What is a professional services rate card?
A rate card lists the prices a professional services firm charges for different roles, skills or types of work. For example, a consultancy might have separate hourly or day rates for consultants, senior consultants, project managers and specialist roles.
Rate cards give sales, project managers and finance teams a consistent commercial starting point when estimating work, preparing proposals and reviewing project profitability.
How do you build an agency or consultancy rate card?
A sustainable agency rate card or consulting rate card should start with the cost of employing each role rather than with competitor pricing alone.
- Calculate the fully loaded annual cost of the role.
- Estimate realistic annual billable hours.
- Calculate the cost of each billable hour.
- Add the gross margin required by the business.
- Convert the result into hourly or day rates.
- Review whether the resulting rates make commercial sense in the market.
Annual loaded cost = salary + employer costs + allocated overhead
Annual billable hours = available working hours × billable utilisation
Cost per billable hour = annual loaded cost ÷ annual billable hours
Target billable rate = cost per billable hour ÷ (1 − target margin)
Example agency rate card
This rate card example uses the default roles in the tool. It is an illustrative professional services rate card template, not a recommendation about what agencies should charge.
- Junior Consultant
- Salary £32,000 · utilisation 75.0%
- £36 cost/hr · £55/hr · £414/day
- Consultant
- Salary £45,000 · utilisation 72.0%
- £52 cost/hr · £79/hr · £595/day
- Senior Consultant
- Salary £65,000 · utilisation 65.0%
- £80 cost/hr · £123/hr · £926/day
- Project Manager
- Salary £55,000 · utilisation 60.0%
- £74 cost/hr · £114/hr · £858/day
Cost rate vs billable rate
Cost rate is the internal cost associated with delivering an hour of work. Depending on the business, it may include salary, employer costs, benefits and overhead.
Billable rate is the amount charged to the client. The gap between billable revenue and delivery cost contributes to project gross profit.
Charge out rate is another common term for the amount charged to a client for a person's time, particularly in UK professional services firms.
Why billable utilisation changes your rate card
A consultant's annual cost does not disappear when they are working internally, training, supporting sales or waiting for project work. If only 70% of their available time is expected to be billable, that smaller number of client hours has to recover the full annual cost.
A role with 1,700 available hours at 70% utilisation has around 1,190 billable hours available to recover its annual cost. At 60% utilisation, that falls to around 1,020 hours. Lower utilisation therefore increases the minimum sustainable rate if every other assumption remains unchanged.
For a single-role calculation, use the Billable Rate Calculator.
Should your rate card use hourly rates or day rates?
Both approaches can use the same underlying commercial calculation. A day rate is normally the hourly rate multiplied by the number of billable hours represented by a day.
Consultancies often quote day rates, agencies may use hourly rates, and some firms use both. Internal calculations should remain consistent regardless of presentation.
Should every client use the same rate card?
Not necessarily. Businesses may maintain base rate cards, client-specific rate cards, contract-specific rates, discounted rates, legacy rates and specialist role rates.
The important thing is knowing when a client-specific rate moves materially away from the commercial assumptions behind the base rate card.
How often should you review your rate card?
A rate card should be reviewed whenever the assumptions behind it materially change: salary changes, employer cost changes, utilisation changes, new overhead, changes in delivery mix, new roles, inflation or market pricing changes, repeated margin underperformance, or client-specific discounts becoming permanent.
Many firms perform a formal annual rate review and also revisit individual roles when costs or utilisation change materially.
Common mistakes when setting professional services rates
Using salary as the cost rate
Salary alone ignores employer costs, overhead and non-billable time.
Assuming 100% utilisation
This usually understates the charge out rate required to recover annual cost.
Confusing markup with margin
A role costing £70/hour and billed at £100/hour has a 30% margin, not a 30% markup.
Keeping old client rates indefinitely
Cost structures can move while client rates stay static.
Using the same margin assumption for every role
Businesses may deliberately price different roles differently.
Ignoring team mix
Project profitability depends on which roles actually perform the work, not just the published rates.
Use the Project Profitability Calculator to see how project costs and overruns affect forecast margin.
How rate cards affect project profitability
A rate card establishes the commercial value of the roles being sold, but actual project profitability depends on who performs the work and how much time delivery consumes.
A project priced around junior and mid-level delivery can become less profitable if much more senior time is required than expected. That is why rate cards, resourcing, timesheets and project financial tracking need to be understood together.