“Are we charging enough?” is the second most common question I get, and the answer owners reach for is the competitor’s rate card. That is the wrong place to start. A rate has to be built up from what a person costs you, and most firms have never done the arithmetic. So I did it for three people.
From salary to rate card
A senior consultant on $150k, AU$ per day
Swipe sideways to see the whole chart.
$150k base over 223 available days after leave and public holidays. On-costs are 12% super, payroll tax, workers comp, long service leave and a parental leave provision. Utilisation 67%, overhead 15% of revenue, margin 20%. Round numbers; your firm will differ.
The same arithmetic for three people
Blue is a market rate below the rate needed
| Person | Salary | All-in | Billable | Rate needed | Market |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Senior consultantSix years in, mid-market | $150k | $189k | 150 days | $1,940/day | $1,800–2,500 |
| Senior associateFive years in, mid-tier | $240k | $302k | 1,250 hrs | $372/hr | $350–550 |
| Senior architectTen years, registered | $130k | $164k | 1,020 hrs | $247/hr | $150–350 |
Swipe sideways to see the whole table.
Salaries are 2026 guide figures for Sydney and Melbourne. Billable time uses the published benchmarks: 66% utilisation for consulting, about 5.5 billable hours a day for a senior associate, 61% for architecture. Rate needed keeps the same 15% overhead and 20% margin throughout. Much of the architecture market sits nearer $200 an hour, which is the point of insight 4.
1Utilisation, not the rate, is usually the leak.
Two of the five steps in the drawing are about time, not money. The consultant on $150k costs $848 for every day they turn up, but $1,261 for every day you can invoice, because a third of the days go to pitching, admin, training and the Tuesday that just disappeared. The global benchmark for consulting utilisation fell to 66% last year, the lowest it has been since anyone started measuring. Every point you get back is worth about $13 a day on the rate, and nobody has to ring a client to get it.
2The multiplier most firms use is too low.
The old rule in consulting is a third wages, a third overhead, a third profit, which is a charge-out of three times salary. My drawing lands at 2.9 times salary per day, and that is with a 20% margin and a lean 15% overhead. Firms pricing at two and a half times are not running lean; they are giving away the margin and calling it competitive. If you have never worked out your own multiplier, it is almost certainly lower than you think it is.
3Five points of utilisation is worth a 5% rate rise.
On the consultant, 5% on the rate is $14,000 a year and all of it is profit. Five points of utilisation is eleven more billable days, $21,000, and all of that is profit too. The difference is that the client notices the first one and not the second. Do the utilisation one first, then raise the rate, and you have the pricing conversation from a stronger place.
4Market below your cost? Change the role, not the price.
The architect row is the uncomfortable one. A senior architect on $130k needs about $247 an hour to make a normal margin, and a lot of the market is charging nearer $200. You cannot fix that with pricing. You fix it by putting the expensive people on the work that pays, giving the drafting to someone cheaper or to software, and being honest about which jobs you should not be taking. A busy studio can be an unprofitable one, and the timesheets are where you find out.
5Parental leave is cheap to provision and expensive to ignore.
The typical mid-market policy is 12 to 16 weeks for the primary carer at full pay and two to four weeks for the secondary carer, on top of the government scheme, which pays 24 weeks at the minimum wage from July 2026. Run it for a 20-person firm with an average age in the early thirties and you should expect about one event a year: 14 weeks at an average salary is roughly $40,000 with super, or about 1.5% of a $3M payroll. Spread across every person’s rate that is $9 a day.
Sources Hays, Robert Half, Mahlab 2026 and Bespoke Careers salary guides · Services Australia Paid Parental Leave scheme, 2026–27 · WGEA employer parental leave data, 2025 · ATO super guarantee and state payroll tax rates, 2026–27 · SPI Research Professional Services Maturity Benchmark 2026, via Deltek · Deltek Clarity architecture KPIs · ArchiTeam fee guidance · Scenario Three work with owner-managed firms, 2019–26
General information only, based on my own experience. It is not financial, accounting or legal advice, and it does not account for your circumstances. Your salaries, utilisation and overhead will move every number here; rebuild it with your own before you change a price.