Last updated: July 2026 · Educational pricing worksheet
Retainer pricing formula
Start with your baseline hourly rate, multiply it by expected monthly delivery hours, then add a buffer for meetings, reporting, priority access, admin, and unavailable time you reserve for the client.
Simple formula: baseline hourly rate × expected monthly hours + retainer buffer = monthly retainer floor.
What the buffer covers
- Recurring planning calls, status updates, and reporting.
- Priority response expectations that reduce your scheduling flexibility.
- Admin, project management, file handover, and client follow-up time.
- Revision risk, client delays, and work that arrives unevenly across the month.
- Reserved availability, even when the client uses fewer delivery hours than expected.
Scope rules to set before quoting
- Monthly deliverables and what counts as a completed deliverable.
- Included calls, messages, reports, and review rounds.
- Response-time target and working-day boundaries.
- Unused-hour policy: rollover, expiry, or no time-bank.
- Extra work rate for urgent, out-of-scope, or high-volume requests.
- Minimum commitment period and payment timing.
Download the retainer scope worksheet
Use this plain-text worksheet before sending a retainer quote. It keeps the money discussion tied to scope, response time, revisions, and extra-work pricing.
Example pricing flow
If your baseline hourly rate is AED 300 and the client expects 15 delivery hours per month, the raw delivery value is AED 4,500. A retainer floor above that may be reasonable if the client also expects monthly calls, priority response, reporting, and reserved availability.
This is not a guarantee of market price. It is a sanity check so you do not sell fixed monthly access at a loss. Tiny detail, massive wallet survival.