A change request form template, filled in as a sample.

A change request form template for client work needs eleven fields and no more than that: the project, a request number, the date, who asked, what they asked for, the reason they gave, the cost, the effect on the delivery date, what happens if you skip it, who approved it, and when. The whole form is written out below so you can copy it straight into a document, along with the arithmetic that fills the cost line and the rule that decides whose yes actually counts.

The reason to write your own rather than download one is that the popular free templates were designed for a different situation entirely. They come from project management platforms serving corporate IT departments, so they carry fields for risk classification, emergency change categories, and the comments of a change advisory board. An agency of five people has none of those things. What an agency has is a client who asked for something on a call, a fixed price that no longer covers the work, and about ten minutes to turn that into a decision somebody can approve by email.

What belongs on a change request form for client work?

Eleven fields cover everything an agency actually needs, and they fall into three groups: what was asked, what it costs, and who agreed. The identifying details go first, because a request without a number and a date becomes impossible to reconcile against an invoice two months later. Then comes the substance of the change, then the money and the schedule, and finally the approval itself.

The field most agencies leave off is the one that does the most work in a difficult conversation. It's the line describing what happens if the change doesn't go ahead. Writing "the homepage ships with the three sections agreed in March" underneath a $2,800 price gives the client a real choice between two defined outcomes rather than a bill to accept or argue with. Clients who feel they're choosing behave completely differently from clients who feel they're being charged.

Two fields on the enterprise templates are worth deleting on purpose. Priority ratings of high, medium and low mean nothing on a project with one client and one delivery date, since every request the client raises is urgent to them by definition. Risk classification is the other one, and it exists so that a review board can decide which changes need extra scrutiny. You are the review board, and you already know.

One field is worth adding that the standard templates never include, which is the phrase describing what the change replaces or adds to in the original agreement. Naming the specific line in the signed scope stops the entire argument about whether the work was always included. That single sentence is the difference between a form that documents a change and a form that settles a dispute about one.

What does a filled-in change request form sample look like?

Here's the complete form, ready to copy into a document, a note, or the body of an email. Everything in square brackets gets replaced, and nothing else needs to change from one project to the next.

Notice how short the descriptive fields are. A change request that runs to a page invites the client to read it as a negotiating document and respond clause by clause, which is the last thing you want on something that should take them ninety seconds to decide. Two sentences of description, one number, one date, and a name is the entire useful content, and the discipline of keeping it that short is part of why the form works at all.

Write the description in your own words rather than pasting what the client wrote. Client requests arrive as "can we also do something with the case studies", and your job is to turn that into "add a case study template with a filterable index page, using the existing blog styles". If they approve your version, you've agreed on the thing you're going to build. If they correct it, you found the misunderstanding before it cost you three days.

If they approve your description, you've agreed on what gets built. If they correct it, you found the misunderstanding for free.

How do you work out the cost and the timeline lines?

Estimate the hours honestly, multiply by the blended rate you used to price the original project, then add somewhere between twenty and thirty percent for the disruption of dropping new work into a project already in flight. That uplift isn't padding, since it covers the re-planning, the context switching, and the work that has to be revisited because it was built against an assumption the change has now broken.

Take an example most agencies will recognize immediately. A client on a $20,000 website build asks in week three for a case study template and a newsletter integration. Sketched out honestly, that's about a day of design, a day and a half of build, and half a day of revisions, so three days of work. At a blended rate of $150 an hour across a seven hour day, the raw delivery cost lands at $3,150, and a twenty-five percent uplift for the mid-project disruption takes it to just under $4,000. That's the number that goes on the form, and the arithmetic behind it takes about four minutes to do.

Check it from the other direction before you send it. Absorbing that request means delivering $3,150 of work for free on a project whose entire profit margin was probably smaller than that, so the change wouldn't reduce your profit on the job, it would erase it. We've written at length about what a year of absorbed changes does to an agency's numbers, and the short version is that a handful of these decides whether the agency had a good year or a flat one.

Set a minimum change fee and put it in the proposal you send before the statement of work so it never comes as a surprise. Most agencies land somewhere between one and two hours of their blended rate, so roughly $150 to $300 at typical rates, because the overhead of scoping, pricing and re-planning a tiny change is nearly identical to the overhead for a large one. The floor also has a quiet second effect, which is that clients stop sending three small requests a week once each one has a visible number attached.

Quote the delivery impact in the same breath as the money, and quote it in working days rather than as a vague delay. A client who waves through $4,000 without blinking will often reconsider once they see the launch move by five days, and that's a perfectly good outcome too. Both numbers are real information about the same decision, and giving the client only one of them makes the choice harder rather than easier.

Who has to approve the change request?

One named person, agreed at kickoff, whose email address you write down before the project starts. This is the single most useful sentence in the whole process, and it's missing from every free template on the first page of Google because enterprise projects solve it with an approval board instead. An agency can't convene a board, so it names a human being.

The problem the named approver solves is authority rather than paperwork. A marketing coordinator can enthusiastically approve $6,000 of extra work with no ability whatsoever to authorize $6,000 of spending, and you find this out when the invoice reaches their director. Deciding at kickoff that requests get priced but only one person's yes starts the work removes an entire category of dispute before it can happen, and clients rarely object, because the arrangement protects their budget as much as your margin.

A written yes from that person is enough. There's no need for a signature, a countersigned PDF, or anything that looks like a contract amendment, and asking for one usually just slows the reply down by a week. An email saying "approved, go ahead" from the named address, with the form quoted underneath it, gives you the description, the price, the date and the identity of the approver in a single artifact. We've written separately about the layers that make an approval hold up when somebody later disputes it, and the honest summary is that none of this is court-proof, but it's dramatically better than a Slack message nobody can find.

Record the refusals on the same form as carefully as the approvals. A change marked declined with a date is a decision you can point to when the same request resurfaces in week nine framed as something you'd always agreed to do. Agencies that only file the approved ones lose half the value of keeping records at all.

What do you send with the form?

Three or four sentences of plain email, with the form underneath. The covering note is doing something the form can't, which is making the whole exchange feel like ordinary project administration rather than an escalation, and the tone of those few sentences determines how the client reads everything below them.

Four things are happening in that message. You're confirming the request came from a real conversation, giving both numbers together, making it explicit that no work has started, and offering a way to solve the problem if the answer is no. The last one matters more than people expect, because a client whose only options are yes and no will sometimes pick no out of pure discomfort with the price.

Send it within a day of the request landing, which is where nearly all of the relationship risk in this subject actually sits. A price sent the same week reads as attentive service, and the identical price sent six weeks later as an invoice line reads as a surprise charge. Nothing about the number changed, only the timing, and the timing costs nothing to get right. Our fuller walkthrough of handling scope creep covers the reply you send before the form is even written.

Is a change request the same thing as a change order?

A change request is the ask and a change order is the priced answer, though in agency work the same document usually does both jobs, and plenty of clients will call the same thing a request for change. The distinction comes from construction and large engineering projects, where a request goes to an estimating team who produce the order as a separate document, sometimes weeks later. Nobody in a six-person agency has an estimating team.

The practical consequence is that your form should carry the price rather than promise one. Sending a client a description with no number invites a "sounds good" that commits nothing and means nothing, and you'll be back at the same conversation once you've done the estimate anyway. One document, one round trip, one decision is the version that works when the same person doing the pricing is also doing the design.

The vocabulary still matters when you're writing the contract, because a scope of work that says changes are handled through written change orders sets an expectation that the client will pay for extra work. Say it in the kickoff meeting too, before anything has gone wrong and while there's nothing at stake, and we've written out the two-minute script for raising change orders early.

When is a Word template the wrong tool?

A document works fine for an agency handling three or four changes a year, and stops working somewhere around one a fortnight. The failure isn't in the template itself, which is a perfectly good template. It's that a form living in a folder depends entirely on somebody remembering to open it at four in the afternoon when saying yes is easy and writing things down is tedious.

Watch for three signs that the document has stopped doing its job. Requests start being approved in Slack because that's where they arrived, and the form gets filled in afterward or not at all. Invoicing turns into an archaeology exercise across email threads to work out which changes were agreed and at what price. Somebody asks in a project meeting whether a particular change was ever approved and nobody in the room can answer with any confidence.

The fix is to make writing it down the easiest available action rather than asking the team to be more disciplined. That means one place clients send requests, a priced reply going back in the same channel, and an approval that lands somewhere permanent instead of scrolling away in a thread. This is what we built Docket to do, and it's the same eleven fields, just with the numbering, the log and the record handled automatically rather than by whoever remembers.

Either way, start with the form. An agency that fills in eleven fields consistently for six months is in far better shape than one that buys software and keeps approving things verbally, and the habit is the part that carries the value. The tooling only ever makes an existing habit cheaper to keep.

Frequently asked questions