Work out what to charge

How the numbers are worked out

Nothing here is a black box, because a rate you cannot explain is a rate you will lose in a negotiation. Four things go into it.

1. A published benchmark band for your tier

The starting range comes from commonly cited per-post bands: roughly $50 to $250 for nano creators, $250 to $1,500 for micro, and $1,500 to $5,000 for mid-tier, in Canadian dollars, for an organic post with no advertising usage attached.

2. A multiplier for your niche

Niche moves price more than follower count does. The multiplier applied to your category is shown with your result, and it ranges from about 0.85 for categories where content is inexpensive to produce and creators are plentiful, up to 2.0 for personal finance, where the audience is worth considerably more per head and far fewer people can credibly make the content.

3. An adjustment for how engaged your audience is

Engagement is compared against the normal band for your tier rather than a flat threshold, because rates fall as accounts grow and that is normal rather than a problem. Across a 2026 dataset of 3,125 creators, median engagement was around 4.4% on TikTok and 2.7% on Instagram for nano accounts, falling to roughly 1.6% and 1.3% at the 100,000 to 500,000 mark. Sitting well above your tier's median moves your rate up. Sitting well below moves it down, and is worth investigating before a brand does it for you.

4. Whether your audience can buy the product

An audience outside the market a brand sells to is worth less to that brand, however engaged it is. This is the adjustment creators most often forget, and it is the one brands check first.

What the calculation deliberately ignores: how good your work is, how reliably you hit a deadline, whether you have a waiting list, and whether you are the only person in a small niche. All four move a rate upward and none of them can be inferred from numbers. If several brands are already asking, charge more than this says.

The add-ons that matter most

Almost every underpaid creator job is underpaid because these were bundled into the base fee silently. Price them as separate lines from the start.

• Paid usage. A brand running your content as an advert is a separate licence from posting it. Commonly adds 20 to 50 per cent, priced by how long the window runs.
• Whitelisting. Ads running from your own handle, so the social proof stays attached to you. Separate again and higher. Around half of creators charge extra for this, and the half that do not are leaving money behind.
• Exclusivity. Not working with a competitor for a period. A thirty-day window in a narrow category commonly adds 15 to 25 per cent. Several months across a broad category can cost more than the original fee, and should.
• Extra hooks and aspect ratios. Three openings to the same video is three pieces of work. Each aspect ratio usually needs its own export and often its own reframe.
• Rush. Anything under seventy-two hours displaces other work. Commonly 20 to 50 per cent.
• Raw footage. Cheap to agree at the start, expensive to hand over afterwards. Decide deliberately rather than by accident.

Defending the number

When a brand pushes back, the useful move is to ask what their budget is rather than to guess downward. Small brands are frequently not trying to squeeze you. They have two thousand dollars for the quarter and genuinely no idea what that buys, and once you know the number you can shape a job that fits it.

What not to do is quietly absorb scope to protect the headline price. That teaches the client the extras are free, and you will be doing it on every job afterwards. Reduce what you deliver, not what you charge.

One number worth having in your head: roughly forty per cent of creators report being paid late or not at all for sponsored work, and about one in ten have never been paid for at least one completed job. That is not a reason to charge less. It is a reason to get the fee, the payment date and the usage window in writing before anything is shot.