Probably, and there's a fast test. If nobody ever hesitates at your number and every client says yes immediately, you're priced under what the work is worth. Undercharging shows up in your calendar and in how you feel about your clients long before it shows up in your revenue.
Look at your last five proposals and count how many people hesitated at the number.
A price nobody ever questions is a price set below what the market and the client would carry.
Price your next engagement on the outcome and see what the number comes out at.
If you use it as the floor, fine, but don't use it as the ceiling.
Leah Neaderthal, Smart Gets Paid
The signs show up in patterns across engagements, so look at your last five rather than your last one. Here's the list I run with clients:
Three or more of those and you have your answer. The last one is the quietest and the most common: a rate nobody has revisited is a rate set by a version of you who knew less about the work than you do now.
An instant yes with no questions usually means you left money on the table, and it's the single most reliable signal in the list. When a client's reaction is "oh, that's fine," they'd allocated more than you asked for.
What the different reactions tell you:
| Their reaction | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Immediate yes, no questions | They had budgeted more. Your number was under it |
| A pause, then a question about scope | You're at the edge of the value. This is the healthy one |
| "That's more than we expected" | They had a different figure in mind. It isn't a verdict on you |
| A no, on budget | Wrong client for this engagement, or wrong engagement for this client |
When somebody tells you they'd allocated more, that's data you can use. Build the program that fits what they had, add the value to match it, and put the higher number on it. And when a client does hesitate, that reaction belongs to them and not to you.
Look, and use what you find as a floor. Knowing the market keeps you from pricing under it by accident. What it can't do is tell you your number, because you can't see the business decision behind anyone else's.
People price their work on financial and personal factors that have nothing to do with you: their costs, who they support, how much work they want, what they need the business to fund. Someone charging a fraction of your rate is solving their own problem, and someone charging ten times your rate is doing the same.
So here are the steps I give people:
My episode "Friends don't let friends undercharge for their work" on The Smart Gets Paid podcast works through the same trap from the other direction.
Undercharging costs you your calendar before it costs you your income, and that's why it takes years to notice. At a low number you need more clients to hit the same revenue, so you take more work, and the work you take is smaller and needs more of you.
Resentment. You start keeping score, and you feel it when a client asks for something reasonable. That feeling is a pricing signal wearing an emotional costume, and the fix is the number rather than the client. Raising it is its own piece of work.
Women ask me this question hoping I'll say no, you're fine. So let me give you the answer I'd give on a call: if you're asking, you probably are, and asking is the good part.
What I want you to notice is where the question comes from. It rarely comes from looking at the market. It comes from a feeling: that you're working hard and the money doesn't match, or that you heard what somebody else charges and felt a bit sick.
Here's the piece that's specific to us. Exley and Kessler ran experiments on how people describe their own performance and found that women rated themselves 46 out of 100 where equally performing men rated themselves 61. The gap held when they removed differences in confidence, and when they removed any reason to talk yourself up. Nobody performed worse. They just said less about it.
So when you ask whether you're undercharging, you're asking a question about your own value, using the instrument that the research says reads low. Which is why my system doesn't ask you to price your worth. It asks what the outcome is worth to your client. That question has an answer you can go and find out, and it produces a bigger number than the one in your head.
Being the most expensive option is a position, and plenty of clients choose it deliberately. What decides it is whether the value is clear enough to make the number make sense. If you're the priciest and you're winning work, your price is doing its job. If you're the priciest and losing every time, the value conversation is where to look first.
No, and treating it as one keeps people stuck. Sometimes the rate is simply old: set years ago and never revisited, with no feeling attached to it at all. Check the mechanical explanation before you go looking for head trash, because a stale number is far quicker to fix than a belief.
A full calendar at your current number is the clearest evidence you have room to move. Being booked out means demand exceeds what you can supply, and price is the lever that resolves that. Raise it on new work first and let the calendar sort itself out.
You'd see it in a pattern: consistently losing work at the proposal stage, with the number named as the reason by clients who otherwise fit. One client saying no on budget tells you almost nothing. A run of well-matched clients all stopping at the same place tells you something worth acting on.