Ask ten designers what they charge for a website and you'll get ten different answers, and they can all be right. A one-page site on a template and a custom online store are both "a website."
So instead of a magic number, here's how to work out yours. All you need is a calculator and a year of bank statements.
Why there's no single right price
A price is really three things stacked up: what you need to earn, how long the work takes you, and what this particular project includes. Change any one of them and the price moves. That's why a "typical website price" doesn't help much. It's somebody else's income, somebody else's speed and somebody else's scope.
What the numbers online can (and can't) tell you
Be wary of any rate range that doesn't say where it came from. These ones show their work, as long as you know what they measure:
- Employee pay, not freelance rates. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the 2025 median pay for web developers and digital designers at $99,520 a year, or $47.85 an hour. For graphic designers it's $62,960 a year. Both figures leave out self-employed people entirely, so they tell you what employers pay staff, not what freelancers charge.
- What an employee really costs. BLS also tracks what employers spend per hour worked. In June 2026, private employers paid $46.89 an hour on average, and about 30% of that went to benefits instead of wages. That's an average across all private employers, not a rule for you. When you work for yourself, you cover your own versions of those, and yours will be different.
- Self-employment tax. In the US it's 15.3% (Social Security plus Medicare), on top of income tax. The Social Security part stops at a yearly earnings cap, so check the current figure.
- What freelance designers say. A 2026 Fast Company and AIGA survey of 1,273 freelance designers (mostly graphic and brand designers, who chose to take part) found only 12% felt very confident pricing their work. Fees across all kinds of design work ran from under $1,000 to $50,000 or more.
None of that is your number, so let's work yours out.
Step 1: Decide what you want to take home
Start with the income you want to live on for a year, after taxes. Be honest, not heroic.
Step 2: Add what the business costs to run
Software, hardware, fonts and stock photos, hosting, insurance, an accountant, the occasional coworking day pass. Add up a year of it. It's usually more than you'd guess, so pull it from your bank statements instead of your memory.
Step 3: Add taxes and the benefits nobody's paying for anymore
As an employee, someone else covered part of your taxes, plus things like health insurance and retirement. Now that's all you. This is the line to get help with, because an accountant can tell you what to set aside where you live. In the example below it's just a round placeholder.
Step 4: Count billable hours, not working hours
This is where the math goes sideways. You don't bill for every hour you work. Sales calls, quotes, email, invoicing, updating your portfolio and learning new tools all take real time, and none of it goes on an invoice. Take out vacation and sick days too.
Estimate the hours you can bill in a year. Then divide the total from steps 1 to 3 by those hours. That's your hourly floor.
Step 5: Turn your hourly floor into a project price
Your hourly number is a floor, not a menu price. To price a project:
- Break it into phases, like discovery, design, build, content, testing and launch.
- Estimate the hours for each one.
- Add a buffer for feedback rounds and surprises.
- Multiply by your rate, then look at the total and ask if it makes sense for the scope and the client.
Then quote the project as one price, with what's included written out line by line. A clear scope makes your quote easy to say yes to, and easy to point back to when the "quick extra page" shows up later.
A worked example (the numbers are made up)
These numbers are invented to show the math. They aren't market rates, and the tax line is a placeholder, not advice.
| Line | Made-up amount |
|---|---|
| Take-home goal | $80,000 |
| Business costs | $10,000 |
| Taxes and benefits you now cover (placeholder) | $30,000 |
| What the business needs to bring in | $120,000 |
| Billable hours (20 a week for 50 weeks) | 1,000 |
| Hourly floor | $120 |
Now say you estimate a site at 60 hours. With no buffer, that's $7,200. Add a 20% buffer and it's 72 hours, or $8,640.
Look at the billable hours line again. If you'd assumed 40 billable hours a week instead of 20, your floor would drop to $60 an hour. But if you could only really bill 20, you'd bring in $60,000, half of what the business needs. Billable hours are the number to be most honest about.
How to structure the payments
How much you take up front and when the rest is due depends on the project and its size. A small refresh might be half before you start and half at launch. A bigger build might add a payment in the middle. Whatever you choose, put it in the quote and the contract so nobody's surprised.
