For the sake of this article let’s break the phases into 3. Where to start pricing your design services?Ī good place to start when figuring out how much to charge as a freelancer is determining the phase of your design career you’re in. When you freelance you have to pay for your own computer, Adobe subscriptions, insurance, CRM tools, website hosting, the list goes on and the expenses add up quickly! When you first start freelancing you can use in-house salaries as a marker but there are many other factors to consider when pricing a design project. Looking at how much a designer in a similar job title and experience level to you makes can be helpful to see where you stand, but if you’re a freelance designer you need to charge more than what an in-house designer makes. If you comb through the e ntries you can see there’s a very wide range. They created an anonymous survey that has almost 3,000 entries of people sharing their years of experience, company size, race, gender, and salary. I believe the more we talk about money and are transparent about how much we make in our design businesses the more it benefits the design community as a whole.Ī recent article by AIGA titled ‘ It’s Time for Graphic Design to Embrace the Radical Potential of Salary Transparency’ talks about the importance of transparency in the design community when it comes to graphic industry salaries.

Personally, I enjoy talking about money but I also understand that not everyone feels that way. I come from a white, middle-class family (aka lots of privilege), and growing up my family always talked openly about money. Pricing can be very tricky because it comes with a lot of existing negative feelings making it difficult to talk openly about.

After making a TikTok post about how much I charge for my branding projects blew up, I received a lot of questions about pricing and it got me thinking about how many designers struggle with it, I know I certainly did!

Freelance graphic design studio