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Marketing agency pricing calculator

What should I actually charge for marketing services?

Your numbers

$90,000

Take-home before tax. Tax, health cover and overhead are added on top.

18 h

Delivery hours in a standard monthly retainer.

50%

Research, writing, design and video drafted for review instead of made from scratch. Reviewing and approving stays with you — set this to whatever you believe.

You should charge

$150

an hour — which makes an 18-hour client $2,700 a month.

Monthly retainer
$2,700
Minimum engagement
$2,400
Clients your week fits
4
What your week is worth

Scout7 is what moves that second marker — it drafts the research, writing, design and video, and you approve it.

At $150 an hour a 18-hour client pays $2,700 a month, so you need 4 of them to cover the $119,095 your year costs — and your week holds 4.

What this works out

  • Your true cost per billable hour, after tax, insurance and overhead
  • An hourly rate with profit built in
  • What a monthly retainer should cost for the hours it takes
  • A minimum engagement below which a client loses you money

How it’s calculated

Every figure above comes from these steps, so you can check the working or run it by hand.

  1. 1

    Add up what the business must produce in a year: the income you want, self-employment tax, health cover and twelve months of overhead.

  2. 2

    Count the hours you can genuinely sell: working weeks times hours a week, then apply a realistic utilisation rate.

  3. 3

    Divide yearly cost by billable hours. That is break-even per hour, not a price.

  4. 4

    Add a profit markup to get your internal hourly rate, then multiply by the hours a retainer takes each month.

  5. 5

    Set a minimum engagement so the fixed cost of carrying a client never exceeds a quarter of the fee.

Questions

Why divide by 1,000 hours instead of 2,000?

Nobody bills every hour they work. Agency benchmarks put annual utilisation at 50 to 65 percent, and a solo owner also sells, invoices and learns. Forty-seven working weeks at 55 percent utilisation is about 1,000 billable hours.

Is the hourly rate what I put on the proposal?

No. It is your internal rate. Price the package by multiplying it by the hours the work takes, then round to a number that reads cleanly. Clients buy an outcome, not your hours.

Does this work outside the US?

The structure holds in any currency. Swap the self-employment tax and health insurance defaults for your own figures; the benchmarks shown are US survey data and are labelled as such.

Learn the arithmetic

The Academy guides behind this calculator. Free, no signup.

Priced it. Now deliver it without the hours.

Scout7 takes the production hours out of a retainer — research, articles, posts, carousels and 9:16 video for every client, with your team approving before anything ships.

Scout7 for agencies

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