What to Charge as a Freelance Marketer (With a Free Pricing Calculator)

If you freelance or run a small agency, the hardest question of the year is not where the next client comes from. It is what to put on the quote. Too low and you spend the month working for less than you would have earned employed. Too high and you never find out, because they simply do not reply.

Most advice on this answers with a range someone made up. The freelance pricing calculator below answers with your number, because it starts from what you need to earn rather than from what other people charge. This guide explains the arithmetic behind it, where the real market figures live, and what to do when your rate and your target do not agree.

Why hourly pricing caps your income

Charging by the hour has one property nobody mentions when they recommend it: it converts every improvement you make into a pay cut.

Get faster at building landing pages and you bill fewer hours for the same page. Buy a tool that halves your editing time and you have just reduced your own invoice. Learn the thing that makes you good at this and the reward is less money. The client gets the benefit of your experience; you get to work more to stay level.

The trap is not obvious because it looks fair. You sold time, you delivered time, everyone got what they agreed to. But the client is not buying your hours — they are buying a landing page, or a month of social, or a video. What it cost you to make is your business, not theirs, in exactly the way that a restaurant's food cost is not on the menu.

The arithmetic is worth seeing once. Say a landing page takes you twenty hours and you bill $60 an hour: $1,200. A year later the same page takes you twelve hours, because you have built a component library and you know what questions to ask up front. At $60 an hour that page is now worth $720 to you. You got materially better at your job and took a 40% pay cut for it, and the client — who received a better page faster — paid less.

Now run it the other way. If the page had been quoted at $1,200 as a project, the improvement would have moved your effective rate from $60 to $100 an hour, and nobody would have needed to approve anything. Same work, same client, same invoice. The only thing that changed is which unit was on the quote.

That does not mean hourly is always wrong. It means hourly should be a unit of calculation, not a unit of sale. You need an hourly number to know whether a project is worth taking. You should almost never put that number on the invoice.

Everything below assumes that split: calculate in hours, quote in deliverables.

How much should I charge as a freelancer? Start with break-even

Before you can decide what to charge you need one number: the hourly rate at which you hit your income target, given the hours you can actually bill. That is your break-even. Below it you are subsidising your clients.

The formula the calculator uses:

break-even hourly =
    ( annual take-home target ÷ (1 − tax rate)  +  monthly overhead × 12 )
    ÷
    ( hours per week × (52 − weeks off) × (1 − non-billable share) )

Four things in that formula routinely get left out, and each one of them makes the answer too low.

1. Tax is not a rounding error

Your target is what you want to keep. Tax comes off before that, so the revenue you need is higher than the target — divide, do not subtract. At a 25% rate, a $60,000 take-home target needs $80,000 in profit, not $75,000. Getting this backwards is the single most common arithmetic error in freelance pricing.

2. Overhead is bigger than you think

Software subscriptions, insurance, accounting, hardware amortised over three years, a coworking desk, professional bodies, the paid tier of the tool you only use twice a month. Add it up honestly. Most solo operators land somewhere in the low hundreds per month before they have paid themselves anything.

3. You do not have 52 weeks

Employees get holiday and sick leave paid for. You do not — you pay for yours by charging enough during the weeks you do work. If you want four weeks off and expect to lose two more to illness, admin days, and dead time between contracts, that is 46 working weeks, not 52.

4. Most of your week is not billable

This is the one that breaks the maths for almost everyone. Pitching, proposals, invoicing, chasing invoices, calls that go nowhere, your own marketing, bookkeeping, learning the new version of the tool — none of it is billable and all of it is compulsory.

A 40-hour week is not 40 billable hours. Depending on how much of your work comes from repeat clients versus new business, expect a third or more of your week to disappear into work you cannot invoice. If you have never measured it, measure it for two weeks before you trust any number that depends on it.

Work it through once

Put your own figures into the calculator above and read the third output — at your current rate, how many billable hours a week you need. If that number is larger than the billable hours you actually have, your pricing is not ambitious, it is arithmetically impossible. That is not a motivation problem and no amount of working harder will fix it.

Hourly, per project, or monthly: which model, and when

Three models cover almost all freelance and small-agency work. They are not interchangeable and picking the wrong one causes most pricing arguments.

Per project — the default

Use when the deliverable can be described precisely: a landing page, a video, a brand refresh, a site migration.

Why it wins: the client buys an outcome and stops watching the clock, and every efficiency you gain is yours to keep. This is the model where getting better at your job actually pays you.

What kills it: vague scope. Per-project pricing without a written boundary is just hourly pricing where you absorb the overruns. Name the number of revision rounds, name what counts as a new project, and put both in the quote rather than the contract nobody reads.

Monthly retainer — for continuous work

Use when the work has no natural end: social media management, ongoing SEO, content production, maintenance.

Why it wins: predictable income for you, predictable cost for them, and the relationship stops being renegotiated every few weeks.

What kills it: defining the retainer as availability instead of output. "20 hours a month" invites the client to audit your time and turns quiet months into an argument. Define it as deliverables — posts, articles, a monthly client report, a response window — and the conversation stays about results.

Hourly — for genuinely unknown work

Use when nobody can scope it yet: diagnostics, rescue jobs, "can you look at why this is broken", consulting where the answer might be twenty minutes or two weeks.

Why it survives: it is the only honest model when the size of the job is unknowable in advance, and clients understand that.

What kills it: using it after the unknown becomes known. The moment the diagnostic finishes, the remedial work is scopeable — quote it as a project.

The rule underneath all three

It is worth knowing how the other side prices too. Marketing agency pricing is built on the same three models plus a layer you do not carry — account management, utilisation targets across a team, and a margin on every billed hour. That is why an agency quote for the same deliverable runs several times a solo rate, and why competing on price against one is a losing position: their number includes services you are not selling. If your client is weighing you against an agency rather than against another freelancer, the three things they are actually buying is the more useful frame.

Charge hourly for uncertainty, per project for defined outcomes, monthly for continuity. When you cannot decide, the tie-break is: who is carrying the risk that this takes longer than expected? If it is you, you need a bigger buffer. If it is genuinely unknowable, it should be hourly.

What the market actually pays, by deliverable

Here is where most pricing articles hand you a range and hope you do not ask where it came from. Rates vary by country, sector, seniority, and how the client found you, by margins large enough that any single global number is nearly meaningless. A $500 landing page and a $5,000 landing page are both real prices for real work.

So instead of a made-up range, here is how to find the number that applies to you, in descending order of usefulness.

1. What your last three clients paid

The most reliable benchmark you will ever get is your own history, and almost nobody uses it. Pull your last three projects of the same type. For each, divide the fee by the hours it actually took — not the hours you quoted. That effective hourly rate, compared against your break-even, tells you more than any survey.

If your effective rate on the work you enjoy is lower than on the work you dread, you have found something worth acting on.

2. What people post publicly

Freelancers discuss rates far more openly than employees do, and specific threads with specific numbers are easy to find. Search the deliverable plus the community name — r/freelance, r/web_design, r/marketing — and read the replies rather than the headline post. Two cautions: people round up when talking publicly, and the loudest numbers come from the top of the market.

3. Published rate surveys

Trade bodies and freelance platforms publish periodic rate research. These are worth reading for shape — how rates move with experience, which specialisms command a premium, where geography matters most — more than for a single figure to copy. Check the publication date before quoting anything from one; a rate survey more than two years old describes a different market.

4. What agencies charge for the same thing

An agency quote for the same deliverable is public, obtainable, and usually two to four times what a solo freelancer charges — because it covers account management, overhead, and margin you do not have. It is a useful ceiling: you are not competing with it, but it tells you what the client's alternative costs, which is what they are actually comparing you against.

Two places the spread is widest

Web design. Freelance web design rates cover a genuinely enormous range, because "a website" describes anything from a five-page template fill to a custom build with a CMS and a migration. Before comparing your number to anyone else's, make sure you are comparing the same deliverable: page count, whether design is included, whether content is included, and who is responsible for the copy. Most rate arguments in this category are really scope arguments.

Content writing. How much to charge for content writing is complicated by the unit — per word, per hour, and per piece all coexist, and they reward completely different behaviour. Per word penalises editing, which is where the quality is. Per hour penalises fluency. Per piece, with a stated word range and revision count, is the only one of the three that pays you for being good at it rather than for being slow or verbose.

How to read any benchmark

Whatever number you land on, run it through one test: at that rate, given my hours, do I hit my target? A market rate you cannot survive on is not a market rate for you — it is a signal to change something else, which is the next section.

How to raise your rates with existing clients

Almost everyone reading this is underpriced with at least one current client, and dreading the conversation. Four approaches, from easiest to hardest.

1. Raise the rate for new clients only, and wait

The lowest-risk move: put the new number on every new quote starting today, change nothing for existing clients. Your average rate rises as the client base turns over. It is slow, it costs you nothing, and it gives you evidence — after three clients accept the new rate, raising it with the old ones stops feeling like a bluff.

2. Raise on the natural boundary

Contract renewal, the new year, the start of a new phase of work. Announce it once, in writing, at least a month ahead: what the new rate is, when it starts, and nothing else. No apology, no paragraph of justification. Justifying invites negotiation about the justification.

The wording that works is short: "From 1 March my rate for this work will be X. Everything else stays the same." A client who is happy with the work almost always says fine. One who argues was going to have this conversation eventually anyway.

3. Re-scope instead of re-pricing

If a straight increase feels impossible, change what they get. The same monthly fee for fewer deliverables is a rate rise that does not read as one, and it is easier to accept because it sounds like you are protecting quality. This works particularly well on retainers that have quietly grown — the scope crept, so put it back.

4. Raise it and be willing to lose them

The one nobody wants and everybody eventually needs. If a client is well below your break-even and will not move, they are being subsidised by your other clients and by your evenings. Losing them frees the capacity that makes the rest of your pricing work.

Before you do it, check the calculator: if that client's hours went away and you replaced half of them at your new rate, are you better off? Usually the answer is yes, and seeing it as arithmetic makes it much easier to send the email.

What not to do

Do not discount to keep someone. A discount to prevent a departure teaches the client that your price responds to pressure, and every future quote will be tested. If you need to move on price, move on scope instead.

Making the price work: the other half of the problem

Everything so far has been about the numerator — what you charge. The denominator matters just as much and gets almost no attention.

Your effective hourly rate is fee divided by hours. Raise the fee and it goes up. Cut the hours and it goes up by exactly the same arithmetic — but without a conversation, without a negotiation, and without any risk of losing the client.

Take the default case from the calculator. A landing page quoted at $1,000 that takes you fourteen hours earns $71 an hour. The same page delivered in nine hours earns $111 an hour. That is a 55% raise that nobody has to approve.

The hours worth attacking are the mechanical ones. Not the thinking — the positioning, the structure, the judgement about what this particular client needs — that is what you are being paid for and it does not compress. What compresses is everything around it: assembling the first draft, formatting the deliverable, producing the variants, building the report, converting the thing you wrote into the thing they asked for.

That is the half Orkas is aimed at. It runs on your own machine, so client material stays on it, and the agents that matter here are unglamorous ones — writing the document, building the workbook, producing the variants. Real numbers, honestly stated: the model cost of generating a client deliverable this way sits in the low single-digit dollars, against a quote in the hundreds or thousands. The interesting figure is not the cost, it is the hours.

One caution. Automating the mechanical half only helps if you keep the time. If you fill the freed hours with more of the same work at the same price, you have built yourself a faster treadmill. Spend it on the pitch you never write, or on charging the same for less of your week.

Six pricing mistakes that cost the most

1. Quoting before you know the scope

Bad: a number in the first reply, because they asked and you did not want to seem evasive.
Good: "I can give you a firm number after a short call — I need to know X and Y." Every fast quote you have regretted was priced on a guess about something you could have simply asked.

2. Unlimited revisions

Bad: saying nothing about revisions, which means unlimited.
Good: "Includes two rounds of revisions; further rounds are billed at X." Not saying it does not make you generous, it makes the overruns invisible — including to you.

3. Not asking the budget

Bad: guessing, then anchoring low so you do not lose it.
Good: "What range were you working with?" The worst case is they will not say and you have lost nothing. The common case is that their number is higher than the one you were about to give.

4. Discounting to win the work

Bad: knocking 20% off to close it.
Good: reducing scope by 20% for the lower price. A discount says your first number was fiction, and it will be tested every time from then on.

5. Absorbing rework that is not yours

Bad: redoing it silently when the client changes direction, because it is easier than raising it.
Good: "That is a change of direction rather than a revision — here is what it adds." Absorbing it once sets the precedent for every project after.

6. Pricing from what you think they will pay

Bad: guessing at their budget and quoting under it.
Good: starting from your break-even and the value of the outcome. Pricing off imagined resistance is how people end up below their own costs while believing they are being commercially savvy.

Take the calculator with you

The pricing calculator above lives in this page and forgets everything when you close the tab. Pricing is not a one-off — your costs change, your target changes, and the mix of work changes — so it is worth having a version you keep.

The version worth keeping is one you generate rather than one you edit, because the inputs that matter to you are not the ones that matter to us. The prompt below builds it.

Generate your own pricing workbook

Give this to ExcelWriter:

Build a freelance pricing workbook with three sheets:

1) Inputs: annual take-home target, monthly overhead, tax rate, working
   hours per week, weeks off per year, non-billable share, and my
   current hourly rate. Every one of these is an editable cell.
2) Rates: compute break-even hourly, billable hours per year, and — at
   my current rate — the billable hours per week needed to hit the
   target, next to the hours I actually have. All live formulas
   referencing the input cells, not typed values.
3) Projects: a row per deliverable type with estimated hours, quoted
   fee, and effective hourly rate as a formula, so I can see which
   work actually pays.

Add an assumptions block: currency, reporting year, and a note on what
counts as non-billable.

One chart: effective hourly rate by deliverable type, as a native
editable bar chart starting at zero, bound to the value column only —
the label column is the category axis, not a data series.

Change the deliverable types to the ones you actually sell and run it again. Because the derived figures are formulas rather than typed numbers, next year is an update rather than a rebuild.

Frequently asked questions

How much do freelance marketers charge?

Widely enough that a single figure would mislead you. Rates move with country, specialism, years of experience, and whether the client came from a referral or a marketplace — and the spread between the bottom and top of any one of those factors is often more than double. The useful question is not what freelance marketers charge but what you need to charge: run your target income, your real billable hours, and your overhead through the calculator above, then compare that break-even against what your own last three projects actually earned per hour.

How much to charge for a landing page?

Work backwards from hours. Estimate the hours the page will take you including revisions and calls, multiply by your break-even hourly, and add a buffer for one round of scope creep. That is your floor. Then check it against what agencies in your market quote for the same thing — usually several times a solo rate, because it covers overhead you do not carry — and against what your own comparable projects earned. Quote per project rather than per hour, and state the number of revision rounds in the quote itself.

How much to charge for social media management?

Price it as a monthly retainer defined by deliverables, not by hours of availability. Count what you will actually produce — posts, stories, community response time, the monthly report — estimate the hours, and multiply by your break-even. Retainers are where scope creep is most expensive, because it compounds every month rather than ending with the project, so define the boundary in the agreement and revisit it at renewal.

Should I charge hourly or per project?

Per project whenever the deliverable can be described precisely, because it is the only model where getting faster increases your income rather than decreasing it. Hourly only when nobody can scope the work in advance — diagnostics, rescue jobs, open-ended consulting. Monthly retainer when the work has no natural end. Either way, calculate in hours and quote in deliverables.

How do I raise my rates with an existing client?

Announce it in writing, once, at least a month before it takes effect, on a natural boundary such as renewal or the new year. Say what the new rate is and when it starts; do not justify it. If a straight rise feels impossible, reduce the scope for the same fee instead, which achieves the same effective increase without reading as one. Do not discount to prevent a departure — it teaches the client that your price responds to pressure.

Can I use the calculator and workbook commercially?

Yes. Use them for your own pricing, for client work, rebrand them, change the formulas. There is no attribution requirement. The calculator runs entirely in your browser and your figures are never sent anywhere.

Pricing is two numbers, not one: what you charge, and what it costs you in hours to deliver. Most advice only addresses the first, which is why so many freelancers raise their rates and still feel like they are running to stand still. Work out your break-even, quote in deliverables, and then go after the mechanical half of the delivery — that second number is the one you can move without anyone's permission.