Pricing Your Time When You Go Full-Time

The short answer

Work out what you need to earn in a year, divide it by the hours you can realistically bill, and treat everything else as overhead you must recover. Most creators price against the hours they spend filming and ignore the three or four unpaid hours behind every paid one, which is why the rate feels fine and the bank balance does not. The fix is arithmetic, not confidence.

This piece is general information about pricing, not financial advice. For anything to do with tax, allowable expenses or how to structure your business, speak to an accountant and check current HMRC guidance.

Hobby maths and business maths are different

When creating is a side thing, every pound is upside. There is a salary underneath it, the kit was bought anyway, and the hours came out of unpaid evenings regardless. Charging £300 for a video feels excellent.

Full-time, that same £300 has to cover the filming, the editing, the revisions, the invoicing, the month you were ill, the kit, the software, the pension nobody is paying into for you, and the tax that lands later. It is not £300 of income. It is £300 of turnover, and the difference is the whole job.

The transition catches people out: the rate that felt generous as a hobbyist is often below cost as a business, and by the time you notice you have a client list built at that number.

Working out a real hourly cost

Do this once, properly, on paper. It takes an hour and it changes how you negotiate for years.

Target income. What you need to live on, honestly, including the things you are currently pretending are optional. Add a figure for tax and National Insurance based on current HMRC guidance for your situation. Add pension. Add a holiday allowance you would get in any job.
Business costs. Kit and replacement kit, editing software, storage, accounting, insurance, travel, phone, any subcontractors. Annual figure.
Billable hours. Here is where people lie to themselves. Start with 52 weeks, take off five for holiday, two for illness and admin collapse, and you have 45. Then take off the unpaid work: for most creators, roughly half to two thirds of working time is not directly billable. If you work a 40-hour week, assume 13 to 20 genuinely billable hours in it.

Target income plus costs, divided by billable hours, is your floor. Not your price. Your floor. Anything below it means you are subsidising the client.

A rule of thumb from practice: creators who run this calculation for the first time usually find their real cost is somewhere between two and three times what they had been mentally charging.

The unpaid work nobody quotes for

The hours that vanish from most people's estimates:

Editing and revisions. Usually the largest single block, and revision rounds are the part that goes unbounded when the contract does not cap them.
DMs, comments and community. Genuinely unlimited. It is also the work that most directly protects your income, which is why it cannot simply be dropped.
Pitching and negotiation. The deals you did not win still cost you hours.
Admin. Invoicing, chasing late payment, bookkeeping, contracts, filing.
Audience maintenance. The organic posting that keeps you worth hiring. Nobody pays for it and it is the reason anyone pays for anything else.

You do not bill these separately. You recover them in the rate, which is why the rate must exceed the time-in-front-of-camera figure.

Why creators undercharge

Partly the hobby hangover above. Partly a stubborn instinct that enjoyable work should cost less. Mostly, though, it is information asymmetry: you have no colleagues, no salary bands, and no idea what the brand paid the last three people. They have a budget line and a spreadsheet of what everyone in your bracket charges. When you name the first number in that room you are almost always naming a low one.

Two practical corrections. Ask what the budget is before you quote, plainly and without apology, because it is a normal commercial question. And build a small network of creators at roughly your level who will swap actual figures. That single habit is worth more than any pricing template.

Raising rates without losing everyone

You will lose some clients. That is the mechanism working, not failing. The aim is to lose the right ones.

Raise on new business first. Quote the new number to every inbound enquiry for a couple of months. You learn where resistance actually starts before you touch existing relationships.
Give existing clients notice and a date. Something like: rates change from the first of the month after next, here is the new figure, delighted to keep working together. No essay, no justification, no apology.
Change the offer when you change the price. Adding a deliverable, tightening the revision rounds or shortening the licence term gives everyone a face-saving reason for the number to move.
Expect a third to grumble and a small number to leave. If nobody objects at all, you did not raise enough.

The uncomfortable truth is that the clients who leave over a sensible increase are usually the ones costing you the most in revisions and chasing.

When to stop trading time for money

Hourly and day rates have a hard ceiling: there are only so many days, and you cannot be ill.

The usual next steps, roughly in order of difficulty:

Price on value, not hours. Quote a project fee tied to what the work is worth to the client, not to how long it takes you. Getting faster should not reduce your income.
Licence rather than sell. Charge for usage, term and territory. The same asset can earn repeatedly.
Delegate the unbillable half. Every hour of editing or scheduling you hand off converts directly into a billable or creative hour. This is usually the highest-return move available and the one people delay longest.
Build something that earns without you. Products, memberships, back catalogue. Slow to start, and worth starting before you need it.

Most people go full-time and fill the extra hours with more of the same work at the same rate. Better to fix the rate and the delegation early, while there is still slack to do it with.

Where this fits

The unbillable half of the job is where the pricing maths breaks, and it is also the part that can be handed over. CORE takes on repurposing, scheduling and channel management so those hours stop coming out of your rate. If your floor calculation came out uncomfortably high, that is usually the first place to look.