What makes this work worth more
The price lives in the client’s outcome, not your artboard. Before quoting, get clear on:
- What the site converts: demos booked, carts completed, applications submitted
- Whether it replaces sales labor the client currently pays for
- Credibility at the moment of evaluation — many buyers see the site before they'll take a call
- The cost of the current site quietly leaking leads
What legitimately moves the scope
- Page count and template count (10 pages on 3 templates ≠ 10 bespoke pages)
- Design only, or design + build? Which platform?
- Content: who writes, who supplies imagery
- Responsive states, interactions, and post-launch support
Every one of these belongs in the proposal’s scope section — vague scope is where margins go to die. (See the proposal template and the change order.)
A worked example
A consultancy's site books discovery calls; each engagement is worth ~$25,000 and the current site produces roughly one inquiry a month against an obvious potential of three.
- Value anchor: two additional engagements a year ≈ $50,000; 10% → a $5,000 anchor.
- Honest scope: 55 hours design + build on their platform. At a $90/hour floor, cost-of-time is $4,950 — the anchor barely clears the floor, which tells you to tier upward from it.
- Tiers: Essential $4,980 (5 pages, 2 templates), Complete $6,880 (full site + copy polish), Premium $9,480 (site + conversion-focused iteration month).
Illustrative arithmetic, not a benchmark — swap in your own floor rate and the client’s real numbers. The project pricing calculator runs this math live.
The floor check
The floor-check data for web design is the best in this library: surveyed web designers report a median of $92.75/hour with revenue tiers from $76–131/hour (State of Web Designer Pricing 2025, n=208, ~60% US — a coaching-program survey that skews high), while broad aggregators land near $35/hour (ZipRecruiter, 2026). Both are real; neither is a method. Estimate your hours honestly, pick the anchor your positioning supports, and make sure the project price clears it.
Don’t know your own floor yet? Derive it in two minutes — income goal, real costs, honest billable hours.
Common questions
- What do freelance web designers charge per hour in 2026?
- Surveyed web designers report a median of $92.75/hour (State of Web Designer Pricing, 2025 — a survey that skews toward coached, premium-positioned designers), while broad aggregators like ZipRecruiter put the average nearer $35/hour. The honest read: positioning moves the number by 2–3×.
- Should websites be priced hourly or by project?
- By project: 82% of surveyed web designers price by package or project (State of Web Designer Pricing, 2025). Project pricing pays you for the outcome and your accumulated speed, and gives the client a fixed number to say yes to.
- What should a website project price include?
- Spell it out: page/template count, design vs. design+build, content responsibilities, revision rounds, responsive states, and what happens after launch. Most web-project disputes are scope disputes that better proposals would have prevented.
Go deeper: read the full guide on the blog.