How to Price Your Personal Styling Services: Hourly, Packages, Deposits and Raises

Disclosure: I sell software to stylists, and part of it handles proposals, deposits and invoices. That part is at the very end. Everything before it is the pricing advice I’d give any stylist, whichever tools they use.

Pricing personal styling services is mostly a question of what you’re selling: a session, a result, or your time on call. Get that right and the number is easier to set and much easier to say out loud.

What your clients are comparing you against

Before a client contacts you, they’ve usually searched what a stylist costs. Here’s what they find:

• $100 to $300 an hour for an independent stylist, with New York and Los Angeles at the top.
• $495 as the Thumbtack national average for a wardrobe consultant job, with most between $265 and $925.
• $320 for a four-hour package with a closet audit, outfit planning and a shopping plan, as one Thumbtack consultant lists it.
• $20 for a Stitch Fix box, credited toward anything they keep. It’s a different service, and it still sits in the back of a client’s mind.

You don’t need to match any of these. You need to know they’re there, because a client who has seen $320 for four hours will ask you what makes yours different. Have the answer ready. I put the whole market, service by service, in the client-side version of this guide.

Find your real hourly rate first

The hours you’re in the room are a fraction of the hours a client costs you. Before quoting anything, count the time nobody sees:

• The intake: the questionnaire, the call, reading their answers.
• Prep: pulling ideas, planning the session, building a shopping list.
• Travel and parking, both ways.
• Returns and exchanges after a shopping trip.
• The follow-up: the lookbook, the notes, the messages the week after.

Here’s a worked example. A three-hour closet edit billed at $150 an hour is $450. If it also takes an hour of intake and prep, an hour of travel and two hours of follow-up, you’ve worked seven hours for $450, which is about $64 an hour. Price from the seven hours, and quote the three.

Pick the right pricing model for each service

Hourly

Good for small, defined help: a one-hour consultation, a quick virtual session, tailoring runs. Easy to explain. The downside is that you earn less as you get faster, and clients start watching the clock.

Packages

Best for anything with a before and after, like a closet edit, a seasonal refresh or a wardrobe for a new job. Clients find a fixed price easier to say yes to, and you keep what you save by getting faster. For shape, one Thumbtack consultant sells a one-hour image assessment at $89, a four-hour package at $320 and an eight-hour package with personal shopping at $640.

Day rates

For work that fills a whole day, like a full shopping day or a shoot. In New York a six-to-eight-hour shopping day runs $1,500 to $3,000.

Retainers

For clients who want you through the year. You sell a block of hours each month at a small discount on your hourly rate, and in return you get income you can plan around. Published examples: $359 a month for 2.5 hours, $400 a month for four hours plus online outfits and unlimited questions, and $575 a quarter for about four hours.

Build packages a client can say yes to

• Name what they get at the end. “Twelve outfits from your own closet, a shopping list and a lookbook” sells better than “a three-hour closet session.”
• State the hours, so the client can do the math and see the package is the better deal.
• Say what’s excluded: the clothes, travel beyond a set distance, extra revision rounds.
• Offer two or three sizes. A small, a standard and a full version lets the client choose how much, which is easier than choosing whether.
• Put the price in writing with the scope, so nobody is surprised later. A written styling proposal does this in one document.

How to charge for personal shopping

Hourly is the most common. The other option is a percentage of what the client spends, commonly 10 to 20 percent. A percentage rewards big shopping trips and punishes careful ones, so if you mostly style clients from what they already own, hourly or a package will serve you better. If you earn commission from retailers, tell the client. It’s normal, and they’ll trust you more for saying so.

Travel fees

Charge for travel separately, or build a set radius into your packages and charge beyond it. For reference, one NYC guide puts travel fees at $50 to $100 inside Manhattan and $150 or more for the outer boroughs, and one multi-city styling firm charges $30 to $80 per house call depending on location. Whatever you choose, put it on the quote.

Take a deposit

A deposit at booking protects the time you’ve set aside and filters out people who weren’t going to show up. Across appointment-based businesses, 25 to 50 percent is the usual range, with bigger and longer bookings at the higher end. Put your cancellation terms in writing next to it: how much notice, and what happens to the deposit if they cancel late.

When to raise your prices

• You’re booked weeks ahead and turning people away.
• Nobody pushes back on price. If every quote is accepted at once, you’re probably under the market.
• You’ve added something, like a certification, a new service or a lookbook with every package.

One styling academy suggests reviewing your prices after every 10 to 20 paid clients, which is a sensible habit. Raise prices for new clients first, and give existing clients notice before their next booking.

Say the number

Once you’ve set a price, write it down: on your site, in a proposal, anywhere the client sees it before you talk. A number that’s already on paper is much easier to say out loud, and much harder to haggle over.

That’s the part Stylement handles: a proposal with your packages and price, signed by the client in a tap, with the deposit collected on the signature, and invoices that sit on the same client record. Here’s how the proposal flow works.