How to Work Out What to Charge for Influencer Marketing

The short version: Work out your rate from three numbers, your production cost, your audience value, and the usage rights you're handing over, then add a floor price you never go below regardless of what the brand offers instead. Follower count is the least useful number in the whole equation, and most creators price themselves too low because they've never done this maths.

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Why "just search a rate calculator" doesn't work

I get asked this constantly, by creators who don't know what to charge and by business owners who don't know what to pay. Both sides Google the same thing and land on a free calculator that spits out a number based on follower count and engagement rate. That number is nearly always wrong, and it's wrong in a way that hurts the smaller, more useful creators most.

Here's the bit nobody tells you plainly: a calculator can't see your niche, your conversion history, or the fact that your 8,000 followers are all UK accountants who buy software, while someone else's 80,000 followers are teenagers who screenshot memes and never click a link. Those two audiences are not worth the same amount of money, and pricing by follower count treats them as if they are.

I built my own influencer following on LinkedIn and Twitter years before I became a consultant, and I learned this the expensive way, by charging too little for years because I was looking at the wrong inputs.

The three pricing methods, and why two of them lie to you

1. Cost per thousand (CPM)

This is the standard media-buying approach borrowed from advertising. You take a rate per 1,000 followers or views and multiply. Typical ranges look like this in 2026:

• Instagram feed post: £10 to £20 per 1,000 followers
• Instagram Reel: £15 to £30 per 1,000 followers, higher because reach outstrips follower count
• TikTok video: £20 to £40 per 10,000 views (not followers, views, because that's what TikTok rewards)
• YouTube integration (60 to 90 second mention): £20 to £50 per 1,000 views
• LinkedIn post: £30 to £60 per 1,000 followers, because the audience is professional and the buying intent is higher

CPM is fine as a sanity check, a floor you can point to when a brand tries to lowball you. It's a bad ceiling because it ignores everything about who those followers are.

2. Engagement rate multipliers

The second method multiplies your base rate by your engagement rate, on the theory that a creator with 6 percent engagement is worth more than one with 1 percent at the same follower count. Sensible in theory. In practice, engagement rate is one of the most gamed numbers in the industry, inflated by comment pods, giveaway accounts, and bots, so a brand that leans on it hard is often paying for a fiction. If you're a brand trying to use this method to negotiate down, know that the honest creators, the ones with real but modest engagement, get punished for not gaming the system, and the ones with fake numbers get overpaid. That's backwards, and most pricing guides skip past it because it's an awkward thing to say out loud.

3. Value-based pricing

This is the one that matters and the one almost nobody uses. You price based on what the brand gets, not what you have. Ask: what would this brand pay for a lead through Google Ads, or a customer through affiliate marketing, or a piece of content made by an agency? Then work backwards from that.

If a brand pays £40 for a qualified lead through paid search, and your last three sponsored posts each generated roughly 15 leads for similar brands, your post is worth roughly £600 in lead value alone, before you even charge for the content production, the usage rights, or your time. This is the method that gets you paid what you're worth instead of what a spreadsheet thinks your follower count deserves.

My actual formula, step by step

This is the calculation I run for myself and for clients I advise on their creator budgets.

1. Start with a production cost. What does it cost you in hours to shoot, edit, write and post this, at your normal day rate divided into hourly chunks? If your day rate is £600 and this takes three hours, that's £225.
2. Add an audience value figure. Take your last five posts of the same format and work out an average number of link clicks, saves, or DMs generated. Multiply that by what a click or lead is worth to a brand in that category (ask them, they usually know their own customer acquisition cost).
3. Add a usage and exclusivity premium. If the brand wants to reuse your content in their own paid ads or on their website for six months, that's a separate fee, typically 50 to 100 percent on top of the base post fee. If they want exclusivity, meaning you can't post for a competitor for a set period, that's another 20 to 40 percent.
4. Set a floor. Whatever the maths says, decide a number below which you will not go, no matter how flattering the brand name is. Mine is my hourly consulting rate times four, because if a post takes half a day of my attention including admin and revisions, it should never earn less than half a day of my normal work.
5. Quote a range, not a single number. Give the brand a range with the top of it being your real target, so there's room to negotiate without you moving off your floor.

What this looks like in real numbers by tier

These are current, real-world ranges I see and quote in 2026, not theoretical ones:

• Nano (1,000 to 10,000 followers): £50 to £250 per Instagram post, £75 to £300 per TikTok, often paid in product plus a small fee rather than cash alone
• Micro (10,000 to 50,000 followers): £250 to £1,000 per post, £400 to £1,500 for a YouTube integration
• Mid-tier (50,000 to 500,000 followers): £1,000 to £5,000 per post depending on platform, £3,000 to £10,000 for a full campaign with usage rights
• Macro and above (500,000+ followers): £5,000 upwards, often negotiated as a package covering multiple posts, stories and usage rights, not a single fee

If you want a fuller breakdown by exact platform and format, I've laid out the specifics in a rate guide by follower size that goes deeper than a single table.

Notice how wide these ranges are even within a single tier. That's not sloppy research, that's the honest state of a market with no standard rate card. Which is exactly why the formula matters more than the benchmark.

The extras that should double your quote and almost never get asked about

Most rate confusion isn't about the base fee, it's about everything bolted onto it that creators forget to price separately:

• Usage rights. A brand wanting to run your video as a paid Facebook ad for three months is buying something completely different from a one-off organic post. Charge for it separately, always.
• Whitelisting or dark posting. If the brand wants to post from your handle using their ad budget, that's their media spend running through your identity. That's worth 50 to 150 percent on top of a normal post fee.
• Revisions. Build two rounds of revision into your quote and charge extra past that, or you'll do five rounds for free and resent every one of them.
• Exclusivity windows. Not posting for a competitor for 30, 60 or 90 days has a real cost to you, price it as one.
• Usage across territories. A campaign running in the UK only is not the same fee as one running in the UK, US and Israel, adjust accordingly.

The £1,500 LinkedIn post

A few years back, a SaaS company approached me about a single LinkedIn post to their target audience of small business owners. I quoted £1,500. Their marketing manager came back with £200 and an offer to feature me on their blog "for visibility."

I said no, and explained my reasoning in one sentence: my audience on that platform was 40,000 engaged small business owners, exactly the buyers they wanted, and a blog feature on their site had roughly 4,000 monthly visitors, most of whom weren't decision makers. I wasn't being difficult, I was pointing at the actual value exchange and asking them to price it honestly. They came back at £1,500 within a day.

The lesson isn't "hold firm and you'll always win," because sometimes you won't and the brand will walk. The lesson is that the first number a brand offers is almost never their real ceiling, it's a test of whether you know your own value. Most creators fail that test not because their content is weak but because they've never sat down and worked out the number in the first place, so they have nothing to defend.

For brands: budget by outcome, not by guesswork

If you're the one paying rather than the one being paid, the same logic runs in reverse. Set your budget from what a customer or lead is worth to you, not from a follower-count formula you found online, and definitely not from what the loudest creator in your inbox demanded. I've written a fuller breakdown of sensible budget ranges by campaign type in this piece on what to pay for influencer marketing, which is worth reading before you send your first outreach email.

One thing brands consistently get wrong: they compare influencer marketing cost to advertising cost, but they compare it to the wrong kind of advertising. A sponsored post with a genuine, trusted creator behaves more like a recommendation from a friend than a display ad, and recommendation-driven sales convert far higher than cold ad clicks. If you're only comparing the sticker price against a Google Ads CPM, you'll always think influencer marketing looks expensive, when the more honest comparison is against the cost of a referral.

It's also worth knowing that a growing share of deals now run performance-based rather than flat-fee, paying a base fee plus a commission on sales through a tracked link, similar in structure to how affiliate marketing platforms handle attribution. This shifts risk off the brand and can reward creators whose audience converts well, but only agree to it if you trust the tracking, because a creator with a real audience deserves proper attribution, not a brand's word for it.

Where to sanity-check your number before you send it

Before you hit send on a quote, do two things. First, look at what similar creators in your niche and follower tier are charging, not by asking them directly (awkward and rarely honest) but by watching which brands they work with repeatedly, which suggests the arrangement works for both sides. Second, if you want structured benchmarking and a community actively discussing real rates rather than guessing, it's worth knowing what's out there, and I've shared my own experience testing a paid influencer marketing community for exactly this purpose. Some tools and marketplaces also try to standardise pricing for you, and I've covered what influencer marketing platforms do and whether you need one if you'd rather not negotiate every deal from scratch.

Saying the number out loud without flinching

The maths only helps if you can deliver the number without apologising for it. When a brand pushes back, don't retreat to a lower number immediately, ask what part of the value isn't landing for them. Sometimes they don't understand what they're buying, and a short explanation of reach, usage rights and past results does more than a discount ever will. Sometimes they simply have a smaller budget than your rate, and that's fine too, a smaller scope of work at your real rate beats a full campaign at half of it.

The one thing I'd tell any creator working this out for the first time: write your number down before the call, not during it. Decide your floor on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with a spreadsheet in front of you, not on a phone call while someone with a marketing budget is being charming at you. The number always sounds smaller in the moment than it does on paper, and that's exactly why the maths needs to come first.

Related: writing for us on influencer marketing.

Related: the saas marketing page.

Frequently asked questions

How much should a micro-influencer charge for one Instagram post?

Most micro-influencers with 10,000 to 50,000 followers charge between £250 and £1,000 per post, depending on niche, engagement quality and whether the brand wants usage rights or exclusivity added on top.

Should I charge based on followers or engagement rate?

Neither should be your main number. Use follower count and engagement rate as a rough floor check, then price the deal on actual results from past posts and on what the usage rights and exclusivity are worth to the brand.

Is it normal to negotiate influencer marketing rates?

Yes, almost every quote gets negotiated, and the first offer from a brand is rarely their real ceiling. Quote a range with your real target at the top, hold a firm floor underneath it, and be ready to explain the value rather than just repeating the number.

What's the biggest mistake creators make when pricing their work?

Forgetting to charge separately for usage rights, whitelisting and exclusivity. A brand that wants to reuse your content in paid ads or lock you out of working with competitors is buying far more than a single post, and that should show up as a separate, additional fee every time.

Useful references

• the ASA's advertising codes
• the FTC's endorsement guides