How to price fractional and consulting services

Price fractional and consulting work from two numbers: what the problem costs your client, and what their alternative costs (usually a full-time hire). Sell a monthly retainer or a fixed-price offer, with three options on the table. Keep your day rate private. It's your floor, and no client ever needs to see it.

What are the three ways to price fractional and consulting work?

You can price it by the day, by the month, or as a fixed price for a defined result. For senior operators, I'd sell one of the last two. Both charge for the outcome, and neither counts your hours.

A few quick definitions first:

• A fractional executive is a senior leader (a CMO, head of growth, CTO or CPO) in an ongoing part-time role, often a few days a month, with the same accountability as an in-house leader.
• A day rate is a fee for each day you work. Clients count the days.
• A retainer is a fixed monthly fee for a defined scope: outcomes, responsibilities, a set number of days, or access to you.
• Value-based pricing sets the fee as a share of what the result is worth to the client. Hours don't come into it. A productized offer applies the same idea to a standard package with a public price.

Jonathan Stark has been making the case against hourly billing for years: it punishes you for getting better. Alan Weiss (Value-Based Fees) and Blair Enns (Pricing Creativity) go further. They argue the fee should follow the value of the result.

I agree with both. A day rate is a useful number to keep in your head and a weak thing to sell.

The Audit on this site is a simple productized example: a written diagnosis at a fixed 599€, delivered within 5 business days of confirming the intake. The buyer knows the price, the scope and the date before they pay.

How much do fractional executives charge in Europe?

Senior interim and fractional leaders in Europe bill roughly 530€ to 1,650€ a day, depending mostly on the country. The INIMA 2025 European Survey (International Network of Interim Manager Associations, 800 interim managers in eleven countries, surveyed in January 2025) reports these net day rates billed on the last assignment, excluding expenses and VAT:

The INIMA 2026 European Survey reports average day rates down 0.9% on the year before, so the table still holds up. In Germany, the DDIM Marktstudie 2026 (Dachgesellschaft Deutsches Interim Management, February 2026) forecasts an average day rate of 1,317€ for 2026.

For fractional CMOs specifically, Primewise's 2026 UK benchmark (interviews with 53 active fractional CMOs, October 2025 to February 2026) puts day rates at £1,000 to £1,300 for CMOs with 10 to 15 years of experience, and £1,300 to £1,800 for 15 to 20 years. B2B SaaS and tech sit at £1,200 to £1,800. A four-day-a-month retainer comes out at about £60,000 to £80,000 a year.

Before you copy a number, three caveats.

Most interim assignments are full-time placements, often in industrial companies. Fractional work is part-time, and I think a part-time senior role can justify a higher effective day rate. INIMA itself says an average day rate has limited practical meaning, because there's no such thing as an average interim.

And your rate should follow where your clients are. If you live in Lisbon and sell to scale-ups in Berlin or Munich, the German row is the one to read.

Why is pricing from your old salary a trap?

Your salary divided by working days gives you a rate that's too low. It assumes you'll bill every working day, and it prices your time when the client is buying a result.

Say you earned 110,000€ as a VP. Divide by 220 working days and you get 500€ a day. That number leaves out a lot:

• Days you won't bill. Selling, admin and gaps between clients all eat days. Even established interim managers in the INIMA 2025 survey billed 65% of working days on average in 2024. If you're new to fractional work, plan for fewer.
• Costs your employer used to carry. Holidays, sick days, pension contributions, social security as a self-employed person, a laptop, software, an accountant and insurance.
• Risk. A client can end a retainer with a month's notice. Your price has to cover the months between clients.

The bigger problem is the reference point. The client never sees your old salary. They compare your fee with what the problem costs them and with the price of hiring someone full-time.

Salary thinking also pulls you into negotiating like an employee asking for a raise. A supplier names a price and explains what it includes. Be the supplier.

How do you work out what to charge?

Work it out in four steps: set a private floor, put a number on the client's problem, price their alternative, then choose the model that fits how they buy.

1. Calculate your floor

Your floor is the revenue you need in a year divided by the days you can realistically bill. Say you need 140,000€ of revenue to cover your pay, pension, tax set-asides, tools and real holidays, and you expect to bill 100 days. Your floor is 1,400€ a day.

Below it, you're paying to work for that client. Keep the number out of proposals.

2. Put a number on the problem

Ask the client what the problem costs them, in their units: pipeline, revenue, churn, months of delay, a funding round at risk. Weiss says to agree on the value before you mention a fee, and I'd follow him on that.

If a company needs 500,000€ of new annual revenue and has no one to own growth, a 7,000€ monthly retainer is small next to that number. If the client can't name what the result is worth, fix your offer first: see what to sell after a career in tech.

3. Price the alternative

List what the client would do without you: hire a full-time leader, use an agency, promote someone junior, or wait. A full-time hire brings recruiting time, a salary, employer costs and often equity, and it takes months before that person is productive. Next to that, a retainer that costs much less and starts next week is an easy call for a founder.

4. Choose the model

Use a retainer when the client needs someone to own an area over time. Use a fixed price when the job has a clear end, like an audit, a positioning project or a launch. Use a day rate only when the buyer insists on it (some procurement teams and interim agencies do), and price it at or above your floor.

If you're still deciding between a fractional role and other models, start with how to go fractional or fractional, consulting or software.

How should you structure three pricing options?

Give each serious prospect three options at the same time, ordered from the most complete to the smallest. Price them so the middle one is the option you want most clients to choose.

This is Blair Enns's approach, and it works because of anchoring. People judge a price against the other numbers in front of them. With three prices on the table, the client is choosing which one to buy.

• Top option: the full outcome plus more of you: more days, faster replies, hands-on work with the team. Price it well above the middle. Some clients will buy it, and its main job is making the middle look reasonable.
• Middle option: the full outcome. This is the offer you've designed the business around.
• Entry option: the smallest thing that solves the problem that made them call you. It's a real offer, with less scope, less access and a longer timeline.

Three rules I'd hold to. Talk through the options on a call before you send anything in writing. When a client asks for a lower price, take scope out and leave the price of each option alone. And stop at three, because a fourth option makes the choice harder.

If you tend to say yes to everything and give extra work away, read the Advisor archetype. That profile's blind spot is undercharging and overdelivering, and three options with fixed scopes fix it directly.

What does a three-tier fractional offer look like in euros?

Here's an illustrative one, for a former VP of Growth selling to B2B SaaS companies after their Series A, using the 1,400€ floor from above.

What I'd check in an offer like this:

• Every option clears the floor. The lowest effective rate is still above 1,400€.
• The middle option compares well with the alternative. 7,000€ a month is 84,000€ a year. Say the company's other option is a full-time head of growth at 150,000€ a year in salary and employer costs, plus a hiring process of several months. The fractional option is the obvious first step.
• The diagnostic can lead into the retainer. A client who buys the entry option has a plan and often wants help carrying it out. You can credit part of the fee against the first month.
• Capacity sets your ceiling. Three clients on the middle option is 21,000€ a month for about 12 billed days, which leaves time to sell and deliver well. Past that point, raise prices or productize.

If you'd like to run these numbers on your own offer, the Pricing skill in The Stack works through the floor, the value conversation and the three options with Claude, using the method for services businesses.

When should you raise your prices?

Raise your prices for new clients as soon as demand for your time gets ahead of your capacity. Don't wait for January or a nice round anniversary.

The signals I'd act on:

• You're turning work down or starting a waiting list.
• Prospects accept your first proposal without questioning the price.
• You have a new result you can name, with a client willing to be referenced.
• The scope you actually deliver has grown past what the price was set for.
• You've narrowed your positioning. David C. Baker's argument is that specialists earn pricing power.

How to do it without drama:

1. Change the price for new clients first. Update your proposals and your page. If new clients keep saying yes at the higher price, you have your answer.
2. Move existing clients at renewal. Give written notice well ahead of the renewal date, say 60 days, with the new price and what stays the same.
3. Raise in steps you can say out loud. Going from 7,000€ to 8,000€ a month is a normal conversation. Doubling overnight usually means the first price was wrong, so fix the offer and reprice it properly.

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