Find your number

The interactive companion to last week's rate report is live. Plug in your info and see where you land.

Hopefully you’ve had a chance to read and start digesting the relatively lengthy 2026 Rate Report.

Both among the survey-takers who contributed to the report and also from readers, the biggest ask has been “ok but where do I fall?” Folks have been scanning the charts, looking for their discipline, and trying to place themselves in the distribution.

I wanted to make it easier, so I built an interactive tool you can use!

The 2026 Rate Report Explorer is live on the Working with Consultants site. You can plug in your hourly equivalent rate, and select your discipline, experience level, business structure, and fee model, and it shows you where you sit against the rest of the sample. It also lays out the patterns from the report all in one place: fee model, rate-setting approach, retainer share, and expense handling with the overall median marked on each one.

Try the explorer →

You won’t see individual responses. Every figure is a group median.

The survey is still open

We’re at 59 responses now, but both the report and the explorer get more useful with every submission. The disciplines where we’re still thin are Program Design/Evaluation, Fundraising, and Coaching, each at a handful of respondents. If that’s you, or you know someone in those fields, five minutes would help a lot.

A few odds and ends

Last week I sent the full report, and it was long. Here are a few thoughts I had when I saw all the data.

We’re probably all too flexible. I wrote in the report that the consultants earning more have decided their rate somewhere other than in the conversation with the client, and that those of us earning less are doing the opposite (reading the room and adjusting). That’s me! I care about the work my clients are doing, and I want to help, and so I find myself quietly shaving the number before anyone even pushes back. One of the open-ended survey responses put it bluntly: the honest truth is whether your client has money or not, and that dictates what we can charge more than our own experience does. Being in the social impact space makes us more susceptible to this: we blur the line between activist and businessperson, and the activist side is usually willing to take a pay cut.

Raising rates on existing clients. This came through in the open-ended responses more than anything except the market-rates question. People want to know how to have that conversation without damaging the relationship. I think I can smell another survey coming, or at least a guide with good anecdotes and lessons!

The confidence finding. The highest earners in our sample are the least confident in their pricing. I would have expected the opposite.

Subcontracting doesn’t seem to help your rate. Solos who regularly subcontract to others actually average lower than pure solos at $178 versus $202. This surprised me, because if you’re subcontracting to others, I would have guessed it was for bigger contracts that could have supported higher rates. I’d love to hear from the folks who use subcontractors on this finding.

Coming up…

The explorer is in version one. I want to add project-fee ranges and some of the retainer-scoping data if I can figure out how to display it usefully. If you play with the tool and something feels missing or confusing, reply to this email and tell me.

And if last week’s report was useful, the most helpful thing you can do is forward it to the consultant who keeps asking what they should charge. Here’s the link.