A deposit is the difference between starting work with confidence and starting work hoping you’ll get paid. Get the number right and you’ll cover your early costs, screen out flaky clients, and keep your cash flow healthy — all without making a good client hesitate before they sign.
The numbers most freelancers land on
There’s no universal answer, but a few benchmarks come up again and again. Use these as starting points, then adjust for your own risk:
- 25–30% — the comfortable default for most project work. Big enough to commit the client, small enough that nobody blinks.
- 50% — for larger projects, new clients you haven’t worked with, or anything where you’ll buy materials, licenses, or contractor time up front.
- 0–15% — for trusted, repeat clients on smaller jobs, or when you’d rather keep the friction near zero and bill the rest fast.
- 100% — for tiny fixed-scope tasks where invoicing twice isn’t worth the effort.
The honest rule of thumb: your deposit should at least cover the work and out-of-pocket costs you’d lose if the client vanished after kickoff.
What your deposit is actually buying you
A deposit isn’t a tax on your client — it’s protection that works in both directions. When you frame it that way, asking gets a lot easier.
- Commitment. Someone who pays a deposit is a client, not a maybe. It filters out the “just exploring” crowd before they eat your week.
- Cash flow. You fund the start of the project instead of floating it on your own credit card.
- Scope sanity. Money on the table makes both sides take the agreed scope seriously.
Tip: Tie the deposit to a real, visible cost the client understands — “this covers the design licenses and the first sprint.” A deposit attached to a reason almost never gets pushback. A round number with no story behind it sometimes does.
Set a smart default so you’re not deciding every time
Rather than negotiating the deposit from scratch on every estimate, set a sensible default once and override it only when a specific job calls for it.
- Open Settings → Preferences from the left sidebar.
- Go to the Estimates section and find your deposit defaults.
- Set a baseline percentage that matches your typical work — 30% is a solid starting point for most freelancers.
- Save. Every new estimate now prefills that deposit, so you start from “protected” instead of “zero.”
When you build an estimate, the deposit % applies to the total after tax, and the client sees exactly what’s due now versus later. Need to flex the number for one client? Just change it on that estimate — the default is a starting line, not a cage.
Reading the room
Lean higher when the client is new, the scope is fuzzy, or you’re fronting real costs. Lean lower when there’s trust, the job is small, or you want to win a competitive bid. And remember the client experience is painless on their end: they approve the estimate in their portal with no login, then pay the deposit by card with a single Pay button — money landing in your own Stripe account. A frictionless payment makes a healthy deposit much easier to say yes to.
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