How to price freelance work in India

You have a portfolio, a few clients, and every time someone asks "what will it cost?" you pick a number that feels safe and hope. This playbook replaces the hoping with arithmetic. You will work out the least you can charge, check it against what clients actually pay, and turn it into a quote that accounts for GST and TDS.

Start with your floor rate

Your floor is the rate below which freelancing costs you money. It is not your price. It is the line you do not cross, and it comes entirely from your own life.

You need four numbers.

1. What you take home each month. Rent, food, family, EMIs, travel. Use your actual bank statements from the last three months, not a guess.
2. What the business costs each month. Software subscriptions, a laptop fund (a ₹1.2 lakh machine every three years is about ₹3,300 a month), internet and phone, health insurance, your CA's fee spread across the year, coworking if you use it.
3. What you save. An employee gets PF and paid leave. You do not, so build them in. Put a fixed amount towards an emergency fund and retirement.
4. A tax set-aside. How much income tax you owe depends on your regime, your deductions and whether the presumptive scheme for professionals applies to your work. The income tax playbook covers that. Until your CA gives you a figure, set aside 10% of everything that comes in.

A worked example

Ananya is a product designer in Pune, three years into freelancing.

So she needs about ₹97,000 a month, or ₹11.6 lakh a year, coming in.

Now the part most people get wrong: how many days she can bill. There are about 261 weekdays in a year. Take out a dozen public and festival holidays, and three weeks for leave and illness, and she is left with roughly 234 working days. She will not bill all of them. Some go to pitching, invoicing, learning, and the gap between one project ending and the next starting. Booking 70% of working days is a decent year for most freelancers, which gives about 160 billable days.

₹11.6 lakh ÷ 160 days = ₹7,250 a day. Ananya rounds up to a floor of ₹7,500 a day, or about ₹1,250 an hour if she counts six focused hours in a billable day.

Check the floor against the market

The floor tells you what you need. The market tells you what clients will pay. You quote somewhere at or above both.

Three quick ways to read the market:

• Salaries for the same role. Look up the role on AmbitionBox or Naukri for the client's city. A mid-level product designer on ₹12 lakh a year costs an employer about ₹4,800 per working day in salary alone, before PF, laptop, leave and office space. A freelancer charging one and a half to two times that daily figure is in a sensible range. Ananya's ₹7,500 sits inside it.
• What clients post. Budgets on the club jobs board, on Upwork job posts, and in agency briefs show what people expect to pay for a defined piece of work.
• What peers charge. Ask two or three freelancers at your level directly. Most will tell you a range if you tell them yours first.

If the market is well above your floor, quote the market. Your floor is a minimum, not a target. If the market is below your floor for the work you do, that is useful information too: you may need a different client type (funded startups, agencies, foreign clients) or a narrower specialism. The playbook on researching a client's budget goes into reading a single client rather than the whole market.

Day rate, hourly or project price

Your day rate is an internal number. Whether you show it to the client depends on the work.

For defined projects (a landing page, a brand identity, ten blog posts), quote a single project price. Estimate the days, add a buffer for revisions and back-and-forth, multiply by your day rate, and round. Ananya estimates a landing page at four days, adds one for revisions, and gets ₹37,500. She quotes ₹40,000.

For open-ended work, such as maintaining a product, sitting in on sprints, or an agency booking you for a campaign, a day or hourly rate is fairer to both sides. Agencies in particular often think in days.

For steady monthly work, a retainer with a fixed scope works better than either. The hourly, fixed price or retainer playbook helps you choose.

Writers and video editors often price per unit (per word, per finished minute, per reel). That is fine as long as you check the unit price against your day rate: if a 1,000-word article at ₹2 a word (₹2,000) takes you most of a day, you are working at about a quarter of your floor.

What to write in the quote

For an Indian business client, when you are registered for GST, write the fee and the tax separately:

Fee: ₹40,000 + 18% GST (₹7,200)
Total payable: ₹47,200
Payment: 50% advance on signing, 50% on delivery, each within 7 days of invoice.

If you are not registered, write the fee alone and do not mention GST. You cannot charge GST without a registration, and registration becomes compulsory once your turnover crosses ₹20 lakh in a year (₹10 lakh in a few special category states). The GST registration playbook explains when it is worth doing earlier. For foreign clients, exports of services are zero-rated, and under a Letter of Undertaking you charge no GST on them; see getting paid from abroad.

The payment line matters as much as the fee. The deposits and payment terms playbook has wording for advances and milestones.

What actually lands in your bank

Indian companies usually deduct TDS from your fee before paying you. For fees for professional services the rate is generally 10% (2% for technical services), and it applies once their payments to you under that head cross ₹50,000 in the year (section 393(1) of the Income-tax Act, 2025, serial 6(iii); section 194J of the old Act). When GST is shown separately on the invoice, TDS is worked out on the fee, not the GST.

On Ananya's ₹47,200 invoice, to a client who has already paid her past the threshold this year:

The ₹4,000 is not gone. It is deposited against her PAN, shows in Form 26AS and the AIS, and counts towards her income tax when she files. The ₹7,200 GST was never hers; it goes out with her GST return, less any input tax credit. So her real fee is still ₹40,000, but only ₹36,000 is spendable this month. Plan cash flow on that number. The TDS playbook covers rates for technical services and contract work, and how to chase a client who deducts but does not deposit.

When to raise your rates

Look at your rate at least once a year. Raise it sooner if any of these is true for you:

• You are booked solid four or more weeks ahead, month after month.
• Your last five or six quotes were accepted without a single question about price.
• You can now show a result you could not show a year ago (a case study with numbers, a known client, a new skill).
• Your costs have gone up: a rent increase, a new dependant, a pricier software stack.

Raise for new clients first. That costs you nothing and tells you quickly whether the new number holds. For existing clients, give 30 to 60 days' notice, and if you can, time it to April, when many Indian companies set new budgets.

Subject: My rates from 1 April

Hi Rohan,

Thank you for a good year of work together. From 1 April my day rate moves from ₹7,500 to ₹8,500. Anything we agree before then stays at the current rate, including the Q1 campaign.

Happy to talk it through on a call if that helps with your planning.

Ananya

Clients who push back are not a reason to drop the increase. The price pushback playbook covers trading scope for price instead of discounting.

Where to go next

Once you have a number, the rest of this shelf helps you get it accepted: anchoring your price so it lands well, writing the proposal, adding case studies that justify it, cold emails to find the clients in the first place, and following up when they go quiet.

If you only do one thing today, work out your floor with your real bank statements. Every quote after that gets easier.