A newer designer with no local benchmark asked the community what to charge. The real answer isn’t a number to copy. It’s a method for building a defensible hourly rate for interior designers from your own costs, your actual market, and your experience, with a plan to raise it on schedule.
A member based in a small town in France posted a question to the community that sounds simple on its face. She has two years of experience, a design degree, and wants to know what to charge. Six designers answered her. Every rate they quoted was in US dollars, and most of them were working in markets that look nothing like hers.
That mismatch is the real story here, more than any number that landed in the comments. A designer in a small French town cannot import a rate built around a Texas suburb, a major US metro, or a luxury build in southern California, no matter how confident the person quoting it sounds. The currency is different. The cost of living is different. The client pool is a different size entirely.
What she can use is the reasoning underneath each answer. Every designer in that thread built her number from the same handful of ingredients: actual cost of doing business, the market she’s actually selling into, how long she’s been doing this, and how much confidence she’s earned in her own value. None of those ingredients require a US zip code. Any interior designer’s hourly rate, no matter where she practices, gets built the same way: from her own numbers, not someone else’s comment section.
That’s the real use of a thread like this. Not a price to copy. A method to run on your own situation.
Why a Dollar Figure From Another Market Doesn’t Answer the Question
If you read the original question posted to Interior Design Community, it’s worth noticing exactly what it asked. Not “what’s a good rate,” but what a designer with two years of experience and a design degree should charge in a specific, small, non-US market. That’s a harder question than the comment section ended up answering, and it’s worth sitting with before you borrow anyone’s number, including the ones quoted below.
Six designers answered with real figures: $50, $75, $125, $150, $300, and one market comparison instead of a dollar amount at all. Read individually, the range looks scattered. Read together, it makes a different kind of sense. Every number was built for the market the designer answering actually works in, and none of them claimed to be a universal interior designer hourly rate that travels anywhere else.
One response made that limitation explicit.
“You have to figure out what is the going rate in your market. I’m right on par in my market, but in a bigger market I’d be very inexpensive.”
That’s the detail that gets lost when a number from an Instagram comment is treated as a benchmark rather than a single data point. A rate that looks generous in a small town outside a major metro can look low inside that metro, and a rate that sounds aggressive in a mid-size US market might be unworkable or surprisingly conservative in a small-town economy in another country entirely. The number only means something next to the market it came from.
Naming a real number for your own market takes practice. On the To-The-Trade podcast, Jill Erwin talks through pricing confidence after nearly 20 years in business, including what it took to say her actual hourly rate out loud and move it toward the going rate in her Richmond market.
For the designer who asked the original question, and for any reader working somewhere without a tidy local benchmark, that means the homework isn’t finished after reading six comments. It starts there.
What Guessing at Your Rate Actually Costs You
Pick a rate disconnected from your market or your actual costs, in either direction, and the damage shows up differently depending on which way you missed.
Price too low, and you don’t just earn less this year. You set a client’s expectation for what your time is worth, and that expectation is hard to walk back once a relationship is established. You also burn out faster, trading the same hours for less than they actually cost you to deliver, and “just take on more clients” stops being a workable fix once you’re already at capacity with no room to raise prices without losing the book of business you built at the old rate.
Price too high without the confidence, portfolio, or local demand to back it up, and the cost shows up earlier. Fewer consultations convert. Prospects go quiet after the proposal rather than push back, which is often a worse sign, since it means they never saw enough value to negotiate. You start second-guessing a number you never actually tested.
One of the more useful answers in the thread skipped both traps by starting from a different place entirely: not the market, not a competitor’s rate sheet, but the designer’s own sense of what her time was worth.
“The best advice I was ever given was to charge what you genuinely feel your time and expertise are worth. When you do it that way (vs what someone else thinks you should charge), you can always feel confident and worthy about your rate, whether you charge $50 an hour or $350. I started at $50 per hour and have increased that each year over the last 13 years based on my skill set and demand. I’ve always felt great about where I stand. Best of luck!”
Notice the range she names for herself: $50 to $350. That’s not inconsistency. It’s the same designer at two different points across a 13-year career, charging an amount she could defend at each one. The number changed every year. The standard she used to set it never did.
Start With What Your Time Actually Has to Cover
Before you can charge what you feel your time is worth, you need an honest answer to a less inspiring question: what does an hour of your time actually have to cover?
That includes your cost of doing business: software, insurance, continuing education, marketing, and the admin time that never shows up on a single invoice but gets paid for out of every rate you charge. It includes how much of your week is genuinely billable versus how much is spent on proposals, sourcing calls, and emails that never get invoiced at all. And it includes what you actually need to earn, not as a designer playing a role on Instagram, but as a person paying rent or a mortgage in your specific town, in your specific currency.
IDC’s guide on how to calculate your cost of doing business walks through that math in detail, and it’s worth doing before you set or defend any rate.
One response reframed this question from an angle most designers never apply to themselves: stop comparing your interior designer’s hourly rate to other designers’ rates, and start comparing it to other professionals whose expertise you already pay for without blinking.
“I was thinking about this. I pay a beauty service provider $300/hour, for her skill set. I am reevaluating the value I bring to my clients and what that is worth.”
That comparison is worth sitting with longer than it takes to read it. A specialist with years of training and a loyal client base can charge $300 an hour for a service most people file under personal care, not a major financial decision. An interior designer is frequently responsible for decisions worth tens of thousands of dollars, decisions that need to be right the first time because furniture, finishes, and contractors are expensive to undo. If $300 an hour is unremarkable for one kind of expertise, the instinct to apologize for a fraction of that rate for design expertise deserves a second look.
Decide How You’re Actually Charging for It: Hourly, Flat Fee, or Both
A rate only means something once you’ve decided what it’s actually a rate for. Several designers in the thread were candid about how much their early pricing depended on a model they later changed.
“My first (few) years of business I was charging $75/ hour, and truly probably less than that because I did flat fee a lot of the time. I was also working part time and from home, so my overhead was low. I think if you have experience at a previous firm, it’s fine to start at $150/ hour. I did not, not outside of an architecture firm anyway. You may find you need to quietly shave some hours off in areas that took you longer because you’re new in business. That perception may be better to a higher end client than charging a low hourly rate but may still work out to the same fee in the end. I think you may need to be flexible in the beginning until you have some jobs under your belt. I just finally raised my rate to $150/hr. Thinking about switching to a flat fee model again though, at least for now.”
The useful, slightly uncomfortable tactic buried in that answer: quietly absorb some of the extra time a task takes while you’re still slow at it, instead of billing a new client for your own learning curve. That’s not undercharging. It’s a deliberate choice about what a client should pay for while you build speed.
The hourly-versus-flat-fee decision doesn’t stand alone, either. It runs directly into a second question one follow-up comment named outright.
“Follow up question, if I may…? If you are charging hourly, are you also marking up products? Or is it an either or situation?”
That’s not a tangent. It’s the actual structure of your pricing model. An hourly rate alone, a lower hourly rate with markup built in, and a flat fee that bundles both are three different businesses, each with a different break-even point.
Decide which one you’re running before you quote a client. IDC’s guide on flat fee, hourly, or hybrid pricing models breaks down how working designers structure each one, or you’ll underprice your design time to leave room for markup you forgot to plan for.
Build In Your Next Raise Before You Need It
Whatever number you land on right now doesn’t have to be permanent, and treating it as permanent is its own pricing mistake. The designers in the thread who sounded the most settled in their rate weren’t the ones who picked the highest number. They were the ones with a plan for raising it.
“In 2019, when I started my business, my rate was $125/hour. Increased it annually per my business plan.”
The detail worth borrowing isn’t the $125 starting point. It’s the phrase “per my business plan.” That’s a scheduled increase, decided in advance, not a reaction to feeling underpaid or a response to one client pushing back too hard. An annual review tied to your actual growth (new skills, a fuller book of work, better systems) takes the emotion out of the conversation entirely. You’re not asking a client for permission to charge more. You’re following a policy you set for yourself before you needed the raise.
IDC’s guide on when to raise your interior design rates lays out the signals that it’s time, along with scripts for having the conversation without apologizing.
If you’re starting at $75 or $100 an hour because that’s genuinely what your current market and experience support, the number itself is not the problem. Having no plan to revisit it is.
If You Don’t Have a Market to Benchmark Against, Build the Number Yourself
The designer who asked the original question isn’t going to find her rate by averaging six Instagram comments, and she shouldn’t try. None of the numbers in that thread were wrong. They were answers to a different question than the one she’s actually facing: not “what does a designer with two years of experience charge,” but what a designer with two years of experience, working in this specific town, with this specific cost of living and this specific client base, needs to charge to run a business that holds up past year three.
That’s the question every working designer is actually answering, whether she’s in a major US metro or a small town in France. The market changes. The currency changes. The math behind a defensible interior designer hourly rate does not: know your real costs, know what your actual market will bear, know how your experience compares to what’s around you, and build in a plan to revisit all three on a schedule instead of waiting for resentment to force the conversation.
If you don’t have six designers in your immediate market to compare notes with, that’s not a reason to guess at a number and hope it holds. It’s a reason to build the number from your own costs and your own confidence, the same way every designer in that thread eventually did, whether or not she had a tidy local market to check her work against.
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