Every pricing article tells you to put your rates up on the first of January, as if a calendar flip gives you permission. The trouble is that January is when your clients are also looking at their own numbers, bracing for a lean quarter, and reading the same advice telling them to cut costs. You raise, they flinch, and the conversation turns into a negotiation you didn't want. July is quieter, and that quiet is worth more than the symbolism of a new year.
The mid-year window nobody competes for
Most freelancers and small studio owners I know hold their breath until the autumn rush to even think about money. That means a July rate change lands in an empty inbox, before the September scramble, when your client has just signed off their own half-year review and is feeling settled rather than defensive. You're not the third price-increase email they've opened that morning. You're the only one.
There's a practical reason too. If you bill in arrears or on retainer, a July adjustment gives you two full quarters at the new rate before the year closes, which matters when you sit down to file. A web designer charging £55 an hour who moves to £65 in July books roughly £1,000 more across a typical 100-hour second half than someone who waited for January and lost the runway. The increase is the same. The timing did the work.
How to say it without flinching yourself
The hardest part of raising rates has never been the number. It's the sentence. Women in particular tend to over-explain, stacking three justifications onto a decision that needs none, and the apology in the phrasing teaches the client to push back. Don't.
A clean version reads: "From 1 September, my day rate is £480. Existing projects already underway stay at the current rate until they wrap." That's it. You've named the figure, given a date far enough out to be courteous, and protected work in progress so nobody feels ambushed. Notice what's missing — there's no "I hope that's okay," no paragraph about rising costs, no asking permission for your own business decision.
If you find yourself writing "I know this is a big jump, but…", delete everything after the comma. The "but" is where you give the money back.
One caveat worth being honest about: a July note doesn't fix an underpriced client who was always going to balk. Some relationships are built on a rate that was wrong from day one, and a polite email won't rescue them. For those, the increase isn't really a price change — it's a filter, and losing them is the point.
What to do with the client who says no
Some will. A good rule is to decide your reaction before you send the email, because deciding it in the heat of a reply is how you end up caving. Map your clients into three rough groups and treat each differently:
- The ones who pay on time and refer you — hold the new rate, and offer a small loyalty hold-back only if they ask, never pre-emptively.
- The ones who haggle every invoice — let the new number do the sorting; if they leave, your hourly profit on what remains usually goes up, not down.
- And then there's the client you've quietly outgrown but kept out of habit. July is a fine time to let that one go, with thanks and a referral to someone cheaper.
The version of this that scares people is imagining all three groups walking at once. They almost never do. In practice you lose the hagglers, keep the payers, and free up the hours the habit-client was eating.
The number is a signal, not just an income
Clients read your rate as information about how busy you are and how good you must be to charge it. A studio that charges €1,200 for a brand identity attracts a different brief than one charging €400, and not because the work differs by three times — it's because the price filtered out the buyer who wanted a logo for the cost of a nice dinner. Raising your rate in a quiet month is the lowest-stakes way to test where that signal sits.
So pick a Tuesday in mid-July. Open the doc where your rates live. Add the new figure, set the date for the first of September, and send three emails before lunch. The ones who say yes outnumber the ones who don't, almost every time — and the summer inbox is empty enough that you'll hear back fast.