Charge by the hour or by the project

Hourly rates pay for time spent, while project fees pay an agreed amount for a defined deliverable. The choice affects who bears uncertainty about the work and who benefits when the writer becomes faster.

The work and the client

Clients often determine the billing arrangement: regular editing, proofreading and short recurring assignments can suit hourly billing, while larger, complex projects such as sales training, white papers, monographs and journal articles often attract project prices for budgeting. ^{1, 2, 3} A freelance can use both methods depending on project size and client, rather than choose one for all work. ^{4, 5}

Hourly fees can suit a writer briefly while starting out or working on the client’s premises where time is visible. ^{1, 6} Practitioners often favour hourly billing for regulatory writing and project fees for medical communication, without treating this as an absolute rule. ⁷ Regulatory documents vary greatly: a safety summary might be 50 pages or 500, submissions can generate agency responses, many internal and external reviewers are involved, and errors in data or analyses may surface late. ⁷ An hourly-only policy for regulatory work rests on hard-to-estimate glitches, although repeated reports for the same client and therapeutic area may become predictable; medical communication projects can be easier to price when the writer has hands-on experience. ^{8, 9, 10}

Project fees can suit familiar assignments or new work that can be planned in detail, while vague projects with likely scope changes and ongoing support, such as website updates or continuing literature searches, can suit hourly fees. ¹¹ One partnership uses project rates with established, trusted clients and documented assumptions, but increasingly favours hourly rates for unfamiliar clients with uncertain requirements or direction. ⁵ Repeated agency changes before the ultimate client comments, and time spent teaching inexperienced clients the requirements of a document type, can make project pricing difficult. ⁵

Fact-checking is particularly hard to estimate because source files, evidential support, annotations and calculations may require unforeseen repairs; one practitioner finds hourly rates usually cause the fewest difficulties and regards an hour per reference as only a guess if a client insists on a fixed fee. ⁹

Earnings and efficiency

Hourly billing pays for the recorded time: at $50 an hour, four hours yields $200 and six yields $300. ¹² It can require detailed time billing but may simplify the client’s accounting, and does not remove the risk that the client expects fewer hours than the writer needs. ^{1, 8, 9} At a given hourly rate, greater efficiency reduces the fee for the same job; a ceiling on the rate clients accept can then limit earnings growth. ^{1, 6, 13, 9, 14} For example, $85 an hour over 1,200 annual hours produces $102,000 gross, which rises only if the rate or hours rise. ¹²

A fixed project price lets the writer retain the benefit of finishing faster, but lowers the effective hourly return when the job takes longer than estimated; both parties know the fee in advance. ^{15, 16, 17, 4} One illustrative comparison uses the same $4,250 project at three levels of proficiency: ^{1, 15, 6, 18}

Hours	Quoted hourly rate	Fee when billed hourly	Fixed project fee	Effective hourly return on fixed fee
50	$85	$4,250	$4,250	$85
30	$100	$3,000	$4,250	$141.67
20	$125	$2,500	$4,250	$212.50

^{1, 15, 6, 18}

In that comparison, hourly-billed receipts fall by about 29% and then 41% relative to the starting fee, while the fixed-fee effective hourly return rises by about 67% and then 150%. ^{1, 15, 18} The writer can use the saved time to work less for the same project income or undertake more work. ^{15, 18, 19, 9}

A second illustration starts from a 100-hour assignment and an $8,500 fee: ^{20, 21}

Hours	Quoted hourly rate	Fee when billed hourly	Fixed project fee	Effective hourly return on fixed fee
100	$85	$8,500	$8,500	$85
75	$100	$7,500	$8,500	About $113
50	$125	$6,250	$8,500	$170

^{20, 21}

From the client’s perspective, a $1,000 deliverable can have the same value whether it takes two, ten or twenty hours, provided it is done properly within budget. ¹⁴ Project-fee advocates argue that selling time can make the service appear interchangeable, whereas pricing the result rewards experience and efficiency. ^{13, 16, 9, 22} A writer who stands behind the estimate as long as project conditions remain unchanged can remove budget uncertainty and be perceived as a partner rather than an expense. ¹⁸

The risk of a fixed fee

A $400 proofreading assignment completed in two hours produced an effective $200 hourly return, although the client probably would not have agreed to that as an hourly rate. ¹⁷ The same writer accepted $2,500 in 2006 to gain experience writing up a clinical trial, hoping for $100 an hour but spending fifty hours for an effective $50, then the writer’s editing rate. ¹⁷ The job included an outline for approval, conversion of a clinical study report into a 38-page journal manuscript with 28 references, three tables and two figures, and annotation of references and manuscript; the writer gained experience and a PubMed-listed contribution. ¹⁷

Overestimates and underestimates can balance over time, but changes in project leadership or expectations can overwhelm a fee: one writer who generally used project pricing reported earning close to minimum wage after a replacement project manager wanted a different presentation. ^{1, 23} Conversely, a writer with generously priced repeat work accepted variation in effort without reopening each fee and found that returns averaged to a generous hourly rate. ²⁴

An organization using an extended writer network may prefer time and materials because fixed pricing requires capital to absorb delays: people still need paying if a project unit cannot be invoiced for three months. ²⁵ The appropriate model can differ among clients and should be reviewed frequently against the time invested and revenue returned. ²⁵

Estimates and contingencies

Clients often want a total estimate calculated from hourly rate and expected hours; enumerating tasks carefully can bring estimated time closer to actual time. ² Hours should be recorded even for fixed-fee work, including research, writing, email, calls and travel, to establish the effective return and inform estimates for similar projects. ^{1, 17, 26} Own time records can be supplemented by asking colleagues how long a document takes, rather than what they charge. ²⁷ Knowing what can be accomplished per unit of time and maintaining suitable metrics connects writing output to a usable project estimate. ²⁸

A page-based estimate can account for spacing, lines per page, margins, graphics and complexity, while presenting the client only a fee for the specified page extent. ¹⁵ Another approach prepares several estimates from expected time, experience and charges on similar work, assumptions about colleagues’ charges and the deliverable’s value to the client. ¹⁸

Contingency recommendations differ. ^{29, 8, 11, 17} One practitioner’s method for estimating a 200-page guide is to list chapters and their tables, graphics and headings, front matter, back matter such as index and endnotes, communications, review comments, research and reference checking, estimate each element and sum the time, then add 30% when new to estimating or 10%–15% with experience. ¹¹ Another adds about 20% after multiplying estimated hours by the desired hourly rate to allow for unforeseen time-consuming aspects. ¹⁷ Another recommendation is to review background material, estimate hours, double them and add 20%–25% for profit on a fixed fee; its hourly counterpart also doubles estimated work hours. ^{29, 8}

Where details are unknown, a range can be accompanied by explicit assumptions, deliverables and the conditions that would require an adjustment. ^{11, 18, 22} A fixed fee needs clear provision for extra work and advance explanation when the budget will be exceeded. ^{30, 3} An hourly estimate should also be updated promptly with specific causes of extra time, such as broken links, unexpected substantive editing or formatting problems, with the explanation repeated on the invoice. ¹² Assigning fees to particular deliverables, such as an outline and successive drafts, makes an additional draft outside the agreement visible. ⁹

A hybrid can estimate the time for each step at an hourly rate and use the resulting budget as the usual invoice amount when the project is predictable. ³⁰ Another hybrid used with a good repeat client on a two-week assignment charges a project fee for the first draft and bills revisions hourly as incurred. ¹⁵

Survey time benchmarks

The 2023 EMWA freelance business survey offered reported times as a guide to services; its time-estimate table was labelled “median ± standard deviation” and gave these ranges. ^{31, 32, 33}

Service	Responses	Hours, median ± SD	Range, hours
Clinical study report or other regulatory document	43	111.5 ± 66.7	6–280
Technical evaluation	3	71.1 ± 111.3	5–200
Standard scientific article	78	57 ± 36.8	6–200
Patient material	32	17.2 ± 16.8	2–60
Translation of a standard scientific article	16	15.9 ± 12.5	5–48
Editing of a standard scientific article	59	15.0 ± 14.3	3–70
Medical blog	27	7.8 ± 11.3	1–60
Website content	27	11.2 ± 12.8	1–60

³³

No time estimate was supplied by 112 respondents (48.1%), and the survey treated its variable results and small categories as guidance to be interpreted cautiously. ^{33, 31} Tracking actual work and comparing effective earnings can refine scoping over time and improve the predictability of estimates and income. ⁴