What to charge as an illustrator
Illustration is priced as two things that clients routinely believe are one. There is the fee for making the work, which is your time, and there is the fee for using it, which depends on where it appears, for how long, and whether anyone else may use it too. Quoting only the first is the most common and most expensive mistake in the trade.
The creation fee
This is the time part: what it costs you to make the thing. The licence is a separate calculation underneath.
What illustrators actually charge
The most useful recent data is a survey of 403 illustrators run in July 2026, 146 of them in the UK. It is worth reading the shape of it rather than just the headline number.
| Measure | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Median UK day rate | £350 | 403 illustrators, July 2026 (90 UK gave firm figures) |
| Middle 50 per cent | £280 to £450 | same survey |
| Charging under £300 a day | over 25 per cent | same survey |
| Charging over £500 a day | 9 per cent | same survey |
| Actually pricing by day rate | 41 of 342 | same survey |
| Pricing by project fee | 174 of 342 | same survey |
| Feel fairly paid | 20 per cent | same survey |
Two things stand out. Most illustrators do not price by the day at all, so a day rate is a costing tool rather than a quote. And only one in five feel fairly paid, with the people who feel worst about it clustered at the bottom of the range, which suggests the problem is pricing confidence rather than the market.
The licence is the part that gets given away
In the same survey, more than a fifth of written responses raised licensing as the central problem, and the recurring complaint was that clients assume paying once buys everything forever. It does not, unless you let it. One respondent put the commercial reality plainly: full copyright roughly triples the final fee.
So separate the two lines on the quote. "Creation fee" and "licence fee" as distinct items make the conversation about scope instead of about whether you are expensive, and they make it obvious what the client is buying when they ask for worldwide rights in perpetuity as though it were a formatting preference.
Three terms do most of the work. Scope is where it appears: one magazine is not the same as every billboard in the country. Duration is how long the right lasts, and unlimited is a real cost because it forecloses every future licence of that image. Exclusivity is whether you can license it to anyone else, and full assignment means you cannot even use it in your own portfolio without asking, which is worth pricing accordingly and often worth refusing.
Questions people ask
Where do these multipliers come from?
They are a common working model in illustration rather than a published standard, and they are here to give you a defensible starting position rather than a correct answer. Rates vary by sector, by country and by client, and a well-known agency will have its own grid. Use these to structure the conversation, then adjust to what you know about your own market.
What if the client insists on buying the copyright?
Price it properly and let them decide. Full assignment means you can never license that image again, cannot reuse elements of it, and may need permission to show it in your own portfolio. A multiple of the creation fee in the region of three times is a normal starting point. A surprising number of clients who ask for copyright as a default withdraw the request once it has a price attached, because what they actually wanted was certainty that a competitor would not use the image.
Should I quote a day rate or a project fee?
A project fee, in almost every case, with the day rate used privately to cost it. The survey above found most illustrators do the same. A day rate invites the client to count your days, and it caps you at the speed you can draw, which is the wrong thing to be paid for once you are good.
Do my numbers leave this page?
No. It is all worked out in the tab, there is no email box, nothing is stored, and you can confirm it by turning off your wifi and using the page anyway.
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Everything on this page is worked out in your browser. The numbers you type are never sent anywhere, there is no email box, and nothing is stored when you close the tab. That is worth saying because most rate calculators are lead capture with arithmetic attached, and your income is not a thing you should have to hand over to find out what to charge.