Consulting Rate Card Template
Five sheets and four documents that price the day you spend rather than the day you invoice, then set every rate from its own yield.
Free download · No account needed
Rate Card working paper · Hollingbourne Partners · two years of closed work
The floor is per day consumed
| Target owner income of $190,000, grossed up at a 32 percent effective rate | $279,000 |
| plus practice overhead | +$46,000 |
| Revenue target | $325,000 |
| 260 weekdays, less 25 days of leave taken and 9 public holidays | 226 |
| less practice administration and finance | −18 |
| less selling not tied to any named opportunity | −22 |
| Days available to deliver or to bid | 186 |
| Floor, $325,000 over 186 days | $1,747 |
Every rate by its own two factors
| Engagement type | Card | Yield | Realzn | Earns | Needs | New |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Workshop and facilitation | $3,200 | 50.0% | 93.8% | $1,500 | $3,728 | $3,750 |
| Retained advisory | $2,600 | 69.6% | 94.4% | $1,707 | $2,662 | $2,700 |
| Operations diagnostic | $2,400 | 63.2% | 93.3% | $1,414 | $2,965 | $3,000 |
| Implementation support | $2,000 | 89.7% | 96.5% | $1,730 | $2,020 | $2,050 |
| Interim operating role | $1,800 | 93.9% | 98.3% | $1,661 | $1,894 | $1,900 |
Yield is invoiced days over consumed days. Needs is the floor divided by yield and realization.
The card is upside down. Its highest rate earns $1,500 per day consumed and ranks fourth of five, because eleven days of workshop prep sit behind fifteen invoiced days. Blended, the practice earns $1,617 a day.
Page one for this query is one calculator, repeated. Target income, gross it up for tax, add practice overhead, divide by realistic billable hours, publish the answer as a floor. Every version warns against dividing by 2,080 and tells you to use 1,100 to 1,500 hours instead. The most advanced of them divides the result once more by a realization rate, so a $238 rate becomes $264. That is the ceiling of the category.
Two things are missing. The unit is wrong: dividing by billable hours prices the day you invoice, and the day you spend is what runs out. A proposal, a scoping call, an absorbed review round and a workshop's unbilled prep are all days gone. Federal cost rules count exactly those, defining bid and proposal costs as preparing, submitting and supporting bids whether or not solicited. One blended haircut is also wrong, because a rolling interim role converts 94 percent of the days it consumes into invoiced days and a workshop line converts 50.
Hollingbourne Partners, a solo operations consultancy, bills $2,037 per invoiced day and $1,617 per day consumed against a floor of $1,747, so it is $38,750 a year short while the card reads healthy. The republished card runs from $1,900 to $3,750, and $21,350 of the increase is uncollectable in the first four quarters. Run the practice itself on the consulting practice dashboard pack, reconstruct one finished engagement with engagement profitability analysis, then price the next one in the proposal pack.
What's in the pack
Rate by Engagement Type
One row per type carrying its yield, its rate realization, what it earns per day consumed, the card rate it needs, and the republished figure.
Historic Realization
Fifteen closed engagements rebuilt with sell days and absorbed days beside invoiced days, so each one shows its rate per day consumed against the floor.
Comparable Analysis
Six market rates each marked card or achieved, with what is not comparable on the row and a verdict on whether it can anchor anything at all.
Card Roll Schedule
Every live engagement with the first quarter its rate can move, the share of invoiced days at the new card per quarter, and the increase forgone.
Concession Ladder
Six things to trade before the rate, each priced against a reference diagnostic and against the ten percent discount the client is going to ask for.
Rate Card
The client-facing card: five lines with their terms, what a day means, when it is invoiced, and a short list of what is deliberately not on it.
Positioning Note
What the realized ordering means for what gets sold at the top of the page, written for the practice rather than for the client. Where a line is repeatable enough to sell at a fixed fee instead of a day rate, the productized service design pack sets the boundary.
Rate Conversation Guide
The six priced trades in the order to offer them, with the sentence that goes with each and the number that makes it hold up.
How the Card Rate Is Computed
The full worked example: $325,000 over 186 days, two years of closed work rebuilt, per-type required rates, and what the new card does not fix.
The unit is the day you spend, not the day you invoice
The standing rule. Floor over yield times realization, per line, with the sell load charged to the type that caused it. A rate that has to move mid-engagement is a change order.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Open the pack and send your closed engagements and floor inputs, or download the four Word documents and five CSV sheets and work through the arithmetic yourself.
- 2
Build the floor in days consumed
Revenue target over the days left after leave, holidays, administration and untied selling. That denominator is smaller than a billable-hours figure, and it is the honest one.
- 3
Rebuild every closed engagement
Add the sell days including the pitches you lost, and the delivery days that never reached an invoice. Both are usually recorded nowhere, and zero is a wrong answer.
- 4
Set each rate, then date it
Divide the floor by that type's own yield and rate realization. Then write the quarter each live engagement can first move, because a published rate change lands at the anniversary or the renewal option period.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. The download is Word documents and CSV sheets, no account and no card. Edit with AI is the optional half: River rebuilds your closed engagements in days consumed and derives a rate per line. The rest sit in the template library.
What format are the downloaded files?
Four Word documents and five CSV sheets in one zip, nothing to convert. The sheets carry the columns that do the work: sell days, absorbed days, days consumed, yield and rate realization per engagement type. Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets open them directly.
I never recorded my proposal or prep time. Can I still use this?
That is the normal case, and it is the reason the sheet exists. Sell days get reconstructed from the calendar in the weeks before a start date and from the proposal file's own revision history, and those rows get marked reconstructed. An estimate beats the zero a timesheet holds.
Why not just apply a realization percentage to my current rate?
Because one percentage across five lines is the error. In the worked example the diagnostic line needs 25 percent and the implementation line needs 2.5 percent. A single weighted 9.2 percent leaves two lines below the floor and prices three above what they need.
Can I raise rates on clients I already have?
Not on the day you publish. A fixed-price statement of work has no rate mechanic at all, and federal service contracts date a rate change to the anniversary of a multiple year contract. The roll schedule prices that delay: $21,350 of a $27,475 increase.
What do I do when a client asks for a discount?
Offer something priced instead. On a 14 day diagnostic at $3,000, ten percent off costs $4,200 and drops the realized rate from $2,143 to $1,929. A named case study approved at closeout is worth $2,097 in saved sell days, and a three-week longer window is worth $3,495.
Does this replace my practice reporting?
No. This sets the forward price once, and the practice dashboard runs the year around it. What one finished engagement actually earned is a separate analysis. What your existing contracts stop you selling is the restriction register, and the agreed rate becomes a term in the statement of work.
Price the day you spend
Take the Word documents and CSV sheets blank, or send River your closed engagements and get a rate per line with its own yield behind it.
Edit with AI