Charge for all the time and resources a job consumes
The cost of a freelance assignment includes time and resources beyond drafting: travel, preparation, learning, literature, software and other work required by the client. A fee needs to account for these demands even when the deliverable is short or the pricing unit makes them hard to see.
Travel and time away
Travel takes time that could otherwise be spent on another client’s paid work, so a freelance can explain why it should be charged at the normal hourly rate. Long journeys and individual circumstances may justify a different arrangement. Clients may accept the explanation once they recognise that travel still uses the writer’s time.
Travel charges can take different forms. In a 2014 account, one freelance reported an upper limit of about $1,000 a day, estimating any resulting deliverable, such as an advisory-board summary, on top of that charge and adding out-of-pocket expenses separately. That writer charged for travel as though work were waiting at the desk, whether or not it was, to encourage clients to request travel only when necessary. Another charged a day at the regular rate for each travel day and each day at the destination, limiting travel charges to eight hours even when the journey took longer, with airfare, hotel and meals billed separately.
A third approach charged the regular hourly rate for up to eight hours a day for travel within the continental United States, even when door-to-door travel took longer, and eight hours for a meeting day that was shorter than a full day. Extraordinarily long journeys, such as travel to India to train writers, should be negotiated separately. Additional project work can increase the day’s total: a six-hour meeting followed by three hours on the same project in the hotel would be billed as nine hours. Leisure costs, such as meals, lodging or local transport for an added personal weekend, were excluded.
Travel rates and expenses should be discussed before the trip so neither party is surprised by the invoice. Arrangements include whether a corporate hotel rate is available, who books the accommodation, who pays and how the hotel payment will be settled.
Preparation, learning and required training
Workshop fees should cover sufficient preparation time as well as delivery. Reasonable familiarisation with a new therapy area can also be included in the time charged, just as an employed writer would learn it on the employer’s time. The limit depends on the expertise promised: a writer who claims extensive oncology experience and then spends a week learning the basics gives the client reason to object. Even an experienced specialist needs to learn the specifics of a particular drug.
Project-specific training should be charged when the learning cannot be applied to other clients. When the skill is transferable and the client objects to paying, the writer may decide that the value of learning justifies some unpaid time. One freelance accepted a lower early-career fee because the client offered unfamiliar documents and guidance, treating the difference as an investment in experience.
Client-required internal training, including standard operating procedures and sensitivity programmes, should be billable: employees receive their normal salaries for the same training. One recommended approach is to ask how the client wants that time invoiced and treat reluctance to compensate it as a warning sign. For a fixed-fee project, activities outside the agreed project should be identified as hourly charges so the client does not assume that training is included in the bid.
An alternative practice is to bill required training at the regular hourly rate without asking beforehand how it should appear on the invoice, using a training line item and a separate IT line when necessary. Time spent with client IT staff fixing a client-issued laptop is another billable activity in this approach. Writers should save or print confirmations of completed training even when the client records compliance automatically, to protect against later disputes.
Charging for audit preparation is an option to consider. One freelance had charged for a telephone conference supporting a client’s audit.
Literature and purchase costs
The writer and client should agree who supplies literature and pays for it. Existing key publications from the client can provide a starting point and references to further material. Some key articles are available without a subscription, and a client may be able to supply copies of papers it wants used. A full literature search should be included in the cost estimate when required, and charges for paid downloads should be explicitly assigned to the client if they are to be reimbursed.
One approach is to request all references from the client, look briefly for a free online PDF when one is missing and otherwise send the full reference back to the client with a request for the paper. If the writer is asked to obtain PDFs, reimbursement can be added as an invoice line or billed separately. Another approach makes the client responsible for full-text costs, obtains as much as possible through an accessible database and agrees a budget for the remainder.
A proposal can make the client responsible for all literature-related costs, including:
- The writer’s hourly time searching publicly available sources or sources accessible free of charge.
- The writer’s hourly time gathering, reading, evaluating, summarising, annotating and tabulating literature and preparing bibliographies or reference lists.
- Outside database-search services, passed through at cost.
- Copies of papers unavailable free online, passed through at cost.
- Permissions to reproduce or distribute literature or parts of it, including tables and figures, passed through at cost.
- Long-term storage or archiving of literature, which the client may be encouraged to take over as a library of material relevant to its drug.
Project-specific software and licences
Software required specifically for a client’s project should be supplied by the client, including a licence or login, or invoiced to them. Ordinary software used as part of the writer’s own working setup is the writer’s cost. For example, one agency supplied a required Adobe version even though the writer already owned a different PDF tool.
For a tool potentially useful across projects, the writer can assess affordability, likely reuse and willingness to invest for that particular client. One writer bought EndNote on that basis but had not subsequently used it for another client.
Work on client pitches
An offer of a share of new business in exchange for helping win an account transfers some of the client’s risk to the writer, although much of the outcome may lie beyond the writer’s control. A writer can insist on payment for developed materials and a daily or half-day fee plus expenses for attendance at pitch meetings, rather than accepting promised future work as compensation. One freelance who followed this practice reported being paid and invited to help with further pitches.
Time hidden by the pricing unit
Researching unfamiliar terminology can take time disproportionate to the number of words involved. One translator estimated that finding the right translation for a single unknown term could take as long as translating about 600 words of routine text.
Machine-translation post-editing can also take longer than a reduced per-word rate anticipates when the machine output is poor. In 2024, one agency used a lower per-word rate for post-editing than for translation but offered to negotiate additional editing time, such as two extra hours, if a translator needed it. Additional proofreading was paid at the unchanged proofreading rate.
A short deliverable can still take substantial time: one medical blogger estimated four to eight hours to prepare a post properly. Tracking actual time spent helps a writer account for that work in quotes.