● Money & small business
How to quote a freelance project: low, likely and high estimates, contingency, and what you earn if it runs long
A fixed-price quote is a bet on your own estimate. Here's one worked through with the sample file of our freelance rate and quote calculator, so you can see what happens to your real hourly rate when a job runs long. The designer, the client and the hours are an example: use your own.
Start from your rate
The designer wants $75,000 a year after $6,000 of business costs and sets aside 25% of revenue for tax. That needs $108,000 of revenue. At 46 working weeks and 25 billable hours a week, 1,150 hours, the rate is $93.91 an hour. (Our guide to what to charge as a freelancer has a table by income and hours.)
Estimate every task three ways
| Task | Low | Likely | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery call + sitemap | 3 | 4 | 6 |
| Design: home page + 2 templates | 12 | 16 | 24 |
| Build 8 pages | 14 | 18 | 26 |
| Content entry + images | 5 | 6 | 10 |
| Booking widget integration | 2 | 3 | 6 |
| Testing + launch | 3 | 4 | 6 |
| Rush weekend work (at $140/h) | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Hours | 43 | 55 | 82 |
The high estimate is 49% above the likely one. That's normal: the things that go wrong (a client who changes the design, content that arrives late, a plugin that fights back) add hours; almost nothing takes less than the low estimate.
The quote
| Quote on | Labor | +10% contingency | + expenses (10% markup) | Quote total | Per hour if it takes 82 hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Low (43 h) | $4,222.49 | $422.25 | $390.50 | $5,035.24 | $56.64 |
| Likely (55 h) | $5,349.41 | $534.94 | $390.50 | $6,274.85 | $71.76 |
| High (82 h) | $7,884.98 | $788.50 | $390.50 | $9,063.98 | $105.77 |
Quoting on the likely estimate, the designer sends $6,274.85 with a 50% deposit of $3,137.43. If the job goes to plan, fine. If it takes the high estimate, the same fee works out to $71.76 an hour, 24% below the rate the business needs. Expenses are passed through to the client, so they're left out of the per-hour figures.
What contingency buys you
Per hour actually earned on the likely quote, by contingency and by how many hours the job really takes (labor plus contingency, divided by hours):
| Contingency | 43 h | 55 h | 65 h | 82 h |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0% | $124.40 | $97.26 | $82.30 | $65.24 |
| 10% | $136.85 | $106.99 | $90.53 | $71.76 |
| 20% | $149.29 | $116.71 | $98.76 | $78.28 |
| 30% | $161.73 | $126.44 | $106.99 | $84.81 |
At 55 hours the job pays a little more than $93.91 even without contingency, because four of those hours are rush work at $140. With 10% contingency, the quote still pays the target rate up to about 62 hours. Even 30% contingency doesn't cover the full high estimate here; that takes a quote on the high estimate, a tighter scope, or a clause that bills extra hours for changes.
Ways to protect the rate
- Write down what's in scope (8 pages, two rounds of design changes) and quote changes separately.
- Take a deposit before you start: 50% here, $3,137.43.
- Track your hours against the estimate on every job, so the next low / likely / high is better.
- Keep a log of quotes: in the sample pipeline, 3 of 5 decided quotes were won (60%) but only 37% by value, because the biggest, $9,800, was lost. That's a pricing signal too.
The free freelance hourly rate calculator gives the same rate as the spreadsheet's Rate tab.