How Much to Charge for a Website: A 4-Number Method

How much to charge for a website comes down to four numbers. Take what an hour of your time costs, multiply it by the hours the job needs and add your margin. Then check the result against what the site is worth to the client. The first three give you a price. The fourth tells you whether the owner can say yes.

This guide works through each number with one example. The example is made up, and its dollar figures are there to show the arithmetic.

You will not find a table of typical prices here. The ranges that guides publish for web design pricing are wide enough to fit almost any quote, so they cannot tell you whether yours covers your costs.

What four numbers set the price of a website?

The four numbers are your cost per hour, the hours the job takes, your margin and the value of the site to the client. Three come from your own business and one comes from the client's.

Put together, the first three make one formula.

Price = (hours × cost per hour + direct costs) ÷ (1 - margin)

What does one hour of your time cost?

Your cost per hour is your pay target plus your yearly overhead, divided by the hours you can bill in a year. It is the least an hour can sell for before you are paying to work.

Pay target. Start with what an employer would pay you. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage for web developers at $92,650 and for web and digital interface designers at $104,000, both for May 2025 (BLS). Those figures cover employees. They leave out the self-employed.

Overhead. Add what the business pays for in a year. Software, insurance, an accountant, equipment, health cover and your own website all count.

Tax. If you are self-employed in the US, add self-employment tax. The IRS states the rate as 15.3%, which is 12.4% for social security and 2.9% for Medicare (IRS). Part of that is what the IRS calls the employer-equivalent portion, so a pay target copied from an employee's wage runs short unless your overhead includes it. This is not legal advice. An accountant can tell you what you will owe.

Billable hours. You will not bill 40 hours a week. Admin, training and time off take the rest. Count the weeks you work and the hours in each week that end up on a client's quote.

Here is the sum for Dana, a made-up freelancer in Ohio. Only her pay target is a real figure.

How many hours does the job take?

Count the hours task by task, add an allowance for surprises, then add the hours it took to win the job. One guess for the whole project hides the tasks you forgot.

Dana is quoting a 10-page site for Ridgeline Roofing, a made-up roofer at ridgelineroofing.example.

Selling time is the line that pricing guides leave off the quote. None of the five we read for this post lists it as a cost of the job. Dana sends 4 proposals to win 1 job, and each proposal takes 3 hours with its call. That is 12 hours of selling behind every job she wins, and no other client will pay for them.

Count those hours once. If you put selling time on the quote, count it among your billable hours as well.

The earlier campaign described in our October 2026 study is a fair warning. An agency emailed 1,382 Dutch companies. The campaign led to 3 sales calls and 0 clients. Reviewing each website by hand first would have taken about 184 hours, at about 8 minutes a site. Selling costs hours either way, and someone pays for them.

What margin should you add?

Margin is the share of the price that is left after every cost is paid. It covers slow months, unpaid invoices and growth. Choose a figure once, write it down and apply it to every quote.

To add a margin, divide the cost by one minus the margin. Multiplying gives you less than you think.

Dana's job costs 104 hours at $100, which is $10,400, plus $600 for stock photos and a form plugin. Her total cost is $11,000. She wants a 20% margin, which is an example figure and no rule.

A 20% markup is a 16.7% margin. On this one job the difference is $550. Dana's price is $13,750.

What is the website worth to the client?

A website is worth the extra customers it brings, multiplied by what one customer is worth. Ask the owner for both numbers. Together they set the ceiling on your price.

Say the owner of Ridgeline Roofing tells Dana that an average roof job brings in $9,000. At $13,750, the new site pays for itself with 2 extra jobs.

Now send the same quote to a made-up barber shop where a visit brings in $30. The site would need 459 extra visits to pay for itself. The hours are the same and the price is the same. The answer will be no.

When a price fails the value check, cut the scope and keep the rate. Fewer pages and fewer features mean fewer hours. The price falls, and your cost per hour and your margin stay whole. A discount with nothing removed is a pay cut.

The owner's current site shows how large the gap is. A roofer whose quote form breaks on a phone is losing requests today, and you can show it on your own phone. Name that finding in the quote, and the price has a reason attached to it.

Finding those weak sites is what Leadodo is for. Twip, the AI inside Leadodo, scores every website in a search out of 100 across 10 domains, and sites below 40 form the shortlist. See how the score works.

Should you check your price against the market?

Yes, and do it last. The market tells you whether your price will look odd. It cannot tell you whether the price covers your costs.

1. Local agencies that publish prices. They sell to the same owners you do.
2. Freelance marketplaces such as Upwork. Look at what sellers with your skills ask.
3. What buyers read. Our guide to what a website costs is written for the owner's side of the table.

If your price sits far above the local agencies, check your hours. If it sits far below, check your billable hours and your margin, because one of them is probably missing.

Deciding how much to charge for a website by copying a competitor skips all four numbers. You inherit their costs, their hours and their mistakes.

How do you present the price to the owner?

Show one recommended price with a smaller and a larger option beside it. Three options turn "yes or no" into "which one".

Our guide to web design packages shows how to turn one quote into website pricing packages with three tiers.

Put the price in a written proposal that repeats the finding, the scope and what is left out. The web design proposal template has the wording. Take a deposit before work starts. Keep hosting and upkeep out of the build price and sell them as a monthly plan, which our post on website maintenance plans covers.

A fixed price suits a job you can define. If the scope is still open, our comparison of agency pricing models shows when hourly billing or a retainer fits better.

Questions

How much should a beginner charge for a website?

Use the same four numbers with a lower pay target. Count the hours a practiced designer would need, because the client should not pay for your learning time. Take small jobs first, so a wrong estimate costs you a few days at most.

Should I charge hourly or a fixed price for a website?

Charge a fixed price when the scope is clear. The owner knows the cost before saying yes, and you keep the gain when you work faster. Charge hourly for open-ended work, such as fixes on a site you did not build.

How much should I charge for a 5-page website?

Page count alone cannot set the price. As a rough estimate, five pages with supplied text and no forms might take 40 hours, and five pages with new copy, a quote form and call tracking might take twice that. List the tasks, count the hours and multiply by your cost per hour.

What do I say when an owner says the price is too high?

Ask which part they would remove. Then price the smaller scope with the same cost per hour and the same margin. If the value check showed that the site pays for itself in 2 jobs, say so in the owner's own numbers.

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Next step. A price is easier to defend when the quote names what is wrong with the owner's current site. Leadodo finds businesses, scores their websites and runs outreach to the ones with the weakest sites. See the features.