Are you charging enough for your design services? Many home-based designers don't charge high enough for their services. They undervalue their work and struggle to find meaningful relationships with great clients. And although it might sound counterintuitive, when you find yourself in this situation, the solution is to raise your prices. It's been proven time and again that the more you charge, the better and more appreciative your clients will be. But when should you raise your design prices? Below are ten indicators to let you know it's time to increase yours. But before we get to them, here's a quick way to determine your hourly rate. For the record, I don't believe you should be charging by the hour. The following just gives you an idea of where you stand. Calculating your hourly design rate. Say you want to make $60,000 per year, a realistic number for a freelance designer that allows for comfortable living. As an employee working 9-5 for someone else, you would need an hourly rate of $28.85 to make $60K annually. But you're not an employee getting paid for an 8 hour day, five days per week. You're a home-based designer, a freelancer if you want to use that term, and there's nothing steady about a freelancer's income. To make $60,000 as a home-based designer, how much do you need to charge as an hourly rate? Let's do the math. There are 260 weekdays per year. Let's eliminate 25 days for vacation and other miscellaneous days. (3 weeks vacation plus sick days, medical appointments, children's activities, etc.) That leaves us with 235 working days per year. During an 8 hour workday, freelancers average 4.5 billable hours. This adds up to 1057.5 billable hours per year. So $60,000 per year, divided by 1057.5 billable hours, equals $56.74/hour (let's round it up to $57.) $60,000 ÷ 1057.5 hours = $57/hour (rounded up) Although you shouldn't be charging hourly for your design services, knowing your hourly rate helps you figure out if you are charging enough per design project. 10 Signs You Should Raise Your Design Prices 1. You're super busy and starting to feel overwhelmed. All the big business sites (Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., Business Weekly) all say the same thing, having a back-log of projects or a waiting list of clients or just being super busy all the time is a sign that you are not charging enough for your services. The strategy here is that raising your rates, and being more selective in who you work with, will lessen the fell of overwhelm, but the higher prices you're charging will make up for any loss incurred from having fewer clients. 2. You're attracting undesirable clients. Are you attracting the type of client that doesn't put much value in what you do? Clients that want it all but are not willing to pay much for it? Clients, that micro-manage you complain and criticize your work, or tell you how to do your job? Clients that would leave you in a heartbeat for a competitor to save a buck? If this sounds like the type of client you're currently working with, raising your rates should fix the problem. Those clients will stop bothering you and go looking for a less expensive solution. Your new rates will attract new clients who are willing to pay higher prices. Plus, they'll trust and value your services and are likely to stay loyal, even if a lower cost option presents itself. 3 You're not landing your ideal clients. If clients are reaching out to you but not hiring you, it might be because your prices are too low. When someone is expecting to pay a certain amount for a project, and you quote a price lower than they expected, red flags go up, and they start wondering if perhaps you're qualified or experienced enough for what they need. They'll imagine all sorts of deficiencies to justify your low prices. So if you're losing more clients than you're landing, consider raising your prices. 4. You start offering a new service. Have you learnt a new skill such as video editing or 3D animation and have added it to you