Setting your freelancer rate (marketing)

[Hairybaker]

Any ideas how best to do it? I don’t want to over or under sell myself! Annual salary roughly £60k for an equivalent role and this is a one off project. I estimate it to take around 20 hours of work over a few weeks (so not 3 straight days if that makes sense!)

Divide your ft salary by 200 working days( a good estimate for freelance) to give you a baseline. £300 per day. So say 3 working days? £900 as a min?

Estimate how log it will take x your hourly rate
Make sure your hourly rate includes time allowed for admin, tax and contingency plus a nominal holiday/ pension allowance. Then add 15% for being freelance.

£300 would be a good amount - mate of mine recently asked my opinion, I suggested £275 a day and they jumped at it. Should have asked for £300!

I've never known a freelancer work for less than £50/hr.

Short term projects generally attract higher rates.

Is this a one off or likely to lead to more work? You can earn £1000 without registering for self assessment. So if it's a one off I would say £999.

If there is any chance of more (either with this client or others) then you could either give a higher fixed fee or say you will charge monthly for hours actually spent (this gives more scope for the project to expand and net you more overall).

Take your target salary and add any non bookable overhead costs, e.g. rent, heating, t&s, professional fees such as accountancy and legal, pensions, health insurance, institutional fees, training, liability, printer cartridges etc.

Take 52 weeks, take 5 weeks off for holiday, 8 days for bank holidays, at least a week for sickness.

Take off any time you spend doing non chargeable admin, answering emails, your time connected with overheads above.

Take a deep breath, sit down, pour a drink, and divide one by the other.

Et voilà!

(I reckon you're looking at £60ph pretty quickly)

I'm freelance marketing and would have similar salary expectations if I went full time, on a good day!

In the non-profit small organisations £250-350 per day is a normal range for marketing with an element of strategy. £350-450 for more obviously strategic consultancy. Larger organisations or corporates will pay more but might also expect more unpaid overtime. Don't touch anything below £200 as it's guaranteed to be pretty entry level work (scheduling tweets etc) unless you know them and it's mates rates for a favour etc.

A good negotiating tactic is to go in at the higher range but say you'd discount for a longer/regular booking or price it up by project. So go in at £350 if you were thinking £300 but make it look like they're getting 4 days for the price of 3 or whatever. You will definitely end up doing more days than you think, anyway, especially if it's an hour here and there.

Thanks all, I’d calculated about £350 too so looks in keeping :)