How To Raise Your Esthetician Freelancing Rates

For freelance estheticians who don’t work in-house at a salon or spa, it can be tricky to move up in income without alienating clients you’ve already accumulated. However, if you’re a professional and skilled practitioner with experience and a trail of satisfied clients, it is possible to permanently raise your freelancing rates.

Understand Your Current Value

Step one in your journey to earn more as a freelance esthetician is to get a good, unbiased idea of what your current value is. Of course, by that we don’t mean your intrinsic value as a person or practitioner, but rather where your services fall in terms of marketplace value.

The baseline starting point for understanding your value is to look at what you typically earn from your appointments. Hopefully, you’ve been keeping a detailed record of each and every job, which should give you some rather precise numbers about your average hourly earnings.

So, how can you raise your current value? Well, in a trade such as esthetic services, your value naturally increases as time passes. The longer you’ve been at this, the more skilled you’ll be, and the better your results will be as well. But there are other ways to increase your value as well: you can take additional certification courses, or learn new and hard-to-find treatments, as well. This sets you apart in the esthetician market and can bring in clients that you might not have otherwise gotten.

Don’t Get Impatient

When it’s time to start charging more and you feel confident that you’re currently being underpaid based on your relative market value, it’s important that you don’t get too ahead of yourself too quickly by raising your rates drastically.

There are several reasons for this: first, existing clients may get priced out or become resentful that they have to suddenly pay much more for something they are used to budgeting for. But also, earning increases should look more like a graph steadily moving upward rather than a sudden spike -- otherwise, you risk a short-term increase in earnings followed by a drop-off as people decide that they cannot regularly afford your new rates.

Perhaps the most important thing is to make calculations based on your record book. Determine based on your yearly average number of jobs how much, say, a $5/hr increase would add up to at the end of the year. A $10 increase? A $20 increase?

When you do this, you’ll notice that even very small increases in your hourly rates can add up to big increases by the time the year is over. By realizing this, you can mindfully structure even small increases and know exactly what that will translate to in terms of your yearly earnings, based on historical averages.

Good luck, and remember that you can always count on the Top Spa Supply family to help you grow your business in any way we can!