How Much to Charge for a Logo: Logo Design Pricing, Worked Out
To work out how much to charge for a logo, estimate the hours each phase takes (discovery, concepts, revision rounds, final files and the email around them), add a buffer, multiply by your floor rate and add the project’s expenses. In the illustrative example below, the designer’s floor is $85 an hour, the project is 25.3 hours with the buffer, and the logo quote is $2,250. Then the post shows what happens to that quote when the client asks for more rounds than it includes.
This post does not quote what other designers charge for a logo. A price copied from someone else’s portfolio carries their hours, their costs and their year. Logo design pricing built from your own numbers tells you the least a project can pay; what a client will pay is a separate question.
The logo design pricing formula
floor rate = (income wanted / (1 - tax set-aside) + yearly costs)
/ hours a client pays for in a year
logo quote = (sum of phase hours) x (1 + buffer) x floor rate
+ project expenses, rounded up
The floor is the least a billed hour can bring in. Every quote in this post is built from it.
Step 1: your floor rate
These figures are illustrative. The designer wants to keep $60,000 a year after setting aside 25% of profit for tax, has $6,000 of yearly costs, and works 40 hours a week for 46 weeks. Only 55% of those hours are billed to a client; the rest is email, invoicing, marketing and admin.
| Step | Working | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Profit before the tax set-aside | $60,000 / (1 - 25%) | $80,000 |
| Business costs | software, fonts, hardware, insurance | $6,000 |
| Revenue needed | sum | $86,000 |
| Hours worked | 46 weeks x 40 | 1,840 |
| Hours a client pays for | 55% of those | 1,012 |
| Floor per billed hour | $86,000 / 1,012 | $84.98, rounded up to $85 |
The trap here is dividing by every hour worked. $86,000 over 1,840 hours is $46.74 an hour, and quoting that rate on billed hours would leave the designer with $30,975 for the year instead of $60,000. The freelance hourly rate calculator post works through this step in more detail.
Step 2: the logo quote, phase by phase
The example quote includes 3 concepts and 2 revision rounds, with a 10% buffer on every phase for the round that takes longer than planned:
| Phase | Working | Hours | With buffer, at rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery: brief, call, research | 4 | $374.00 | |
| Concepts | 3 x 3 h | 9 | $841.50 |
| Revision rounds | 2 x 2.5 h | 5 | $467.50 |
| Final files and formats | 3 | $280.50 | |
| Calls, email, invoicing | 2 | $187.00 | |
| Expenses: fonts, stock, mockups | $50.00 | ||
| Total | 23 | $2,200.50 |
Time plus expenses is $2,200.50. Rounded up to the next $50, the quote is $2,250, with a 50% deposit of $1,125 before work starts. The quote works out to $88.93 per quoted hour, above the floor because the expenses and the rounding are in the quote too.
The two figures to measure on your own work are concepts and hours per concept. Time yourself on your last project rather than estimating from memory.
What extra revisions do to a logo price
Now the insight the calculator pack is built on. A logo quote is a promise about scope: 3 concepts, 2 rounds. When the client asks for more, each extra round costs the same hours as an included one, plus about 30 minutes of reading feedback and replying. At the floor rate with the buffer, that prices each extra round at $285 and each extra concept at $330.
Say the client asks for 2 more rounds and 1 more concept. Billed as a change order, that is $900. Done for free, it is 9.5 more hours on the same $2,250, and the whole project now pays $64.66 an hour, under the $85 floor. Writing the included rounds into the quote, and the price of an extra one, is what keeps the floor intact.
Checking what a finished logo project paid
The same arithmetic works backward. Here the designer logged every hour on the finished project:
| Phase | Planned, before buffer | Logged | Over by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery | 4 | 5 | 1 |
| Concepts | 9 | 12 | 3 |
| Revisions | 5 | 9 | 4 |
| Final files | 3 | 4 | 1 |
| Calls, email, invoicing | 2 | 6 | 4 |
| Total | 23 | 36 | 13 |
The project took 36 hours. After a 3% payment fee and the $50 of expenses, it kept $2,132.50, which is $59.24 an hour, $25.76 under the floor. Revisions ran 1.8 times the plan, and revisions plus email account for 8 of the 13 hours over. The price that would have paid the floor on those hours is $3,206.19. That figure is the one to carry into the next quote, not the old price.
The same pattern shows up in website work; the how much to charge for a website post follows a build through its revision rounds.
Usage and licensing
The hours are the same whether the logo goes on one storefront or on national packaging, but the value to the client is not. One way to price that is a multiplier you set on the design fee. In the example, a usage multiplier of 1.5 plus a 15% exclusivity add-on takes the $2,250 fee to $3,900, adding $1,650. The multipliers are the example’s choice; no published scale is behind them, and what a licence grants is set by your contract.
How these were calculated
The floor is (income / (1 - tax set-aside) + yearly costs) / (weeks x hours a week x billed share), rounded up to the next $5. The quote is the sum of phase hours x (1 + buffer) x the floor, plus expenses, rounded up to the next $50. An extra round or concept is (its hours + email minutes / 60) x (1 + buffer) x the floor, rounded up. The diluted rate is the quote / (quoted hours + absorbed hours). The effective rate is (price x (1 - fee) - expenses) / logged hours. Every figure on this page was computed twice: once by the code behind the product below, and once by an independent program that prices each phase separately and rounds by counting steps. The two agree to the cent. All incomes, hours, rates, multipliers and prices are illustrative inputs, not market rates. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.
To run this on your own year and your own hours, the pack below has seven linked calculators, including a brand package with a style guide and assets, and a day rate against a project price.