How much to charge for a poster or flyer design: working out your price from scratch

Someone from a local charity messages: “How much for a poster for our fundraising dinner?” You want the job, you have no idea what to say, and you suspect whatever number you give will be either too high to win or too low to be worth it. So you type £40, then delete it, then type £60.

This guide replaces the guess with a method. It is written for freelance designers in the UK, especially those starting out, and it uses a poster as the worked example. The numbers in it are an illustration built on stated assumptions, not a survey of what designers charge, so swap in your own.

Why copying someone else’s price fails

It is tempting to look at what others charge and land somewhere in the middle. The trouble is that you don’t know what those prices include. A low price on a gig marketplace might be for one size, one revision and no print file, with the platform keeping around a fifth of it. A high agency price might cover strategy meetings you will never run.

Other people’s prices are useful as a sense check at the end. They are a poor place to start, because they tell you nothing about whether that price works for your costs, your speed and the life you need to pay for.

Start with a day rate

Work out what a day of your time has to earn, then price jobs from it. Here is the calculation with example figures.

1. What you need to earn in a year

Say you want £28,000 a year before tax from design work. Add your business costs: software subscriptions, a share of a laptop you will replace every few years, fonts and stock images, a phone, and an accountant if you use one. Say that comes to £2,000. You need the work to bring in £30,000.

2. How many days you can actually bill

There are about 52 weeks in a year. Take off holidays, bank holidays, Eid and a few days of illness, and you might work 46 weeks. You will not spend all of that designing. Replying to enquiries, writing quotes, invoicing, chasing payments and updating your portfolio take real time. It is safer to plan on about three days a week of paid work, especially in the first couple of years, and treat anything more as a good year.

46 weeks at 3 billable days is 138 days.

3. Divide

£30,000 divided by 138 days is about £217 a day. Over an eight-hour day, that is roughly £27 an hour. Round it to a figure you can say without wincing - £220 a day, or £28 an hour.

That figure surprises people who are used to thinking about wages. It is not the same thing. An employee’s salary comes with paid holidays, sick pay, a pension contribution and someone else paying for the laptop. Your rate has to cover all of that, plus the days nobody books you.

Count the hours a poster really takes

Now estimate the job honestly. Most people only count the time at the design software and forget everything around it. For a standard event poster, a realistic breakdown might be:

• Reading the brief, asking questions, gathering text and photos: 1 hour.
• First design, including trying a couple of directions: 3 hours.
• Two rounds of revisions: 1 hour.
• Preparing the print PDF with bleed, plus checking it: 30 minutes.
• Emails, the invoice and delivering files: 30 minutes.

That is six hours. At £28 an hour, the poster comes to £168. You might quote £165 or £170 for that job. If you are faster than this, your price per job falls, and that is the right incentive: you earn the same per hour and win more work.

Keep a simple log of how long your next five posters actually take. Real times are almost always longer than estimates, and after five jobs you will have a figure you can trust.

Price the extras separately

The base price should cover a clearly defined job. Everything beyond it is an extra with its own line on the quote, which keeps the headline figure competitive and stops scope creep.

• Extra sizes. Turning an A4 poster into an Instagram post, a 9:16 story and an A5 flyer is real work, because the layout has to be rebuilt for each shape. Price each one, or offer a bundle.
• Extra revision rounds. State how many are included. After that, charge at your hourly rate, and say so up front.
• Rush jobs. If a client needs it tomorrow and you have to move other work, a rush fee of a fixed percentage is fair. Pick one, such as 25% or 50%, and state it before you start rather than after.
• Stock images and fonts. If a client wants a paid photo or a font that needs a licence for commercial use, pass on the cost, and check the licence covers print.
• Source files. Handing over editable files lets a client change next year’s date without you, which is worth something. Price it separately rather than giving it away by default.

Clients who write a clear brief take less of your time, and some designers quietly price that in. Sharing a guide like how to brief a graphic designer with new clients is a polite way to get better briefs.

Charity and masjid rates

A lot of design work in the Muslim community is for masjids, schools and small charities, and many designers want to help them without going broke. That is a good instinct. It works best when it is deliberate rather than a habit of saying a low number every time.

• Decide on a set discount, for example 20% for registered charities, and apply it the same way every time.
• Show it on the quote and the invoice as a separate line below your full price. The treasurer sees the real value, and next year’s committee will not assume the discounted figure is your rate.
• If you want to donate work, decide how many free jobs you can afford in a year, and treat them as sadaqah you have chosen rather than favours you were talked into.

Also take a deposit and agree payment terms on community jobs, exactly as you would for a business. Committees change and volunteers move on, and an agreed price in writing protects everyone. Our guide on how to write an invoice as a sole trader covers purchase orders, reminders and what to do when an invoice goes unpaid.

Showing your prices

Many designers hide their prices and answer every enquiry with “it depends”. The result is a stream of messages from people who would never have afforded the job, and a few who might have but were put off by having to ask.

A “from” price solves most of this. “Event poster, from £165, includes A4 print file and two rounds of revisions” tells a client enough to decide whether to get in touch, while leaving room to quote higher for a complicated job.

Finally, look at what the route to your clients costs you. On a commission marketplace, a £165 job leaves you with noticeably less once the platform’s cut and processing fees come off. Our DeenTask vs Fiverr comparison sets out the fees, including the cases where Fiverr is the better choice, such as wanting a large global audience quickly. On DeenTask, clients pay you directly and nothing is taken, though you still pay your own processor’s fee if you accept cards; the getting paid guide explains those costs. You can browse open design jobs once your page is live. If you also build websites, the same method applies to bigger projects such as a mosque website - just with more hours in step two.