How Much to Charge for a Website: Web Design Pricing, Worked Out
To work out how much to charge for a website, multiply the hours the build will take - including the revision rounds you are willing to do - by your floor rate, the lowest hourly rate at which your year still works. In the illustrative example below the floor is $85.58 an hour, so a 40-hour build with two rounds of revisions has to be priced at $4,450.16 or more. A quote of $4,000 looks comfortable at $100.00 an hour, but if the revisions are unlimited it is under the floor by round two.
The web design pricing formula
floor rate = (take-home target / (1 - tax rate) + overhead) / billable hours
billable hours = (52 - weeks off) x hours a week x billable share
website price = (build hours + included rounds x hours per round) x floor rate
The first two lines say what an hour of your time has to earn. The third turns that into a project price. The part that gets left out is the middle term: the revision rounds. A fixed price with no round count is not a fixed price for the work - it is a fixed price for an amount of work neither side has agreed on.
Step 1: your floor rate
These inputs are the illustrative example from the kit linked below. They are chosen to show the method and are not typical figures for any market, country or skill level.
| Input | Value |
|---|---|
| Take-home income target, after tax | $70,000 |
| Tax rate on profit (placeholder) | 25% |
| Weeks off a year | 5 |
| Hours at the desk per working week | 40 |
| Share of desk hours that are billable | 60% |
The overhead is the cost of running a one-person web design business for a year, item by item:
| Overhead item | A year |
|---|---|
| Design and dev software | $720 |
| Hosting, staging, domains | $480 |
| Hardware replacement | $900 |
| Professional insurance | $450 |
| Accountant and invoicing tools | $650 |
| Total | $3,200 |
The 25% is a placeholder, not a real rate for anyone. Use the figure your accountant or tax authority gives you.
Build time is billable. Discovery calls, proposals, estimating, client email, fixing your own bugs and learning a new stack are not - which is why only 60% of desk time counts. That leaves 1,128 billable hours a year. Keeping $70,000 after tax needs $93,333 of profit; add $3,200 of overhead and the business must bring in $96,533.
$96,533 / 1,128 hours = $85.58 an hour.
If you want each of those steps explained in more depth, the freelance hourly rate post on this site walks through the same formula one correction at a time.
Step 2: what revisions do to a fixed price
Now take a $4,000 website you estimated at 40 hours. At the estimate, that is $100.00 an hour - comfortably above the $85.58 floor. The build alone, priced at the floor, would be $3,423.20, so the quote has some room in it.
Then the revision rounds start. In this example each round - feedback, changes, re-testing, another call - adds 6 hours. The price does not move. What each hour earns does:
| Revision rounds | Hours worked | Effective hourly rate | vs floor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 40 | $100.00 | +$14.42 |
| 1 | 46 | $86.96 | +$1.38 |
| 2 | 52 | $76.92 | -$8.66 |
| 3 | 58 | $68.97 | -$16.61 |
| 4 | 64 | $62.50 | -$23.08 |
| 5 | 70 | $57.14 | -$28.44 |
One round still clears the floor: $86.96, by $1.38 an hour. Round two puts the effective rate at $76.92, $8.66 under the floor. By round five you have worked 70 hours for $4,000, an effective $57.14 an hour - 43% less than the rate you thought you quoted. Measured at the floor rate, that is $1,991 of time given away on one project.
Notice that the client has not done anything wrong. Asking for changes is reasonable when a quote does not say how many changes it covers.
Another way to see it: at the floor, $4,000 buys 46.7 hours of your time. The build takes 40, so the quote has 6.7 hours of slack - room for 1.1 revision rounds of 6 hours. That is the whole margin, and an “unlimited revisions” line spends it.
The insight: price the rounds, not just the build
Unlimited revisions turn a fixed price into an hourly rate that falls every round. The fix is a number in the quote, not a boundary defended later:
- State how many rounds the price includes. Here, two.
- Price those rounds in. 40 build hours plus two rounds of 6 is 52 hours. At $85.58, that is $4,450.16 - $450.16 more than the $4,000 quote, and the difference is exactly the time you were about to give away.
- Quote extra rounds before they start. One more round here is 6 hours, or $513.48 at the floor. A round that has a price becomes a decision for the client instead of a cost for you.
None of this tells you what a client in your market will pay. If the round-inclusive price is far above what your clients accept, that is useful information: the scope, the hours, your costs or your market has to change. Quietly working below the floor is the one option that cannot last.
How much to charge for a website as a beginner
The floor rate does not depend on experience. Your rent, software and tax cost the same whether this is your first site or your fiftieth. What changes as a beginner is the hours estimate - it is the input you know least about, and it multiplies everything.
Here is the same floor and the same two included rounds across different build estimates:
| Build estimate | + 2 rounds | Hours priced | Price at the floor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 h | 12 h | 42 h | $3,594.36 |
| 40 h | 12 h | 52 h | $4,450.16 |
| 50 h | 12 h | 62 h | $5,305.96 |
| 60 h | 12 h | 72 h | $6,161.76 |
The danger is the estimate being wrong, not the rate being low. If the 40-hour build quoted at $4,000 really takes 55 hours, that is 15 hours over - about 2.5 rounds’ worth - and the effective rate is $72.73 before a single revision. That is already worse than two rounds of revisions on an accurate estimate.
So, as a beginner:
- Track your hours on every project, build and revisions separately. After a few sites, your estimates come from your own records instead of hope.
- Quote from the estimate you can defend, not the one that wins the job. If you are unsure between two figures, the table above shows what the gap costs.
- Keep the round count in the quote from the first project. It is easier to start with a stated count than to introduce one later with a client who is used to unlimited changes.
- Compare the result with your market before sending it. If it is above what clients will pay, cut scope, not the rate.
How to use this on your own numbers
- Work out your floor rate: take-home target, overhead list, tax rate on profit from your accountant, weeks off, desk hours and an honest billable share.
- Estimate the build in hours. Break it into pages and features if that helps.
- Decide how many revision rounds the price includes, and how many hours a round takes you. If you have tracked a past project, use that.
- Price = (build hours + rounds x hours per round) x floor rate.
- Put the round count and the price of an extra round in the quote.
How these were calculated
The floor rate is (take-home target / (1 - tax rate) + overhead) / billable hours, with billable hours = (52 - weeks off) x hours a week x billable share. Tax falls on profit, so overhead is added after grossing up. The effective rate after n revision rounds is the fixed price divided by (build hours + n x hours per round). Project prices are built from the floor rate as printed, to the cent. Every figure on this page was computed twice: once by the code behind the kit below, and once by an independent program that runs the year forward at a trial rate to find the floor and solves the revision rounds directly. The two agree to the cent. All inputs are illustrative, the tax rate is a placeholder, and none of this is financial, legal or tax advice.
If you would rather run this on your own numbers with a worksheet, the kit below prints the floor-rate steps and the revision-round table, plus client scripts for quoting a round count and handling the “one more page” request.