Scope creep calculator
“Quick one, can you also…” feels free in the moment. Enter a few numbers to see how many hours and how much money those asks take from your retainers, and what your real hourly rate becomes.
Unbilled time is costing you
$20,000 a year
That is 16.7 hours and $1,667 a month, about 2.1 working days of work nobody pays for.
Your real hourly rate
$82/hr
$100/hr on paper, 18% lower in practice.
Capacity leaking away
1.1 clients’ worth
Measured against one client’s included hours, every month.
Where the hours go each month
15 hours on quick requests (including refocusing) and 1.7 hours answering status messages.
$10,000 a year back, and 8.3 hours a month returned to billable work.
Your own estimate, not a prediction. Start low.
Stop the leak
One place for requests, a visible queue and a cap on work in progress turn quick asks into ordered work.
Estimates based only on the numbers you enter. Nothing is sent or saved. This is not accounting advice.
How the numbers are calculated
- Request time is clients × quick requests × (minutes per request + refocus minutes) × the share you don’t bill.
- Status time is clients × status messages × minutes per reply.
- Money lost is unbilled hours × your hourly rate, then × 12 for the year.
- Real hourly rate is the monthly fee ÷ (included hours + unbilled hours per client).
- Recovery is the unbilled time multiplied by the percentage you choose.
Billed requests are treated as paid in full, including refocus time. Every figure depends on the numbers you enter, so use your own averages rather than the examples.
What to do with your number
The cost rarely comes from one big request. It comes from many small ones that never get counted. The fix is a request policy: one place for requests, a visible queue, and a limit on what is in progress for each client. Our guide on retainer scope creep and the request policy covers it step by step, and you can see how it applies to your kind of work on our who it’s for pages.
Frequently asked questions
What is scope creep on a retainer?
It is the slow growth of unplanned work beyond what the retainer was priced to include. On retainers it usually arrives as small asks, each too minor to quote, that add up to hours of unpaid work every month.
How does the calculator work out the cost?
It adds the time spent on quick requests, including the time it takes to refocus afterwards, to the time spent answering status messages. It multiplies the unbilled hours by your hourly rate for the monthly cost, and by twelve for the yearly cost.
Is the refocusing time real?
Switching tasks costs time beyond the task itself, but how much varies by person and by the kind of work. The default is ten minutes per request. Set it to zero if you want a conservative figure.
What is my real hourly rate?
It is your monthly fee divided by the hours you planned to work plus the unbilled hours you actually spend. It shows what each hour earns once quick requests and status messages are counted.
Does the calculator save my numbers?
No. The calculation runs in your browser, and nothing you enter is sent or stored.
What can I do about the result?
Give requests one place to live, cap how much is in progress for each client, and ask clients to choose what moves when something new arrives. Our request policy guide walks through each step.