Individual skill
raise-your-rates-playbook
Raises freelance rates safely - 20-30 percent for new clients when utilization passes 80 percent, 60-90 days notice for existing clients, grandfathering decision rules, a word-for-word rate-increase email, and walk-away math. Use when a freelancer says "I'm fully booked but not earning enough", "how do I raise my rates", "should I grandfather my old clients", "write my rate increase email", "what if they leave when I raise prices", or "when is the right time to charge more". Do NOT use for negotiating a salary or a job offer - use salary-negotiation instead; for setting the retainer price itself from capacity math, use retainer-pricing-calculator.
skills/raise-your-rates-playbook/SKILL.md
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# Raise Your Rates Playbook
Freelancers treat a full calendar as success, but a full calendar at yesterday's rate is a pricing error: demand has outgrown price and the freelancer is donating the difference. The costly mistake this skill prevents is the double failure of waiting years to raise rates and then doing it apologetically - no notice, no script, priced by fear - which loses clients that a clean, well-timed increase would have kept.
In the Freelancer / Consultant OS pack, the trigger and the floor both come from retainer-pricing-calculator. Worked example: Maya, a freelance brand designer who moved from $6,000/month at $75/hr to two Brand System Retainers at $4,900/month (an effective $136/hr against her $107.95/hr floor), now at 82 percent utilization with inbound leads waiting.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Confirm the trigger
Raise rates when any of these holds; do not wait for all three:
1. **Utilization above 80 percent** of billable capacity for 2+ consecutive months (the red line defined in retainer-pricing-calculator). Sustained fullness is the market saying the price is low. Maya: 72 of 88 hours = 82 percent, two months running - triggered.
2. **Win rate too high**: closing more than roughly 80 percent of proposals means prices are not being tested.