Monthly retainer: what a month buys, and where it ends.
A retainer sells a reserved share of your team's month, so the agreement has to settle two edges before either one comes up: the hours a client doesn't use, and the request too big for one month to hold.
A monthly retainer is a fixed fee a client pays at the start of each month to reserve an agreed share of your agency's time or output for ongoing work, instead of buying one finished project. It holds up when the agreement says three things plainly: what one month includes, what happens to the part the client doesn't use, and what happens to a request that's bigger than the month. Most retainers that go sour skip the second and third, which is how a client ends up feeling they paid for hours they never got while the agency feels it delivered a project for free.
The worked example below is a website care retainer at $4,200 a month for a small museum, run through a quiet summer and a busy September, so you can see both edges of the month with real numbers rather than as principles.
What is a monthly retainer?
A monthly retainer is an agreement to pay the same amount every month, usually in advance, for a defined amount of ongoing work from the same agency, with either side able to end it on notice. The money buys availability as much as output. The client knows that somebody who already understands their site, brand or accounts will pick up the next request without a new proposal, and the agency knows a share of next month's payroll is covered before the month starts.
On agency work the monthly fee pays for the month it's invoiced in, which is why the wording of that month matters so much. A project fee is measured against a finished thing the client can point at, while a retainer is measured against a calendar, and a calendar has no natural edges unless somebody writes them in.
What are the three kinds of monthly retainer?
They differ by the unit the month is sold in, which is either hours, counted outputs or access. An hours retainer reserves a set number of hours of design or development time each month and suits work that arrives as unpredictable small requests, like keeping a website current. A counted retainer sells a fixed list, such as four articles, eight posts and one report, and it's the normal shape for marketing work, which is why our marketing scope of work template writes every monthly line as a count. An access retainer sells availability for advice and nothing countable at all.
The sources we read disagree about which of these even deserves the name. Jonathan Stark defines a retainer as round-the-clock access to your advice on a subscription basis, and says plainly that his isn't a prepaid block of hours, a maintenance contract or a support contract. Studio Fellow's article sells a flat monthly fee that covers a small monthly project of up to a set number of days, and refuses to count hours at all. Paige Brunton, writing for web designers, describes a retainer as a monthly fee to handle whatever updates or maintenance the client needs, and then explains why she stopped offering one.
We'd let the work pick the unit rather than a preference. Advice sells best as access, for the reason our consulting proposal template gives, since an hourly advisory retainer teaches the client to count your replies. Marketing output can be counted in advance, so count it. Website care can't, because next month might bring one broken form or a whole new donation page, and that's the case where hours are the honest unit, provided both edges of the month are written down. It's the same trade you make choosing between time and materials and a fixed price on a project, applied one month at a time.
How much is a monthly retainer fee?
A monthly retainer fee is the hours or outputs one month includes multiplied by the rate you'd charge for the same work on a project, with no discount for the commitment unless the client is giving you something worth one. The museum retainer below includes 24 hours of design and development at $175 an hour, which is $4,200 a month. Its overage rate is set higher, at $190, because time sold outside the reserved block has to push some other client's work aside.
Published figures vary too widely to borrow. Paige Brunton puts designer retainers at $100 or more a month, which describes a few hours of upkeep on a small site, and the same word covers marketing engagements billing five figures every month. Price it from the share of your team's month you're agreeing to hold back for this client, then check that the fee still covers holding it back in a month when they send nothing at all.
What does a month of retainer look like on paper?
It looks like six short clauses a client can read in a minute, covering what the month includes, what carries over, what costs extra, what's too big for the month, when requests have to arrive and how the arrangement ends. Pennick Harbor Maritime Museum runs two galleries and a working boatyard on the Maine coast with one person doing all of its marketing, and its website needs a steady trickle of changes: exhibition pages, event listings, ticketing tweaks, and a donation form that breaks whenever the payment provider updates something.
2.1 Each calendar month includes 24 hours of design and development on the museum's website, for $4,200, invoiced on the first of the month and payable within 14 days.
2.2 Up to 8 unused hours carry into the following month only. Carried hours are used first, and unused hours beyond those 8 expire at the end of the month.
2.3 Work beyond the month's available hours is billed at $190 per hour, and starts only after the museum's named contact approves a written estimate.
2.4 Any single request estimated at more than 16 hours is quoted as its own statement of work, outside this retainer, and doesn't draw on the month's hours.
2.5 Requests received by the 20th are scheduled in that month. Later requests are scheduled in the following month unless the museum approves extra hours under 2.3.
2.6 Either side may end the retainer with 30 days' written notice. Hours already invoiced for the final month stay available until that month ends.
Clause 2.4 is the one most hourly retainers leave out, and it decides more money than the other five put together. Without it, a request that's really a small project quietly eats the month, the routine work gets pushed back, and the client experiences the retainer as slow in exactly the weeks they're paying for it to be fast. If the retainer sits under a master agreement, it's simply one more statement of work issued under it, the way the example year in our MSA vs SOW comparison carries a maintenance retainer as its third.
What happens to unused retainer hours?
They either expire or roll over, and the agreement has to say which before the first quiet month rather than during it. Studio Fellow's position is no rollover of work or hours at all, so the monthly rhythm doesn't fizzle into a bank the client stops drawing on. That's a defensible rule, but it's a hard sell to a museum whose only marketer takes her vacation in August, so the Pennick Harbor agreement lets up to eight hours travel one month forward and no further.
July was a quiet month on the museum's website. The museum used 15 of its 24 hours, leaving nine, so eight moved into August and one expired. August had 32 hours available and used 18, which left 14, so eight moved into September and six expired. Across the summer the museum let seven hours lapse, worth $1,225 at the included rate of $175, and that's the figure its marketer will bring to the October check-in.
The fair answer is that those seven hours were what it cost to have the other 41 ready whenever they were wanted, which is the thing a retainer sells. The alternative shows why the cap exists. With every unused hour banked indefinitely, July's nine would have made August a 33-hour month, August's 15 unused hours would have rolled forward again, and September would have opened with 39 hours owed, all of them landing in the month the museum was opening a new exhibition and needed the agency most. An open-ended bank turns two quiet months into one month you can't staff, and a client who has been told the hours are theirs will reasonably expect every one of them.
What happens when the client asks for more than the month holds?
The extra work gets an estimate, a named approval and a price before anybody starts it, and anything big enough to be a project leaves the retainer entirely. September at Pennick Harbor shows both. The museum's new exhibition opened on October 3, and by the middle of September its requests added up to 61 hours of work against the 32 hours the month had available.
One of those requests was an exhibition microsite with its own timeline page and an audio guide player, estimated at 22 hours. Clause 2.4 moved it out of the retainer and into a short statement of work, priced as 22 hours at the $190 overage rate, which comes to $4,180. That kept the remaining 39 hours of routine work inside the month, covering ticketing pages, event listings, a members' preview sign-up and the usual fixes, where it ran seven hours past the 32 available. The museum's contact approved a written estimate for those seven hours on September 16, at $190 each, which is $1,330.
September therefore billed $4,200 for the retainer, $1,330 for the approved extra hours and $4,180 for the microsite, $9,710 in all. Under an agreement that only said ongoing website support for $4,200 a month, the same 61 hours would have gone out for $4,200, which works out at $68.85 an hour against the $175 the retainer was priced at. Nobody at the museum would have been acting in bad faith, either. Without a written line, a busy month and a quiet month cost the client the same, so nobody on their side had any reason to ask whether a microsite counted as retainer work.
The approval matters as much as the price. A written estimate the contact agreed to on a specific date is what stops the October invoice turning into a debate about whether anyone asked for the extra hours, and it's the same record a change request form produces on a project.
When is a monthly retainer the wrong deal?
It's the wrong deal when the client's needs come in lumps rather than a stream, because a retainer then charges them for capacity they don't use and tempts you to absorb the lumps to keep the arrangement alive. Paige Brunton's case against retainers is exactly this one. Her clients, once trained to edit their own sites, needed help a couple of times in the first year, which describes a project-and-hourly relationship rather than a monthly one, and a client who wants a redesign every two years and nothing in between is the same case.
The other wrong deal is a retainer used to avoid writing a scope. If the client wants one defined thing built, sell it as a project with a statement of work, and if they want it built and then looked after, sell the build as a fixed fee and the care afterwards as a retainer, the way our website development scope of work template offers a monthly retainer once its warranty runs out. Folding the two into one monthly fee is how an agency ends up delivering a build at maintenance rates.
The sixteen-hour line keeps a retainer from swallowing a project
Of the six clauses, 2.4 did most of the work in September. It moved $4,180 of microsite out of a month that couldn't hold it, kept the routine work on schedule for an exhibition opening, and gave the museum's marketer a price she could take to her director before a single hour was spent. The rollover cap protected the agency's calendar and the overage rate priced the spillover, but the threshold is the sentence that decided which conversation September would be.
Docket keeps those decisions in one place: the request, the estimate, which side of the sixteen-hour line it fell on, and the date the museum's contact approved it, so the October check-in starts from a record instead of two people's memories of a busy month. Scope creep on a retainer arrives in smaller pieces than on a project, but handling scope creep works the same way in both, by putting a price and a yes on the request before the work starts.
Frequently asked questions
What is a monthly retainer?
A monthly retainer is a fixed fee a client pays each month, usually in advance, for an agreed amount of ongoing work from the same agency. The agreement sets what one month includes, whether that is measured in hours, in counted outputs or in access to advice, and either side can usually end it on notice. Unlike a project fee it doesn't buy one finished thing, so the edges of the month, meaning unused capacity and requests that don't fit, need their own written rules.
How does a monthly retainer work?
The client is invoiced at the start of each month for the included work, requests arrive through the month and are scheduled against that allowance, and anything beyond it is estimated and approved before it starts. In the museum example on this page, the month includes 24 hours for $4,200, up to eight unused hours roll into the next month, extra hours cost $190 each, and any single request estimated at more than 16 hours is quoted separately as its own statement of work.
How much is a monthly retainer fee?
It's the hours or outputs included each month multiplied by the rate you'd charge for the same work on a project. Paige Brunton puts designer retainers at $100 or more a month for light website upkeep, while marketing retainers often bill five figures, so borrowed numbers mislead. Work out how much of your team's month you're holding back for the client, price that, and make sure the fee still covers it in a month when they send nothing.
Do unused retainer hours roll over?
Only if the agreement says so, and the safest version caps both how many hours carry and how far they travel. Studio Fellow allows no rollover at all. A one-month rollover capped at a third of the monthly hours, eight out of 24 in the example on this page, softens a quiet month for the client without letting two quiet months pile up into one month nobody can staff.
What is the difference between a monthly retainer and a project fee?
A project fee buys one defined result with an end date, and a monthly retainer buys a recurring share of an agency's capacity with no fixed end. Projects suit work you can scope in advance, like a redesign, and retainers suit work that arrives as a stream, like keeping a website current. Plenty of agencies sell both to the same client, with a fixed fee for the build and a retainer for the care afterwards.
What does a $5,000 retainer fee mean?
On agency work it usually means $5,000 a month for whatever the agreement says one month includes, paid at the start of each month and kept by the agency even if the client sends less. Other professions use the same words for different arrangements, so read the agreement rather than the label. Before comparing two $5,000 retainers, check the unit, the rollover rule and the overage rate, because those three decide what the money actually buys.