How Much of a Deposit Should You Ask For? (And How to Ask)

A client loves your proposal, says "let's do it," and then goes quiet for three weeks — meanwhile you've already turned down two other inquiries to keep the slot open. Or worse: you deliver the whole project, send the invoice, and it sits in someone's "to pay" folder for two months while you're the one covering the software subscriptions and the freelance taxes that funded getting it done. A deposit doesn't prevent every bad outcome a freelancer can run into, but it prevents both of those, and it's one of the few contract terms where simply asking gets you most of the way there. Here's how much to ask for, how to phrase it without hedging, and when the number should go up.

Why take a deposit at all

Three reasons, and they're not the same reason wearing different clothes.

• Cash flow. Freelance income is lumpy enough already without also floating a client's entire project on your own dime for weeks before the first payment lands. A deposit means you're not covering software, contractors, or your own rent on the promise of a future invoice.
• It filters flaky clients before you've done any work. A client who balks at putting down 25-30% before you start is telling you something real — either the budget isn't actually approved, or they don't take the engagement seriously enough to commit money to it. Better to learn that in week zero than in week six.
• It protects you if the project falls apart. Scope disputes, ghosting, budget cuts, a client's own business folding — none of that is rare, and a deposit means that if the worst happens on day one, you're not walking away with literally nothing for the calendar time you already gave up.

None of this is adversarial. Clients who've hired freelancers before expect a deposit; it's the ones who've never worked with an independent contractor who sometimes need the reasoning spelled out, which is exactly what the phrasing section below is for.

How much to actually ask for

There's a real standard here, not just freelancer folklore. 25-50% upfront is the common range, and where you land in it depends on project size, client history, and how much risk you're carrying before the first milestone.

• 50/50 is the default for small and mid-size projects. Half at signing, half on delivery. It's simple to explain, easy for a client to budget around, and it caps your downside at half the project's value no matter what happens after kickoff.
• Thirds work better for bigger or longer engagements. One-third at signing, one-third at a midpoint milestone, one-third at final delivery. This keeps cash flowing through a multi-month project instead of leaving you unpaid for everything between kickoff and the final invoice.
• Milestone deposits combine both. Take a deposit upfront — say 30% — then split the remaining balance across however many milestones match the project's real checkpoints: a first draft, a client review round, a final handoff. Short projects can get away with just two payments; longer or multi-phase work usually wants three to six so no single missed payment represents too much unpaid effort.

Freelance contributor Nick Darlington, writing on the FreshBooks blog about upfront payments, puts a number on the new-client end of that range: "For new clients, I usually charge a 50% deposit before I even put pen to paper," with a personal floor of 30% if a client pushes back — and he notes an informal survey of other freelancers put the broader range at roughly 20% to 50%. That matches what shows up across freelance contracts generally: 50% is common and defensible for a new relationship, 25-30% is reasonable once you've built trust with a repeat client, and going lower than that starts to erode the actual point of taking a deposit in the first place.

One more structural note: whatever percentage you land on, the deposit should at minimum cover your real costs — any materials, subcontractor payments, licenses, or stock assets you'll need to spend money on before the client pays anything else. A deposit that doesn't even cover your out-of-pocket costs isn't really doing its job.

Run your numbers

Rather than picking a round number and hoping it holds up, plug your actual project total and deposit percentage in and see the deposit amount and the milestone schedule it leaves behind:

If you're using a thirds structure, set the deposit to roughly 33% and 2 milestones for the midpoint and final payments — the tool splits whatever's left after the deposit evenly across however many milestones you enter, so the schedule matches what you'd actually put in the contract.

How to phrase it in a proposal or contract

The single biggest reason freelancers under-collect deposits isn't the percentage — it's the delivery. Asking for money upfront while apologizing for asking undercuts the number no matter what it is. State it as a normal, unremarkable part of how you work, because for anyone who's hired freelancers before, it is.

A version that works in most proposals or statements of work:

"A [X]% deposit is due before work begins, which reserves your project on my calendar. The remaining balance is due [on delivery / split across the milestones below]. Work starts once the deposit is received."

A few things that make that language actually enforceable rather than just polite:

• Put it in the contract, not just the proposal email. A deposit mentioned in a pitch but never written into the signed agreement is a request, not a term — if a client disputes it later, you have nothing to point to.
• State whether it's refundable. Most freelance contracts treat the deposit as non-refundable once work has started, since it's compensating you for turning down other work and reserving time, not pre-paying for deliverables you haven't made yet. Say this explicitly; a verbal understanding falls apart fast when a client asks for the money back.
• Tie "work begins" to the deposit landing, not the invoice being sent. Sending an invoice isn't the same as getting paid. If you start work before the deposit clears, you've quietly given up the entire point of collecting one.

When to ask for more than the default

Treat 25-50% as a range to move within, not a single number to default to every time. Push toward the top of the range — or above it — when:

• It's a new client with no track record with you. The less history you have with someone, the less you actually know about whether they pay on time, and the deposit is the only leverage you have before the relationship proves itself either way.
• The scope is large or highly custom. Bespoke work — a full brand identity, a custom-built application, anything that has no resale value to another client if this one walks away — carries more of your unrecoverable time if it falls apart. A bigger deposit matches that risk.
• The timeline is long. A project that runs for months ties up your calendar for months. A single deposit-and-final-payment structure leaves you exposed for the entire stretch in between; either raise the deposit or add milestones so you're never carrying that much unpaid work at once.
• There's real upfront cost to you. Materials, a subcontractor, a software license bought specifically for this job — anything you have to spend before the client pays again should be covered by the deposit, not floated out of pocket.
• Something about the inquiry feels off. Vague scope that won't get more specific, reluctance to sign a contract at all, or pressure to start before paperwork is finished are all reasons to ask for more, not less — or to treat the entire deposit conversation as a screening question you're allowed to walk away from the answer to.

What if they cancel after paying the deposit?

A deposit protects you if a client disappears before work starts. It doesn't automatically cover what happens if they cancel after work is already underway — that's a related but separate clause called a kill fee, and conflating the two is where a lot of contract disputes start. The deposit is upfront proof of commitment; a kill fee is calculated against the project's remaining value at the moment of cancellation, and it's what actually compensates you for work in progress and the opportunity cost of the calendar time you'd already turned other clients away for. If your contract doesn't have one, the Kill Fee Calculator walks through the math and a companion guide covers exactly how to write the clause. Some freelancers credit the deposit against the kill fee owed later so a client isn't effectively paying for the same lost time twice — decide which approach you're using and say so in the contract, rather than leaving it to be argued about after a cancellation has already happened.

Turning the deposit into a real invoice

However you structure it, the deposit still needs to show up on an actual invoice — and if you charge sales tax, VAT, or offer any negotiated discount, the number on that invoice isn't always just the raw deposit percentage of the project total. The Invoice Total Calculator breaks a subtotal into its discount, tax, and final total, which is worth running before you send the deposit invoice if your jurisdiction requires tax on it — better to catch that before the client questions why the number doesn't match what the proposal said.

Methodology & sources

The deposit and milestone math above matches the calculator embedded in this guide: depositAmount = projectTotal × depositPercent, and the remaining balance is divided evenly by the number of milestones entered. The 25-50% range and the new-client guidance draw on freelance-industry reporting rather than a single fixed rule — see Nick Darlington's Should You Ask for an Upfront Payment on Work? on the FreshBooks blog for the specific percentages cited above, and Freelancers Union's 8 Contract Provisions Every Freelancer Should Know for why key terms like this belong in a written contract rather than a verbal agreement. Your own number should reflect your actual costs, your history with the client, and how much unrecoverable time a cancellation would cost you — not a percentage copied from an article, including this one.