Freelance Work - What To Charge Part I
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Whether you’ve been working in a creative field using your creativity for a long time or whether you’ve just started, it’s important to know what your work is worth. If you charge too little, many won’t take you seriously (no one wants to hire an amateur). Yet if you charge too much, your clients will either
1) never hire you or
2) never hire you again.
You may think that figuring out to charge is complete arbitrary, but that’s not so. Every market and industry has rates, you just need to figure out where you fit and weigh the costs. You need to know your industry, decide on your level of expertise & experience, and charge per hour accordingly.
Each industry has a rate that they work within. Across the board in US, most graphic designers make around $22 an hour working full-time for a single organization. Writers receive $24 per hour as an author (based on 5-9 years of experience). The average web designer also pulls in $24 per hour. And professional musicians and singers? About $25 per hour for 1-4 years of experience (more when you’re younger and have a longer career ahead of you). You also have to take into consideration the population of the city or town you live in. Cities that have a higher income per capita and/or cost of living will often have higher pay scales.
You can find the average of the US or any other country by typing in “average pay fill-in-the-blank-with-your-work.” (Note: All stats taken from Payscale.com and Salary.com, both are usually fairly realistic and offer research on a wide range of industries.)
The level of expertise and experience vary from person to person. Expertise relates to how well you know your line of work. It measures you as an amateur or an expert…or somewhere in between the grid. The more education you have and the more you’ve applied it, the more expertise you’ve acquired. If you went to school and received a degree in your field, you have two or four years of expertise. Yet, if during school you also interned, worked in your field, or did freelance project, that is also additional time. For example, if you worked as an assistant to a graphic designer during your second year as an intern and that got hired the year after, that’s two more years. If during your Senior year, you worked freelance on a myriad of projects, that’s an additional year. Thus you have a total of 7 years of expertise and deserve a that type of pay.
The same goes for experience. You can add up your years in the same way. Yes, school does get included. If you’re trying to get a full-time position though, they will often not include your schooling and consider you a “recent grad”, which equals lower pay. Freelance work is different. If you can use all of your work and show it off online to gain more clients, then it definitely counts and benefits you. In the end, experience must be added into the equation of your hourly worth.
If you’re freelancing, you can estimate that about 44% of your time will be spent on administrative and marketing tasks. Simply put, administrative tasks keep you organized through e-mails, phone calls, billing, and so on. Marketing aspects keep your website updated, your Google AdSense hits high, and your potential and past clients well-informed. You can expect to take half of your day doing these types of tasks. That is, any task that doesn’t cause you to work on your current project(s). Because of this, your pay rate should be at least twice as much as the above averages. That means, you should charge $50 an hour to create that small businesses website if you’re a web designer. But how do you calculate your project hours so you can bill the appropriate amount?
L’voe,
Jenn “Branden” O’Brien
Creative Consultant–connecting the creative world to the business industry one musician, artist, and writer at a time.*
Visit LvoeStudios.com to learn how creative consulting can help you increase your creativity within your business, music, artistry, or writing today.
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