✍️ How to Calculate Your Hourly Rate as a Freelance Writer

Plus: a downloadable hourly rate calculator for paid subscribers!

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately from writers who are curious about what they should be charging.

So today’s newsletter is all about how to set your hourly rate as a freelance writer.

I’ve also included a downloadable hourly rate calculator for paid subscribers (scroll to the bottom of this post to grab it!)

In today’s newsletter, you’ll read about:

✨ How to know if you’re charging enough for your work as a freelance writer

✍️ A round-up of this past week’s writing jobs

📚 Plus: a downloadable hourly rate calculator for paid subscribers

✍️ New Writing Job Board Comes Out Tomorrow!

Did you miss it? Here are the writing jobs and opportunities on this past week’s job board:

• Write 2 articles about writing each week at $500 per article, which comes out to $52,000 for the year for this freelance job.

• Get paid $800 for your stories about the outdoors — and then see it get produced in an audio format!

• A copywriting job for a company looking to upgrade its branding materials that pays $8,000.

• Plus: a $40,000 fund awarding money to 8 indie authors. Authors of all genres can apply!

If you missed the last issue of my writing job board, check it out at the link below:

✨ Plus, there were two featured writing jobs posted this past week:

• A freelance developmental editor job for a children’s adventure book (paying between $60-$90/hour for experienced editors)

• A freelance memoir ghostwriter job for a memoir about 9/11 (this client’s max budget is $50,000 for the project — I believe this client is going to be taking interviews pretty soon if she hasn’t started already)

🫖 Sunday Tea: How to Calculate Your Rate as a Freelance Writer

“How much should I charge as a freelance writer?”

Short answer: enough!

Long answer: enough to cover your expenses as an individual human as well as business (because if you’re a freelancer, you’re running a business!) which includes setting aside earnings for things like taxes and a variety of different expenses like health insurance or a snazzy new desk lamp.

My hourly rate calculator linked in the next section includes a list of things to think about when calculating what number you should charge as a bare minimum as a freelance writer!

However, expenses are just one part of the “rate” equation. Here are other things to consider:

• What are other freelancers in your niche charging? This is sometimes helpful to get vague estimates of what you should be charging, but it can be unhelpful because some writers get away with charging more for a multitude of reasons. In the memoir ghostwriting niche alone, I’ve seen ghostwriters charge as little as $10,000 for ghostwriting a whole book, and as much as $500,000. You’d be surprised how similar the experience levels are at both ends of that equation. I think it’s valuable to go on sites like Upwork and Contra and search through fellow freelancers’ profiles if you’re just starting out and want to see what others are getting paid for different niches, but once you become an expert freelancer all of that goes out the window and justifying a really high hourly rate also comes down to other factors like building a personal brand. My article on how I went from charging $17/hour to $750/hour covers some of these intangible factors.

• How many clients are you working with? Are they referring you to other clients? If you’ve got tons of clients who love working with you and are constantly referring you to other people, great! Time to double your rates. If you’re in high-demand, it’s time to raise your rates. As a freelancer, your time still operates on the “supply and demand” curve. The more you’re in demand, the less supply of your time you have. Thus, you have to charge more because there’s a scarcity of supply of time. Otherwise, you’ll be on the road to burnout!

• How price-sensitive is your ideal client? Some clients are going to be more motivated than others to spend money on a high-quality freelancer. This is true in the memoir ghostwriting space because most people only write their memoir once, so they want to pay more to hire a writer who can do it right. In this case, memoir ghostwriting clients are less price sensitive and willing to spend more than a business owner who wants a writer to use AI to help write a blog post. Not to say there aren’t great blog writing jobs out there — in fact, there was recently a very high-paying job in my most recent job board in the blogging space! So you can’t discount an entire niche as being low-paying, but you do need to really understand who your ideal client is — and you’ll have a better time as a freelancer if that client is willing to pay for high-quality talent.

Want to learn more about when to charge an hourly rate versus a fixed rate? I talk about all this and more in my book Six-Figure Freelance Writer, which is free to read on Kindle Unlimited right now.

✍️ Get My Downloadable Hourly Rate Calculator for Freelance Writers

Upgrade your subscription to get access to my hourly rate calculator to understand what you should be charging as a freelance writer: