client is going to feel when their bill is more than double what it was last time?
They could set you a limit – “We’re prepared to pay for up to six hours a month” – but what happens if you can’t fit the work into those hours? Or the quality is crap because you had to rush it?
It’s much better to charge a fixed price for work like this. Some months you might be faster, some you might be slower, but hopefully, it will balance out overall and your income won’t be as up and down.
The faster you get, the less money you make
Let’s stick with our above example. You’re a content writer writing blogs at £50 per hour.
When you start out, writing a blog post takes you around eight hours so you’re billing an average of £400 per blog post.
After a few months, you get quicker at writing posts. It now only takes you five hours, so you’re billing £250.
Better for your clients but not for you.
When you started, you only needed to write five blog posts to make £2000, now you have to write eight. That means you need to generate more clients.
That means more time spent on marketing. More time spent on client calls. More admin work. More clients to keep happy.
So you’re working more and splitting your attention across more clients but you’re not earning any more money for your efforts.
You’ll be penalised for being faster than a competitor
What happens if you offer the exact same service at the same rate as someone else, but you can do it in three hours while it takes your competitor six?
They’ll be getting paid twice as much as you for the same thing just because they are slower.
You’ll have to take on double the work to make the same money.
Doesn’t really make sense, does it?
An hourly rate doesn’t account for the complexity of different tasks
An hourly rate might work well if every task you do is the same. It requires the same level of concentration, physical exertion, knowledge and skill, and experience. It offers the same value to a client and so on.
But what if the tasks you do vary?
What if some tasks are easy and require very little brain power whereas other tasks are more complex and require a lot of energy? What if you can work on some tasks for five hours solid, but some tasks sap your energy after two? Should you charge the same price for both tasks?
What if one service you offer provides far more value to a client than another? Should that be billed at the same rate?
Hourly pricing doesn’t differentiate between tasks unless you set different rates for different things. But if you do that, it can start to get confusing for you and your clients.
How about using a daily rate?
Charging by the day is slightly better than charging by the hour because it usually means you’re working on chunkier projects. And that means your work isn’t as bitty.
Trying to generate 20 hours of work a week when your average client project only requires four hours is a challenge – you need to find five clients a week.
Trying to generate two days of work a week when your average client project requires six days of your time is a little more manageable.
Personally, I wouldn’t use day rates if you don’t know how long a project will take as it will have the same downsides as hourly pricing.
However, if you deliver consulting, coaching, training or so on, day rates can be a good way of pricing. A client can book you for two days of work per month and they know exactly how much it’s going to cost.
Using an hourly or daily rate as a guide
This can be a good way of pricing when you’re new to freelancing and you have no idea how much to charge for stuff.
Instead of quoting for work at an hourly rate or daily rate, use it as a guide to come up with a fixed project fee.
Set a realistic hourly rate. This needs to account for all your costs – business, personal, tax and so on. It also needs to be based on your capacity – how many hours can you realistically work each week?
When you need to quote on a project, work out roughly how long you think it will take and then multiply that by your hourly rate. This is the fixed rate you quote your client.
The benefit of quoting a fixed fee rather than an hourly rate is it allows you to get faster without losing out.
For example, you might estimate it will take eight hours to write a blog post for a client so you quote £400 (8 hours x £50 per hour). The next time you write a post for the same client, it might only take you six hours, but you can still quote £400 because the client has agreed a fixed fee, not an hourly rate.
If you quote on a project and it takes you longer than you expected, then next time you quote for a similar project you adjust your estimate. If you do it faster than you predicted, then good for you. Your client agreed to a fixed fee – they don’t need to know how long it took you.
Track your time so you get better at estimating how long projects will take. And make sure you increase your hourly rate as you get faster.
Once you’re more experienced and you’re better at generating clients, you can change your pricing structure.
How to increase your prices
If you’re already established as a freelancer, but you aren’t earning anywhere near what you’d like, it’s probably time for a price increase.
I know it can be daunting putting your prices up – I’ve been there. But nobody is going to offer you high-priced work – you need to be the one to make it happen.
The easiest place to start is to increase your prices for new clients.
Start by applying a 10-20% increase to any new clients and see if it affects your conversions. If it doesn’t, you can go up again.
Once you’ve started getting those higher-paying clients, you can increase prices for existing clients. You can do it gradually in increments, and it’s a good idea to give notice, rather than spring it on them. But if they value what you do, they’ll be happy to pay a little extra.
And if you do get some resistance, see it as an opportunity to drop some of those low-paying clients so you can focus on attracting clients who are prepared to pay what you are worth.
Price is just a number
When it comes to your pricing, there will almost always be a cheaper option or a more expensive option. You need to decide which end you want to sit closer to. Then tailor your marketing to the people who think you’re worth it.
That doesn’t mean you pick a price and then decide who can afford you. People with tons of cash can be complete cheapskates. While people with a modest income might be prepared to pay top dollar if they really want what you’ve got.
We all have different priorities when it comes to money. We scrimp in some areas so we can splurge in others. Some people buy clothes from charity shops so they can afford the latest iPhone when it comes out. Some people never eat out, so they have money for a luxury holiday every year.
Never make assumptions about what your ideal client can afford – they might have a low turnover business, but they might also be mortgage-free with a load of savings in the bank. If you can convince them you have something of value, they’ll have no problem finding the cash.
The important thing to remember is that your fees should reflect the quality of your service. If you knowingly don’t deliver value for money, you should take a long, hard look at yourself.
But if you genuinely offer something of value, there’s no reason not to charge accordingly.
And you can put any price you want on your services. You can be the lowest priced in your field or the highest. But price is just a number. It’s not cash in the bank.
It will only be cash in the bank if you can get people to pay it. And you can only do that if your marketing attracts the right people and you know how to convert them into clients.
I can help you with that part.
Need some help with your marketing strategy?
If you are struggling to consistently attract and convert the clients you want (at the prices you deserve), let me help you create a more effective marketing and sales strategy.
My 90-minute consultations are designed to help you figure out what actions you can take right now to play to your strengths and make the biggest impact on your results. Book your session here.
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If this is your first time here, thanks for reading.
I’m Lisa – owner of LS Mentoring, and author of the The Freelance Fairytale.
I help freelancers and small businesses attract more of the clients they want.
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