Raising your rate

Raising your price feels frightening because it looks like a conversation about money. It is really a conversation about who you want to work with next.

Price is a filter. While it is low, everyone passes through: the people who value the work and the people who haggle over every revision. Raise it, and the first group stays.

Treat raising your price as hygiene, not heroism. It frees time for loyal clients and screens out projects that never made money anyway.

When it's time

Not by the calendar and not «once a year». There are exactly three reasons, and all of them can be counted.

• The rate stopped matching your life. Costs went up, the hour didn't. Recount it and you will see the gap.
• You got faster. The same work takes fewer hours, so at the old rate you earn less for the same result. This is the one case where getting better punishes you.
• The calendar is full months ahead. Demand is higher than the hours you have. Price is the only way to manage that without working nights.

From which hour the new rate applies

From today. Every hour is priced at the rate in force on the date it was logged — past work cannot be made more expensive.

That is not a limitation, it is protection. Otherwise every raise would rewrite history: last year's projects would suddenly look profitable, reports to clients would stop matching what you invoiced, and your own statistics would turn into fiction.

So the picture after a raise looks like this: what is done counts the old way, everything new counts the new way, and both eras live side by side in the reports without mixing.

How to tell the client

Briefly and in advance. Not when you send the invoice, but a project before it.

The argument is not about quality. «My work got better» can't be verified, and it is an invitation to argue about taste. Speak in a language where the client has a scale: deadlines, risk, scope, predictability.

And don't apologise in the letter. A raise is an ordinary business message, not a plea for indulgence: an apology in the first line announces by itself that the price can be talked back down.

How to tell whether the raise worked

The rate you name is a promise. It is checked by a different number: what actually came out per hour.

It is counted simply: the money that arrived divided by the hours that went in. Overtime pulls it down, a discount pulls it down, free revisions pull it down. That is why the rate you actually get is almost always below the one you name — the only question is by how much.

On the project card this number comes first, next to its gap from plan: green means the rate held, orange means it slipped. There is a neutral zone of ±5%, so a stray percent doesn't look like a victory or a failure.

The point of a raise shows up here, not in the contract. If your real rate stayed where it was after the new price list, then what grew is not the price — it is the amount of free work around it.

The exact rules are in income and the rate you actually get.

What happens if you don't raise

A rate doesn't stand still — it falls. Not in the contract, but in practice: costs grow, projects stretch, and the same hour is worth less to you every year.

That suits your existing clients, so they will not remind you. The only person who can remember is you.

Next: the method: what an hour is made of, income and the rate you actually get, all the guides.