Retainer Calculator
One-off projects create a permanent hunt for the next one. Price a monthly retainer that is worth a client's commitment, and see how many of them cover your baseline costs.
Monthly retainer fee
$918
$76.50 an hour billed — $65.57 once unbilled time is counted.
Your month at that many retainers
- Billed retainer hours60 h68%
- Unbilled client overhead10 h11%
- Left for project work18 h20%
What different discounts do
- No discount$1,020
- 10% discount$918
- 20% discount$816
- Three of these retainers$2,754per month
Copy-ready retainer proposal
Monthly retainer proposal Included each month: 12 hours of work, reserved for you. Monthly fee: $918 Equivalent hourly value: $76.50 (a 10% discount on the standard project rate of $85.00). Initial commitment: 3 months, then rolling with 30 days' notice on either side. Unused hours: up to 25% may carry into the following month only. Extra hours beyond the retainer are billed at the standard project rate and agreed in advance. Response time: within one working day for anything urgent. Invoiced on the first of each month, payable within 14 days.
Why retainers change how freelancing feels
The hardest part of working for yourself is rarely the work. It is the first week of every month, when you do not yet know what the month will earn. A retainer removes that question for a portion of your income, and the psychological difference is larger than the financial one: you stop taking bad projects out of fear.
Two or three retainers that cover your baseline costs turn every other piece of work into upside. That is the whole aim of this calculator — not to maximise a single client's fee, but to find the point where the floor is covered.
Pricing it so both sides want it
A retainer is a trade. The client gets guaranteed availability and a known monthly cost; you get predictable income and no repeated sales conversation. That trade needs a visible discount against your project rate, usually between 5 and 15 percent. Offer nothing and there is no reason to commit. Offer 30 percent and you have simply agreed to work cheaply.
Keep the included hours modest. A 10 or 12 hour monthly retainer is far easier to approve than a 40 hour one, because it fits inside a budget somebody already controls. Once it renews twice, growing it is a conversation rather than a pitch.
Count the hours that never reach the invoice
Every ongoing client costs more time than the work itself. There is a standing call, a monthly summary, a thread of small questions, and the mental cost of holding their context in your head. The unbilled-hours field exists because that time is what makes a badly priced retainer quietly worse than project work, and the difference between the billed rate and the true rate is the number worth staring at.
The rules that keep it healthy
- Cap the rollover. Allow at most a quarter of unused hours to carry into the next month, and only one month forward. Without a cap, a client saves up six months of hours and spends them in the week you are busiest.
- Price overage in advance. Extra hours are billed at the full project rate, agreed before the work starts. This protects the discount from becoming the default price.
- Make the output visible. Send a one-paragraph summary each month listing what was delivered. Retainers are cancelled when the value stops being obvious, not when it stops existing.
- Three months, then rolling. Long lock-ins scare off cautious clients, and month-to-month from day one means you absorb the setup cost for free.
If the calculator tells you that five or six retainers are needed to cover baseline costs, the fee is too low for the hours. Raise the fee or cut the included hours — adding more clients is the one option that does not work, because each new one brings unbilled overhead with it.
Frequently asked questions
- Why should a retainer cost more per hour than project work?
- It should not — it should cost slightly less per hour, in exchange for the client reserving your time every month whether they use it fully or not. The discount is the point: predictable income for you, guaranteed availability for them. Somewhere between 5 and 15 percent off your project rate is normal.
- Should unused hours roll over to the next month?
- Allow a partial rollover of one month at most, or the retainer turns into a bank of hours the client cashes in all at once and your quiet month becomes their busy one. State the rule in writing before the first invoice.
- What is the difference between a deliverable and an availability retainer?
- A deliverable retainer buys a fixed output each month — four articles, one report, two design updates. An availability retainer buys access to a block of your time. Deliverable retainers are easier to defend at renewal because the value is visible.
- How many retainer clients can one person carry?
- Three to five is the usual ceiling for a solo operator, because each one carries meetings and context-switching beyond the billed hours. If the calculator says you need more than five to cover baseline costs, the monthly fee is too low.
- How long should the initial commitment be?
- Three months, then rolling with 30 days' notice on either side. Shorter than that and you carry the setup cost for nothing; longer and a client who is unsure will simply decline.