There is no rate card for consulting work, and any number you find online belongs to someone else's business. Your price comes from what the outcome is worth to the client in front of you, which is why I have women set it after the conversation that uncovers that value, never before.
Set your price after the conversation that uncovers what solving this problem is worth to your client.
A number built from your hours describes your calendar, and a number built from value describes their result.
Before your next proposal, write down what the outcome is worth to that one specific client.
Price isn't about money. It's about your life.
Leah Neaderthal, Smart Gets Paid
No standard rate exists because consulting is priced on the value of an outcome, and the same outcome is worth wildly different amounts to different companies. A hospital system and a twelve-person nonprofit can hire you for identical work, and what it's worth to each of them isn't remotely the same number.
Three things vary from client to client, and each one moves the price:
This is why rate calculators and industry benchmarks feel unsatisfying. They are averaging away the only variable that matters. A benchmark can tell you what other people charged for a category of work, and it can't tell you what your work is worth to the client you're talking to next Tuesday.
Five things decide it, and only one of them lives inside your business. I teach them as the Five Pricing Principles, and they're the frame for everything else in pricing:
The mechanics of putting a number to that value sit in how value-based pricing works.
What other consultants charge tells you almost nothing about what you should charge, because you can't see the business decision behind their number. You don't know their costs, their mortgage, who they support, how much work they want, or whether they're thrilled with the arrangement.
Worse, looking drags your own number toward theirs. Tversky and Kahneman showed in 1974 that people asked to estimate a quantity land near whatever number they saw first, even when that number came out of a spinning wheel in front of them: groups shown 10 and 65 gave median estimates of 25 and 45 for the same quantity, and paying people for accuracy didn't reduce the effect. A competitor's rate is exactly that kind of arbitrary starting point.
There are people charging ten times what you charge for what you do, and there are people doing it on a freelance marketplace for a few dollars. Both of them have clients. I live across from a park in Brooklyn where a premium ice cream shop and an ice cream truck sit on the same corner every weekend, and people walk past each one to get to the other.
So competitor rates are a data point about the market, not an instruction. Your number is a business decision. If your current clients can't pay what you need to charge, the answer is usually a different set of clients rather than a smaller number (my episode "If your clients can't pay higher rates" works through that).
Your price should move with the value of the work to each client, which means the same engagement can carry two different numbers and both are honest. You aren't charging two clients differently for the same thing. You are charging each of them for what solving their problem is worth to them.
| What stays the same | What moves the number |
|---|---|
| Your expertise and your standards | What the outcome is worth to that client |
| The quality of the work you deliver | The size and reach of the problem |
| The way you show up | The scope you and your client agree on |
The trap is the opposite habit: setting one number early, then holding it for years because changing it feels like admitting the first one was wrong. Pricing per engagement is how you avoid rebuilding a rate card every time a project looks different. When a potential client asks for your number on a live call before you know any of this, there's a way to answer without inventing a figure.
Women come to me wanting the formula. They believe there's a right answer and everyone else was handed it, and their job is to find it and apply it correctly. So I want to say the thing nobody says: I don't have a lesson on how to calculate what to charge, and I left it out deliberately.
The value is different for every client, so a calculation would be a fake precision. What I have instead is a way to find out. You ask the questions that uncover what the outcome is worth to that client, and then you decide.
Your price is something you decide. Smart women want to earn the number by proving it with arithmetic, because deciding feels like it needs permission from somewhere. It doesn't. Your price is the clearest expression of your strategy: who you want to work with, what you're worth to them, and how you want your life to look. You get to set it, and you never have to defend it.
Publishing a price on your website prices the work before you know what it's worth to the reader, which is the whole problem with a rate card. It also invites people to disqualify themselves on a number that has no value attached to it yet. For custom consulting work, leave it off and let the conversation do that job.
Experience is why you can deliver the outcome, and it's not the thing your client is buying. They are buying the result. Twenty years of practice usually means you reach that result faster and more reliably, which raises what the work is worth rather than what it costs. Price the outcome, and let your experience be the reason you can promise it.
A minimum is useful, and it's a business decision. It isn't a pricing method. It protects your calendar from work too small to be worth the setup, and it tells you quickly whether someone is in the right range. Set it against the life you want your business to fund, then hold it without apology.
Charging more doesn't mean doing more, and the fear that it does is what keeps consultants stuck on hours. When your price is tied to the value of the outcome, you can raise it without adding tasks. Consultants who raise a price by adding scope are still selling volume, and volume is the thing that caps what you can earn.