How much deposit should a freelancer charge?

Nobody has measured freelance deposits

We looked for published data from Freelancers Union, Upwork, Payoneer, Bonsai, HoneyBook and Proposify on how freelancers actually split payments. None of them publishes it. The most quoted norm, “50% upfront,” comes from an analysis of Reddit threads, not a survey. So when a guide calls a percentage “industry standard,” ask which industry, and measured by whom.

The standard forms are no more specific. The AIGA Standard Form of Agreement for Design Services (2021) says: “Whenever possible, you should ask for a deposit at the beginning of a project.” It lets you apply the deposit to the first progress bill or hold it until the final one, and on cancellation it is refunded “less any amounts due to the designer.” It gives no percentage. The only numeric anchor in the standard forms is the Graphic Artists Guild sample letter of agreement, which makes 50% of the fee due if a job is cancelled before the final stage, and 100% once the art is complete.

What exists beyond that are worked examples. Sprintlaw’s UK guidance on a five-page website uses 40% deposit, 40% on homepage design approval, 20% before launch. One UK designer’s pricing page asks 30–50% up front and 25% at design approval on projects over £2,000. Brennan Dunn’s project terms were 50% deposit and 50% on completion. A 30/40/30 split sounds plausible, but we found no source that recommends it.

Deposit by kind of work (convention)

The kind of work matters more than the field you work in. Here is what the sources converge on, with the basis for each row. Treat every number as a starting point you can defend, not a rule.

Two rules hold across all of them. First, the last payment falls before handover, not after. If ownership of the work passes on payment in full, as AIGA’s clause 3.4 sets it, that clause only has force while you still hold something the client needs. Second, every payment needs a trigger both sides can see happen. Sprintlaw’s Australian guidance: “a payment due on delivery of homepage design concepts is clearer than a payment due when the client is happy with the design.” The milestone payment schedule template is built on both rules, and the fixed-price proposal template uses the 50/50 split for smaller jobs.

Why ask at all: what late payment looks like, measured

Here the evidence is solid. Two kinds of data exist and they shouldn’t be mixed: surveys, which ask freelancers whether they have ever been paid late, and invoice data, which counts the share of invoices that arrived late.

• Freelancers Union, “The Costs of Nonpayment” (survey of 5,358 US freelancers, published 2015, covering 2014): about half had trouble getting paid that year. The average loss was $5,968 in unpaid income, about 13% of income, and the average longest wait was 98 days. Older data, but the largest sample we found.
• Freelancers Union, New York survey (2022): 91% had been paid late at least once in their career, and 54% had waited three months or more. An advocacy survey of New York freelancers only.
• IPSE (UK): an average of £5,230 currently owed in late payments; 35% of self-employed people not paid on time in the last 12 months; 18% waiting more than three months past the deadline; 50% having done work they were never paid for. The page doesn’t state the survey year.
• Bonsai invoice data (vendor, undated, invoices from more than 100,000 freelancers): 29% of invoices paid at least one day late, and over 75% of the late ones settled within 14 days.
• Tofu invoice data (vendor, 3.75 million invoices from 442,894 US field-service businesses, 2025–2026, trades rather than creative work): 84.5% of invoices stated no payment terms at all. Where terms were stated, median days to pay rose with the term: 9 days on receipt, 21 on Net 15, 34 on Net 30.

Read together: most invoices get paid, and most late ones arrive within two weeks. The damage is in the tail, the three-month wait and the invoice that is never paid. A deposit doesn’t make a client pay faster, and no independent study shows that it does. What it does is cap how much you can lose to the tail, test that the client is really committed before you book the time, and cover early costs. It also gives a cancellation something to come out of.

Make the deposit a condition, not a promise

Search “client signed but won’t pay deposit” and the results are mostly forum threads. It happens when the proposal says a deposit is due but not what depends on it. Fix it in the wording: the deposit is what reserves the start date. No deposit, no reserved dates, no work. AIGA’s form takes the same approach to changes, with no work on revised services until a signed revision and any retainer are received.

Wording you can adapt:

“A 40% deposit is due on signing. Your start date is confirmed when it arrives; until then, the dates in this proposal are not reserved.”

“The deposit is credited against the final invoice. If you cancel, it is kept against work done to that date, and any part of it that exceeds what is owed is refunded.”

“Each later payment is due on the event named in the schedule, and invoices are due within 14 days. Work on the next phase starts once the previous invoice is paid.”

“Overdue invoices may pause the work after written notice, and may carry interest at the statutory rate where one applies, or otherwise at [X]% a month or the maximum the law allows.”

On the due date: AIGA notes that “it’s common for design firms to establish client payment terms of ‘Net 15’,” and every statutory fallback in the table below is 30 days. A 14-day term fits under all of them. If you do pause work over an overdue invoice, UK guidance from Sprintlaw says to give written notice first and keep the response proportionate. Don’t take a live site down over a small dispute.

On interest: the US-style “1.5% a month” from AIGA’s form (18% a year, subject to state usury limits) is wrong for UK clients. There, a rate you write into the contract replaces the statutory 8% over base, which is usually higher. That is why the wording above defers to the statutory rate first.

Late-payment law by jurisdiction

Several places now set a default due date, a remedy, or both. The table reports what the statutes and regulators say, as summarised in our sources. Where a detail was seen only second-hand or the sources disagree, the row says so. It is not legal advice.

Notice what the US laws have in common. Each asks for a written contract that states the work, the pay and the date it is due, and California asks for “an itemized list of all services.” A signed proposal with line items and a payment schedule is that record. A proposal tool can help you include the elements these laws ask for; it can’t make a contract compliant, and nothing here should be read that way. In New York City, DCWP’s five-year report counted 2,542 complaints to its Navigation Program between FY2019 and FY2023, and $2.9 million that freelancers reported recovering after filing.

How ApeiroCraft drafts the deposit invoice at signing

This is our product, so read it as a description rather than a review. In ApeiroCraft the payment schedule is a section of the proposal: each payment is a percentage or a fixed amount, due on signing, on completion, or on a date. The client sees it and signs it with everything else.

The moment they sign, the deposit invoice is drafted at the agreed amount, taken from the signed version of the proposal, not from anything edited afterwards. You review it and send it, usually the same hour. It is created once: delete it and it stays deleted. Each later payment has a “Mark complete, create invoice” step, so the phase and final invoices are one click each, at the amounts already agreed. Invoices link to your own payment page. ApeiroCraft never processes client payments and takes no cut.

What it doesn’t do: there is no recurring billing, so a retainer’s later months are invoiced by you; it doesn’t calculate statutory interest or late fees, so the late-payment line lives in your terms; and it isn’t legal advice about any of the laws above. For the invoicing side in full, see freelancer invoicing software. For which pricing model each schedule belongs to, see the freelance pricing models comparison, and for the full signed-to-invoiced workflow, from signed proposal to invoice.