What should you actually charge?
Most agencies price by remembering what the last client paid. This works the other way round: start from what the business needs, divide by the days you can really bill, and see the floor you have been pricing under.
Salaries, software, rent, tax, and the profit that makes it worth doing.
260 minus holiday, illness, admin, sales and the afternoon lost to a migration. If you have never measured it, you are optimistic by about a third.
How the maths works
No black box. Four lines of arithmetic, shown so you can argue with them or rebuild them in a spreadsheet.
Sites under management is estimated as one per build you complete in a year. If you already know your real number, use it: it is the input that moves the care plan figure most.
What other agencies charge
Useful as a sanity check, not as a target. The spread within each band is wider than the gap between bands, which tells you positioning matters more than size.
Day rates for web and design work, 2026. Bars are scaled to the top of each range.
Two things this number is not
It is not your price. It is the line under which the work loses money, which is a different and more useful thing to know. What you charge above it is a question about positioning, demand and nerve.
And it is not a reason to raise every quote tomorrow. It is a reason to stop quoting below it, which is a slower change and a permanent one.
Common questions
How much should I charge for a website?
Work backwards from what your business needs to earn rather than from what the market seems to pay. Divide the revenue you need by the days you can realistically bill, usually around 160 per person and not 260, then multiply by the days the build takes. That is your floor. A typical small-business brochure site lands between $4,000 and $15,000 on this arithmetic.
How many billable days does an agency really have?
About 160 per person per year for a working owner, once holiday, illness, admin, sales calls, invoicing and unplanned support are taken out of 260. Agencies that have never measured it usually guess about a third too high, which is exactly the size of the gap between their price and their floor.
Should I charge a day rate or a fixed price?
Quote fixed, cost with the day rate. A day rate is a costing tool for you; a fixed price is what the client buys. Selling days makes efficiency a punishment, because you get faster and earn less for the same work.
Does this work for retainers too?
Yes, and the care plan floor is that calculation. Price recurring work as a share of capacity you hold in reserve rather than hours you expect to spend, or the arrangement loses money in every busy month.
Once you know the floor
How to price a care plan
The same arithmetic applied to recurring work, with the three tiers that sell.
What to charge for a website
The longer argument behind this calculator, and why day rates lose you money.
Quote from a rate card
Stop duplicating last quarter's PDF and watching the margin drift down.