Most agency retainers are priced too low, and the owner rarely notices until it has quietly cost them a year of margin. Retainer pricing is the one number in an agency that compounds. A project you underprice stings once. A retainer you underprice bleeds every month the client stays. I built a Belfast agency from a bedroom to £2.2M over 13 years, then sold it, and now I coach agency owners on exactly this through Move at Pace. An underpriced retainer is the most common money I see left on the table.
When I first started selling retainers, I calculated them the same way I calculated everything else. Hours times rate. A 10-hour retainer at £60 an hour was £600 a month. Simple, and completely wrong, because I was selling my time while the client was buying certainty, priority access and ongoing results. This is how to set a retainer price that reflects what the work is actually worth, and how to tell when yours has slipped too low.
Why most agency retainers are priced too low
Retainers usually start life as a favour. A good project client asks if you can “just keep an eye on things” each month, you put a round number on it that feels safe, and that number sets the ceiling for years. You never revisit it. The client’s business grows, the work you do gets more valuable to them, and your fee sits exactly where it started.
The damage is slow, which is why it goes unnoticed. If a monthly retainer is £1,500 below where it should be, that is £18,000 a year, every year, on one account. Across a book of retainer clients it is often the difference between an agency that feels stretched and one that is comfortably profitable.
The win-rate test for retainer pricing
Here is the simplest signal I know. If almost every client says yes to your retainer number without a flinch, the number is too low.
I tracked the win rate on every proposal my agency sent for years. The pattern never changed: any time we were closing more than about 70% of what we put out, our prices were too low. Winning everything feels like success, but it usually means you are the cheap, easy yes. You have not found the ceiling. You are sitting well below it.
Treat the retainer number as a test. Set the next new retainer a little higher than the last. Then higher again. Keep nudging until a client hesitates, until one or two push back. That hesitation is the edge of what the market will pay, and you want to live just below it, not far underneath where you have been.
Not sure whether your retainers are pricing power or quietly costing you? The free Agency Health Scorecard scores your pricing alongside the other levers in about two minutes, and tells you which to fix first.
Price to the value, not to your costs
The biggest mistake in agency retainer pricing is anchoring the number to what the work costs you to deliver. Cost-plus pricing caps you at your own overheads. The client does not care what it costs you. They care what it is worth to them.
Anchor the retainer to the outcome instead. What does the work let the client do, win, or avoid? An owner I coach took their websites from three grand to ten grand for the same build, because they started pricing the result rather than the hours. Same work, more than triple the fee, because the number finally reflected the value.
And trust your first instinct on the number. When you do the maths and land on a figure that feels right, then talk yourself down before you have even sent it, you are not winning the work, you are teaching that client to expect the lower rate forever. Set the price, check that comparable work supports it, and hold your nerve.
How to set an agency retainer price: a simple method
- Define the scope and the outcome. Write down exactly what the client gets each month, and the result it drives for them. The result is what you are pricing.
- Set a value-based starting number. Ignore your costs for a moment. What is a fair share of the value this creates for the client? Start there.
- Sense-check against capacity. Make sure the fee covers the real hours plus a healthy margin. If value-based pricing lands below your costs, the scope is wrong, not the price.
- Build in a step-up. Agree from the start that the retainer grows as you take on more, or as results land. A retainer that never moves is one that falls behind every year.
- Test it on the next new client first. New clients have no anchor. Price them at the new, higher number before you go near your existing book.
How to raise an existing retainer without losing the client
Raising a retainer feels harder than it is. The conversation you are putting off is almost always easier than the version in your head, and the cost of avoiding it compounds every month.
Give notice, tie the rise to value and to the work that has grown, and frame it as keeping the relationship sustainable rather than as a favour you are withdrawing. The right clients accept a fair, well-explained rise. The ones who leave over a sensible increase were rarely profitable to begin with.
When retainers are not the answer
Not every client fits a retainer. One-off buyers and specialist projects are often better served by a productised offer, a fixed-scope package at a fixed price, than by a monthly fee you both have to keep justifying. Our guide to agency pricing models covers when each structure earns its place. Retainers work when there is ongoing, compounding value to manage. Where there is not, a clean productised service protects your margin better.
FAQ
How much should an agency retainer be? There is no single figure, because the right number is a share of the value you create, not a multiple of your costs. As a floor, the fee must cover the real hours plus a margin you would be happy to run the whole agency on. Above that floor, price to the outcome and use the win-rate test to find the ceiling.
How do you price a retainer? Define the monthly scope and the result it drives, set a value-based starting number, sense-check it covers cost plus margin, build in a step-up as the account grows, and test the new number on new clients first.
What is a good profit margin on a retainer? Healthy agency retainers should be more profitable than project work, because the relationship is established and the delivery is repeatable. If a retainer is your thinnest-margin work, it is underpriced.
If you want a hand actually holding your nerve on the number, that is what Scale is, my monthly support programme. We set a plan for your agency, pricing included, and I keep you on it month to month. And if you want to see where your pricing stands today, start with the free Agency Health Scorecard.