The increase nobody will offer you

The number that stopped moving

Most independent creatives set a rate early, out of anxiety, and then keep it for years. The work gets better, the process gets faster, the market moves, the cost of living rises, and the number stays where a frightened beginner put it.

This does not correct itself. Nobody offers you more money. Clients who like you have no incentive to raise your rate, and the ones who would happily pay more never learn that you undercharge, because the figure they were given is the figure they assume.

So the increase has to be a decision with a date, and the two cases (new clients and existing ones) are completely different problems.

New clients: just change the number

For anybody you have not worked with, raising your price is not an event. There is no conversation, no announcement, no justification. You quote the new figure to the next enquiry.

The only difficulty is internal. The first few times you say a higher number you will feel it is too much, and you will be watching for a reaction that usually does not come, because the person on the other end has no idea what you charged last month.

Two observations that help. Your win rate should fall a little after an increase: if you are still winning nearly everything, the rise was too small. And the enquiries you lose at a higher rate are disproportionately the ones that would have been difficult, because price-sensitivity and demandingness correlate more often than not.

Existing clients: the mechanics that work

This is the part people dread, and there is a shape that makes it survivable.

Give notice, with a date. Not “I’m thinking of raising my rates”. A specific change from a specific month, sent six to eight weeks in advance. Notice is what converts it from a demand into a business fact they can plan around, and it lets anybody with a budget cycle handle it properly.

Apply it to new work, not to work already quoted. Anything already agreed completes at the agreed price. This costs you little and removes the main source of grievance.

Keep the message short and do not over-explain. Long justifications invite negotiation and sound apologetic. Compare:

“From 1 April my project rates increase by about 15%. Anything we have already agreed is unaffected, and I wanted to give you plenty of notice. I have enjoyed this year’s work and hope we keep going.”

against a paragraph about inflation, studio costs and experience gained. The first is a professional notification. The second is a request for permission.

Do not apologise, and do not ask. “I hope that’s OK” turns a decision into a negotiation you did not need to open.

Sizing it

Small, frequent increases are easier to absorb than rare large ones, for both sides. A rise in the range of ten to twenty per cent, once a year, is normal and rarely contested. A 60% jump after four years of no movement is arithmetically justified and will still feel like a different relationship to the client, because it is.

If you are badly underpriced, which is common after a few years of no increases, you may need a step change with some clients and you should expect to lose some of them. Plan for that before you send it, not after: know which clients you can afford to lose, and have the outreach running before the date.

What happens next

Three outcomes, in roughly descending order of frequency.

Nothing. Most clients accept it without comment. This is the most common result and it surprises people every time.

A conversation about scope. “We can’t go to that. Could we reduce what you do?” This is a good outcome. Reduce the scope to match the budget, which keeps your rate intact.

They leave. Some will, and a proportion of those were the least profitable. Losing the bottom of your client list when you raise prices is the mechanism working, not failing. What should worry you is losing the top.

The clients you cannot raise

Sometimes there is a genuine constraint: a small charity, a friend’s business, an arrangement you value for reasons other than money. Keeping a deliberate exception is fine, as long as it is deliberate, named and bounded: “I am doing this at below my rate because I want to, and it is one client, not five.”

What corrodes a business is the undeclared exception: several clients, each individually justified, quietly forming the majority of the work.

Raising the floor instead of the rate

There is a second lever people forget: the minimum project size. Even at an unchanged rate, refusing projects below a floor (say, nothing under a stated figure) improves the year substantially, because small projects carry almost the same overhead as large ones. The enquiry, the call, the quote, the kickoff, the invoicing and the handover happen whether the fee is 5,000 or 50,000.

Raising the minimum is usually easier psychologically than raising the rate, and often has a larger effect on annual income.

Evidence, if you need it for yourself

The record you keep of quoted price versus actual hours is what turns this from a nerve question into an arithmetic one. If a project quoted at a certain figure took 70% more hours than estimated, your effective rate on it is knowable, and it is usually a shock.

A year of that data makes the increase feel less like a demand and more like a correction, which changes how you say it, and clients respond far more to the steadiness of the delivery than to the number itself.

The limitation

Raising prices does not create demand. If you have no pipeline, a higher rate means no work at a higher rate, and the increase will feel like it caused the silence when it merely coincided with it.

The order matters: build the pipeline, then raise the price, and raise it at the moment you are busy enough to mean it. An increase announced from a position of having more work than you can take is a different message from the same words sent in a quiet month, even though the sentence is identical, because the first one you can afford to hold, and the second one you will quietly discount the first time somebody pushes back.