Freelance trainer daily rate: how to set your TJM

“What’s your daily rate?” is often the first question a freelance trainer hears, whether from a training organisation looking for a subcontractor or from a corporate client. Many answer by copying a figure heard from a colleague, without checking that it covers their costs, their unbilled time and the income they actually need. Yet setting a daily rate — the TJM (tarif journalier moyen) in French — is not a matter of intuition. It’s a calculation, and it runs backwards: from the income you want to the rate, never the other way round.

Why think in daily rates rather than hourly rates

The hourly rate is the employee’s natural unit; the daily rate is the freelancer’s.

• The day is the real unit of delivery: training is sold in days or half-days of facilitation, and a day on site consumes your whole day anyway — travel, set-up and debrief included.
• Hourly rates invite salary comparisons, always misleading for a freelancer: they hide social contributions, unbilled days and the absence of paid leave.
• A daily rate simplifies negotiation with buyers, who themselves think in days — especially training organisations building their own selling price grid on a per-day or per-day-per-learner basis.

Hourly billing retains a residual use: short one-to-one coaching, highly fragmented sessions. For everything else, think in days.

The method: work back from your target net income

The right question isn’t “what do others charge?” but “what must I charge to make a decent living from this?”. The method has three steps.

Step 1: set your target net annual income

Start from the net income you need or aim for, including everything you’ll have to fund yourself: complementary health cover, additional pension, equipment, your own training, quiet periods.

Step 2: work up to the revenue you need, based on your status

Between the revenue you invoice and your net income sit deductions and costs that depend entirely on your legal status:

• Micro-entreprise: social contributions are paid as a percentage of revenue collected, on top of which come income tax and business expenses that the regime doesn’t let you deduct — that’s how the regime works by design (see our guide to the auto-entrepreneur training organisation).
• Company (EURL, SASU): social charges on the director’s remuneration, structural costs (accounting, banking, insurance), corporation tax where applicable.
• Umbrella employment (portage salarial): the umbrella company deducts management fees from your revenue, then converts the balance into a salary with employer charges — a model with genuine advantages for a trainer, covered in our article on umbrella employment for trainers.
• Occasional trainer: if you train occasionally alongside another activity, a specific contribution regime may apply — see the occasional trainer status.

For the same net income, the revenue you need — and therefore your daily rate — varies significantly from one status to another. That’s why copying the rate of a colleague on a different status makes no sense.

Step 3: divide by your genuinely billable days

This is the step almost everyone gets wrong. An employee works around 220 days a year; a freelance trainer bills only a fraction of that, because you must deduct:

• prospecting and client relations (meetings, quotes, follow-ups);
• unbilled course design and instructional engineering;
• administration: invoicing, accounting, compliance, regulatory watch;
• your own training and content updates;
• holidays, public holidays and the unexpected (cancellations, illness, seasonal lulls).

Dividing your revenue target by 220 days produces an artificially low rate you will never make up: you won’t bill 220 days. Count your sellable days honestly, then divide.

A worked example — hypothetical

The figures below are deliberately fictitious: they illustrate the mechanics, not a market rate.

Step	Illustrative assumption
Target net annual income	€45,000
Assumed contributions, charges and costs	30% of revenue
Revenue needed	45,000 / 0.70 ≈ €64,300
Estimated genuinely billable days	100 days
Resulting daily rate	≈ €643

Change a single variable — a status with heavier charges, 80 billable days instead of 100 — and the required rate changes immediately. That’s the whole point of the method: it gives you your floor, not your neighbour’s.

Don’t forget preparation and course design

A day of facilitation sold is never an isolated day of work: behind it sit the session plan, the materials, the assessments. Two coherent approaches exist:

1. Build design time into the daily rate: your facilitation rate includes a share of engineering time. Commercially simple — but you then have to resist “making a gesture” on that rate, which already pays for invisible work.
2. Bill design separately, as engineering days distinct from facilitation days. More transparent, and suited to bespoke programmes where design is a heavy workload.

What isn’t viable is the implicit third route: a rate priced on facilitation alone, with design given away and counted by no one.

The factors that legitimately move a daily rate

The same trainer doesn’t have a single rate carved in stone. The legitimate variables:

• Scarcity of expertise: a sharp, in-demand specialism commands more than generalist facilitation many others could deliver.
• Sales channel: subcontracting for a training organisation versus selling directly to the corporate client (see below).
• Open-enrolment vs. in-company: in-company, you sell a day to a single client; in open-enrolment courses, the buyer’s economics rest on filling seats, which weighs on what they will pay for your days.
• Geography: cost of living, density of local competition, induced travel costs.
• Recurrence: a committed volume over the year can justify an adjusted rate — provided the volume is contractual, not merely promised.

Subcontracting: a mechanically lower rate — and that’s normal

When you work for a training organisation as prime contractor, it sells the course to the end client at its own price, then buys your days. In between, it funds its prospecting, its client relationship, its Qualiopi compliance, its bad-debt risk: it takes a margin, legitimately. Your subcontractor rate will therefore always be below what you would invoice the same company directly.

That’s not an anomaly to fight — it’s a commercial trade-off: subcontracting brings you volume with no acquisition cost and no funding-file admin. The mistake would be to compare your subcontractor rate to the final selling price and feel cheated — or, conversely, to accept in direct sales the rate you charge as a subcontractor. In both cases, check the framework: subcontractors have obligations of their own, and the subcontracting contract must set out in black and white the rate, the expenses and the cancellation terms.

Negotiating: anchoring, floors and side conditions

Negotiating a daily rate is not a purely rational exercise, and the research has shown it for decades. In their landmark 1974 article in Science, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” (see it on Google Scholar), Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman identified the anchoring bias: the first number put on the table serves as a reference point, subsequent adjustments remain insufficient, and the final agreement is pulled towards that initial anchor. In practice, for a trainer:

• State your rate first whenever possible, rather than asking “what’s your budget?”: your number will structure the discussion.
• Don’t discount your anchor: a timid opening figure, offered “so as not to scare them off”, mechanically caps the whole deal. Anchor on your target rate, not your floor.
• Know your floor — calculated at step 3, not felt — and decline below it: a loss-making day occupies a billable day you can’t sell again.
• Negotiate side conditions before touching the rate: travel and accommodation billed on top, a late-cancellation fee, payment terms, whether or not materials are transferred. A concession on the rate is hard to claw back; a solid cancellation clause protects your calendar for good.

VAT and status: quote a rate without ambiguity

A daily rate means nothing until it’s clear whether it is exclusive of VAT, inclusive, or VAT-exempt. A trainer registered as a training organisation can apply for the VAT exemption for vocational training; under the micro-entreprise regime, the VAT franchise may apply below certain thresholds. State the applicable regime systematically in your quotes and contracts — it’s also a signal of professionalism to a prime contractor who will have to justify its subcontracting chain at audit.

Take action

Setting a solid daily rate is the first building block of a viable training business; structuring it and making it fundable is the next. The Complete Kit Certif gives you the procedures and evidence expected to certify your activity and access funding. To lay the foundations, the ebook Create Your Training Organisation in 30 Days walks through every step, from the activity declaration to the business model, and the complete pack brings both resources together.