The Freelance Rate Nobody Talks About: Start With Your Time

Most advice about setting a freelance rate starts and ends with the market. Look at what others charge. Research industry benchmarks. Know your worth. This is all reasonable advice, and I use it – but only as a starting point.

Market rate is the floor. What I charge is built on top of that, adjusted upward based on two things: what my skills are actually worth, and what I actually need. The market tells me the minimum, and if you’re working across borders, the fees that eat into that minimum are worth understanding before you set anything. Everything above that is a conversation between me and my own arithmetic.

Here is how that arithmetic works.

I work Monday to Friday, eight hours a day. That gives me forty hours a week, which is the total I have to offer across all clients, combined. Not forty hours per client. Forty hours total. This sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but I spent years behaving as if hours were somehow renewable, taking on more than the week could hold and then wondering why everything felt frantic.

Once I accepted the ceiling, everything else became simpler. I know how many clients I can realistically serve. I know how to price myself: take what I need to earn in a month, divide by the hours available, and that number is the starting point for my rate. If the market rate is higher, I adjust up. If my skills and the complexity of the work justify more, I charge more. Clients accepting without hesitation is usually a sign you can go higher. Clients pushing back repeatedly is information too.

Anything that exceeds my forty hours goes to someone I trust to handle it well. Not to build a team or manage people, but because the work exists and shouldn’t be turned away just because my week is full. This only works because I have one reliable person willing to take the overflow. I don’t take that for granted.

In the early years, I priced low. That’s normal and probably necessary — you’re building a track record, establishing trust, figuring out what you actually know how to do. I raised my rate gradually as the work became more complex. Inflation was part of it. Difficulty and complexity were the bigger part. When you can handle something most people can’t, that’s worth something.

The test I use: propose the rate, watch the reaction. Clients who accept without blinking are telling you something. Clients who consistently push back on price, even as the work gets harder, are telling you something too. Over time, this feedback shapes what you charge and who you work with.

The other thing that changed everything was deciding that no single client could represent more than thirty percent of my income.

Early on I let one client become the majority of my revenue. It felt like security. What it actually meant was that every email from that person carried disproportionate weight – every slow reply, every “let’s revisit this next quarter.” When someone controls the majority of what you earn, you stop making decisions freely. You start making them from quiet anxiety, whether you realise it or not.

Thirty percent is my hard ceiling now. It means I need enough clients to spread the work across, but not so many that I can’t give each one proper attention. I negotiate from a position of choice rather than need, and the work is better for it.

None of this produces a perfect, stable income. Slow months are still slow. But there is a difference between “I don’t know what’s coming” and “I don’t know what I need or what I’m worth.” The first is just freelance life. The second is a problem you can actually solve.

Set your hours. Know your floor. And if you haven’t already separated your personal and business finances, that’s worth doing before anything else. Price upward from your skills and your needs. Make sure no one client becomes indispensable. Everything else is negotiable.