You’ve been charging the same day rate since the van was new. The merchant’s price list has been reissued twice since then, your insurance renewal came back higher again, the tip’s putting its charges up, and you’re booked out eight weeks. Every one of those is a signal, and you’ve been ignoring all of them.

Not because the sum is hard — the sum takes ten minutes. It’s the conversation you think you’ll have to have, the one where a customer you’ve known for years looks at you differently. Here’s the useful bit: most of a price rise involves no conversation at all, and the part that does is shorter than you’re imagining.

The signs you’re overdue

You don’t need a spreadsheet to spot these:

Your rate hasn’t moved in two or three years while your costs have moved every year.
You’re booked solid and turning work away. Demand is telling you something your price isn’t.
You win nearly every quote you send. If nobody ever flinches, you’re cheap. A healthy win rate has some losses in it.
Jobs look profitable on paper but there’s nothing in the account. Usually means the margin was never really there.
You’ve started resenting certain customers. Resentment is almost always an underpricing symptom.

The last one matters more than people think. If you find yourself dreading a particular regular’s call, it’s rarely about them — it’s that the job stopped paying properly a while back and you never said anything.

Work out the number before you think about the conversation

Don’t pluck a new rate out of the air, and don’t set it by asking the bloke at the merchant what he’s on. Rebuild it from your own costs: what you need to take home, your real annual overheads, and the number of days you honestly bill after holiday, weather, quoting and admin. The full method is here and it’s worth redoing from scratch rather than nudging last year’s figure.

Say your rate’s sat at £300 a day for three years and the rebuilt number comes out at £345. Your figures will be different — that’s the point of doing it yourself — but the shape is usually the same. That gap isn’t greed. It’s the ground that shifted underneath you while you weren’t looking: fuel, van finance, public liability, tools, the fact that timber and copper don’t cost what they did.

Knowing the number came from somewhere real changes how you say it. There’s a world of difference between “I’m putting my prices up” and “I’ve rebuilt my costs and my rate needs to be £345.” One sounds like a whim. The other sounds like a business.

Raise it on new quotes first — there’s nothing to announce

This is the part most trades miss, and it takes all the fear out of it.

A customer who rings you tomorrow has no idea what you charged last month. To them, your new rate is just your rate. No announcement, no explanation, no awkwardness — you simply price the next job at the new number and send it.

For most trades, new and one-off work makes up the bulk of the book. So the bulk of your price rise happens in complete silence. Put the new rate on the next quote that leaves your phone and let it bed in for a few weeks. By the time you get round to the handful of regulars who’d notice, you’ll have sent a dozen quotes at the higher number and had the sky stay firmly up — so you’re having the harder conversation from a position of “this is what I charge now,” not “this is what I’d like to charge.”

Little and often beats one big jump

A modest rise once a year is barely noticed. A 25% correction after five years of standing still feels, to the customer, like you’ve become a different company overnight — and it invites a level of scrutiny that a small annual move never does.

Pick a date and stick to it. Start of your financial year, first of April, the week after Christmas — something you’ll actually remember. Then review the rate every year whether it needs moving or not, and the gap never gets big enough to need a conversation.

If you’re already years behind, you may need one larger move to get back to a sane number. Do it, but do it in one clean step and then get on the annual cycle. Two rises in six months looks like you’re making it up as you go.

The regulars: give them the heads-up yourself

The only people who need telling are the ones who see your prices repeatedly — a letting agent who sends you work, a builder who subs jobs to you, the landlord with six properties, the customer whose boiler you’ve serviced every autumn for years.

Three rules for that:

Tell them before they see it on an invoice. A price rise discovered on a bill feels like being had. The same rise, flagged three weeks earlier, is just information.
Put it in writing. A text or short email, not a doorstep conversation you’ll both misremember.
Honour what’s already out. Anything you’ve quoted stays at the quoted price. Say so explicitly — it costs you very little and it’s the line that makes the whole message land as fair.

Something like this is plenty:

Morning John — heads-up rather than a surprise on an invoice. From 1 November my day rate goes to £345. It’s the first rise in three years; merchant prices and insurance have both moved and I’ve held off as long as I sensibly can. Anything I’ve already quoted for you stays at the old price. Same service, same fella — just wanted you to hear it from me.

Short, dated, reasoned, no apology. Send it and go back to work.

Say it once, then stop talking

The most common way trades sabotage a price rise is by over-explaining it. You send the message, then you fill the silence: how hard things have been, how you’ve been meaning to do it for ages, how you’ll see what you can do if it’s a problem. Within two minutes you’ve talked yourself into a discount nobody asked for.

State it. Give one reason at most. Stop.

And never open with “sorry.” “Sorry to have to do this, but…” signals that you think the price is unreasonable, which is an open invitation to negotiate. You’re not doing anything to them. You’ve adjusted a price, the same way every supplier they deal with does.

If someone does push back, you’re in a normal objection conversation and you handle it normally: find out what’s actually behind it, and if they genuinely can’t reach the new number, change the scope rather than the rate. The scripts for that are here. What you don’t do is quietly keep one customer on the old rate because the conversation got uncomfortable — that’s not a customer, that’s a subsidy.

Losing a few is the point, not the risk

If you raise your prices and absolutely nobody leaves, you didn’t raise them enough.

Run the arithmetic before you panic about it. Put your rate up 10% and lose one customer in ten, and you’re roughly level on money — and up a day you can now sell to somebody else, or spend on the quoting and admin that’s been living in your evenings. Lose none, and you’re straightforwardly better off.

Look at who actually goes, too. The customers who leave over a modest rise are usually the same ones who haggled at the start, paid late, and rang at seven on a Sunday. The ones who stay are the ones who were never really buying on price — they were buying someone who turns up, does it properly and answers the phone. Those are the customers worth building a business on, and a higher price tends to attract more of them, not fewer.

The takeaway

Rebuild your rate from your own costs so you know the number is real. Put it on new quotes immediately and say nothing — that’s most of the job done in silence. Give your regulars a dated, written heads-up that honours anything already quoted, deliver it without apologising, then stop talking. Review it every year so you never need a big one again.

The trades that go under aren’t usually the expensive ones. They’re the ones who were too polite to charge properly and ran out of road.

Queezy puts your current rate into fast, itemised, professional quotes on-site — so a new price always arrives looking like it’s worth it. Download it free on iPhone.

How to Raise Your Prices Without Losing Customers