How to Tell Clients You're Raising Your Prices

If your prices have not moved in a couple of years and you have been meaning to do something about it, you are in good company and there is usually a sensible reason for the delay. The work of changing a price is small. The work of telling people is the part that sits in your diary moving from week to week.

So this is mostly about the telling. There is a notice you can adapt at the bottom, and before that the two or three things that make the difference between a price rise that costs you a client and one that nobody mentions again.

Say you look after about a dozen retainer clients. Your rate was right when you set it, and since then you have got considerably better at the work, your costs have gone up, and two of those twelve have quietly expanded what they ask of you without anything changing on the invoice. You know the number should move. What stops you is a specific fear with a specific face on it, which is the client you have had longest, who has been generous to you, and who you can already hear sounding disappointed.

When should you raise your prices?

When the price no longer matches the value of the work or the cost of delivering it, which for most service businesses means more often than once every three years and by less each time.

That last part is the bit worth hearing. Small regular increases are far easier for a client to absorb than one large correction, because a large correction is a surprise and a surprise invites a conversation about whether it is justified. If you raise your rate modestly every year, it becomes a thing you do rather than an event, and nobody has to decide how they feel about it.

There are four moments when the question has usually already answered itself. When your costs have risen and your rate has not. When the scope of what you deliver has grown without the invoice changing. When you are turning work away because you are full. And when you notice that you are quietly hoping a particular client will leave, which is almost always a pricing problem wearing a different coat.

Does your current rate reflect what you charge, or what you were willing to accept when you needed the work? Those are different numbers, and a lot of businesses are still running on the second one.

Why do you already know your prices are too low?

Because being full and being resentful are both pricing signals, and most people feel them well before they act on them.

Here is the thing that makes pricing genuinely hard to think about clearly. Price is not a measurement of your work. It feels like it should be, which is why raising it feels like a claim about yourself, but it is not.

Think about a bottle of water in a grocery store in Portugal. It costs about fifty cents, and it is good water from a mountain. Now think about a worse bottle of water at Heathrow airport, past security, which costs eight dollars. The water did not improve. Nothing about the product got better, and the bottle at the airport is probably the inferior one. What changed is the situation the buyer is in, and what the water is worth to them in that moment.

So when you raise your price, you are not asserting that you have become sixteen times better. You are pricing the situation, the problem you solve, and what it is worth to the person who has it. That is a much easier thing to say out loud than "I am worth more now," and it has the advantage of being the accurate description.

<!-- PLACEHOLDER: the investor story goes here if Simone confirms it. The point it would make is that she once declined money she had already been offered, using a team departure as the reason, and later recognized it as an income ceiling she was not ready to pass. It belongs here because the reader who has not raised prices in three years is doing a quieter version of the same thing. Not included until confirmed, because it is not on the confirmed stories list. -->

How do you tell clients about a price increase?

In writing, individually, about sixty days ahead, with the new number stated plainly and no apology attached.

Each of those is doing a job, so here is why for each.

In writing gives the client time to react privately rather than having to produce a response while you are looking at them. Most people's first reaction to a price is not their considered one, and a written notice lets the considered one be the one you hear.

Individually matters more than it sounds. A notice that reads as a form letter sent to everybody tells a long-standing client that they are a line in a spreadsheet, which is exactly the wrong message in the one conversation where you want them to feel their relationship with you is real. Change at least the first line for each person.

Sixty days gives them a budget cycle to absorb it. Thirty is doable and feels brisk. Anything less than thirty reads as a problem you are handing to them rather than a change you are managing.

Plainly means the number is in the email, not in an attachment, and not softened to the point where they have to work out what you mean. If the reader has to re-read your notice to find out what happens next, you have made it harder for them to say yes.

And no apology, which is the one people find hardest. "I am so sorry to have to do this" invites them to agree that something regrettable is happening. Nothing regrettable is happening. You are telling a supplier relationship the current price, which every business you buy from does to you, usually with less care than you are about to take.

What do you say if a client pushes back?

Ask what specifically is difficult before you answer, because the three things it might be have three different answers.

The temptation when somebody objects is to respond immediately, and usually to respond by discounting. Slow it down by one question. Something as simple as "can you tell me a bit more about what makes it difficult?" will tell you which conversation you are actually in.

If it is a budget problem, the answer is usually a smaller version of the work rather than the same work for less money. Fewer hours, a narrower scope, a longer timeline. Protect the rate and change what they get for it, because the moment you deliver the same thing for less you have told them your price was never real.

If it is a value problem, meaning they do not see what they are getting, then they have told you something important about your reporting rather than your price. Clients who can see the results rarely argue about the invoice. It is worth asking yourself whether this client has ever been shown what the work actually produced.

If it is a fairness problem, meaning they feel the increase came out of nowhere, that is a process issue and the answer is honesty about your timing plus a commitment to more notice next time. It is also the one that most clearly argues for small annual increases rather than occasional large ones.

And some clients will leave. I would rather say that than pretend otherwise. Usually it is one or two, usually they are the ones who were taking the most and paying the least, and the capacity they free up tends to get filled at the new rate. That is not a comforting platitude, it is just the arithmetic of the thing, and it is worth knowing before you start that losing nobody at all is not the goal. If you raise your prices and every single client stays without a flicker, you probably did not raise them enough.

What does leaving your prices alone actually cost?

More than the difference, and in three places rather than one.

The first is the straightforward gap, which is every hour you work at a rate you have outgrown. If you have twelve clients and your rate is fifteen percent below where it should be, you are delivering roughly two of those twelve for nothing, and you are doing it every month.

The second is the capacity cost, which is larger and less visible. Underpriced work fills the time you would otherwise use for the better-paid work, so the real price of an outdated rate is not the discount, it is the client you did not have room to take. That is the part people miss, because the discount shows up on an invoice and the missing client does not show up anywhere.

The third is what it does to the work itself. Resentment is not a good state to deliver from, and a client you are quietly annoyed with gets a slightly worse version of you, which makes them less likely to stay and less likely to refer you. An underpriced client relationship tends to decay on its own, and the price is usually the cause rather than the symptom.

The cost of waiting another year is not one year of the gap. It is one year of the gap, plus a year of the capacity, plus another year of being the person whose rate is from two years ago, which gets harder to correct the longer it runs.

How to actually do it this month

Four steps, and the first three are desk work.

1. Pick the number and the date. The new rate, and the date it applies from, which should be at

least thirty and ideally sixty days out.

1. Decide who is affected and in what order. New enquiries get the new rate immediately.

Existing clients get the notice. If you want to protect one or two long relationships with a longer run-in, decide that now rather than improvising it when somebody pushes.

1. Write the notice once and personalize the opening line for each person.
2. Send them all on the same day. This matters, because clients talk to each other and

staggering it over three weeks means somebody hears it secondhand before they hear it from you.

Here is a notice you can adapt.

Subject: A change to my rates from [date]

Hi [name],

[One line specific to this client, for example: I have really enjoyed working on [project] with you
this year.]

I am writing to let you know that my rates will be changing from [date]. From then, [service] will
be [new rate], up from [old rate].

I have kept my rates where they were since [year], and this change brings them in line with the
work as it stands now. Everything about how we work together stays the same.

If you would like to talk it through, I am happy to find a time.

Thanks,
[your name]

Notice what is not in it. No long justification, because a paragraph defending the number implies the number needs defending. No mention of inflation or of your own costs as the reason, because your costs are not your client's problem and they know it. And no apology.

One thing I would say plainly, because this is where most of the hesitation actually lives. Raising your prices is not something you do to your clients. It is a normal piece of maintenance in a business, in the same category as updating your contract or changing your payment terms, and your clients run their own versions of it without agonizing over whether you will be upset. The discomfort is real and it is not evidence that you are doing something wrong.

Common questions

How much should I raise my prices by?

Enough that you do not have to do it again in six months, which usually means more than you first think and less than feels dramatic. If you have not moved in years and are well below the market, the honest answer may be that one increase will not close the gap, in which case plan two over eighteen months rather than one that frightens everybody.

Should I grandfather my existing clients at the old rate?

You can, for a defined period, and the thing to avoid is an open-ended exception. "Your current rate holds until March" is a kindness. "You are on the old rate indefinitely" means you have two businesses, one of which is slowly becoming your least profitable, and it gets harder to unwind every year.

What if a client asks me to justify the increase?

Tell them what has changed about the work and the market, briefly, and resist the pull into a line-by-line defense. A short answer given calmly reads as a settled decision. A long one reads as a request for permission, and the longer you talk the more it sounds like something you might be talked out of.

Do I need to explain why I am raising my prices?

One sentence is plenty, and it should be about the work rather than about your circumstances. "This brings my rates in line with the work as it stands now" is complete. Your rent, your costs and your own suppliers are real, and they are not arguments a client can do anything with.

*This article is education and coaching rather than financial, tax or business advice, and it cannot account for your own contracts or the rules where you operate.*

Raising your price is not a claim about how good you are. It is a description of what the work is

worth to the person who needs it, and that is a much easier sentence to say out loud.