Review your prices once a year by totaling last year's revenue, counting billable hours, dividing to find your real effective rate, then raising every number that fell below your target. The whole exercise takes an afternoon and usually produces a larger raise than any single negotiation you will have all year.
Pull twelve months of invoices. Sum revenue, sum hours actually billed, and divide. Most freelancers discover their effective rate is twenty to forty percent below the rate they quote new clients, because discounts, revisions, and unpaid admin quietly ate the margin.
That gap is your first target. Before raising listed prices, tighten what eroded them: cap revisions harder, stop writing free proposals, and bill for the admin hours you have been absorbing.
Raise listed rates five to fifteen percent annually as a default, more when a new skill or niche credit landed during the year. Write the new rate card on a fixed date each year so the decision is procedural rather than emotional, then apply it to all new quotes immediately.
Grandfather no one forever. Existing clients can get a gentler increase announced thirty days ahead, but a rate card that only rises for strangers is a rate card that punishes loyalty and traps you in old numbers.
The best raise you will ever get is the one you give yourself on a schedule, not the one you beg for in a negotiation.
Keep one page of notes: new skills gained, testimonials collected, best-performing niches, and clients who balked at the old increase. Next year's review starts with that page instead of a blank document, and compounding reviews get faster and sharper each time.
Treat the annual review as a standing calendar event, like a tax appointment. Skipping it is how freelancers arrive at year three still charging year one prices, which is a slow leak no amount of hard work can outrun.
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