How Much Should You Charge as a Facilitator?

How much can you actually charge for your facilitation work? Whether you're running workshops for clients or running workshops internally at a corporate or a small business, it's really confusing because if you look around the internet, depending on which country you're in, depending on which like niche of facilitation you're in, depending on what type of workshops you're running, it's all over the place. So what we've done at facilitator.com is we've created a really simple app, which asks you a couple of questions and then shows you exactly what day rate range that you can expect to charge for exactly where you are in your career. And in this video, I'm going to show you what the different ranges are for a beginner facilitator, a mid-level facilitator, expert facilitator, also depending on where you are, topics you're doing, the group sizes, et cetera, et cetera. My name is Jonathan. I've been a facilitator for 15 years. I do everything from group facilitation for companies to help them with their strategic problems to large-scale hackathons, talks and facilitation training. So I do the entire gamut of facilitation. I also run facilitator.com now. That was a very good domain name to get back in the day. And because I run facilitator.com, I've also been working over the years with thousands of professional facilitators who tell me what they're doing, tell me how much they're getting paid, and I've correlated all of that data with the public data we have out there from things like the state of facilitation survey, so that I can show you exactly how much you should be getting paid for the facilitation work you're doing in 2026. This is only relevant for 2026. I don't know if it's relevant for 2027, but right now, as this is coming out at the start of 2026, these numbers are still accurate. And by the way, you can also follow along and use this exact tool that I'm using by going to quiz.facilitator.com or click the link down in the description, and you can figure out your day rate, even if you don't want to watch this video. You can also skip to the relevant parts of this video that you want, whether you're a mid-level beginner or whatever, you can skip right down below and see what those day rates are. I'm not just going to be talking about day rates. I'm also going to be showing how to increase your day rate and what the opportunities are for the specific levels to go from one level to the next level. It's going to be a lot of stuff. I hope you find it useful. And please, if you do find it useful, give it a like, give it a comment. YouTube loves that. All right, let's jump in. So I'm going to start with the first version of this being sort of a beginner facilitator. So this is someone who maybe has a little bit of experience, maybe isn't facilitating full-time. It's just part of their job. And let's just say I'm an individual consultant as well. So let's try to see what the price range of that would be. First, I'm going to focus on me, but as a beginner, and we're going to say, okay, I'm going to be delivering workshops in Western Europe, US, UK, Canada. That's probably, even if I'm doing remote, that's probably the major places that I'll be delivering. Although actually I do deliver in person in major metro hubs as well. So I'm going to click that. How long have I been facilitating workshops professionally now? Because I want to test out like beginner mode here. I'm going to say less than two years. What's my professional background before facilitation? I'm going to say I'm a career changer, meaning that I was working on something else. So UX design, and now I'm sort of bringing this facilitation stuff into it. So how central is facilitation to my business? Again, in this scenario, I'm going to say it's part of my consulting mix. I'm also going to say, it's asking me, do I have a specific niche? I'm going to say, I do have deep domain expertise in UX design. So I'm going to choose that one. Do I have a defined facilitation methodology? Okay. I'm using some of the facilitator.com AJ and smart methodology, but I don't know too much of it. I'm also going to say, you know, do I primarily deliver workshops in person virtually or both? I'm going to say it's mostly virtual at the moment. What group sizes do I tend to facilitate? It's all over the place. But right now, again, since I'm a beginner, I'm just going to say it's like small teams. What does the typical engagement include? This first run through, we're going to go in detail. The next runs, we're just going to fly through it. So what, what things do I actually end up doing? Well, I'm going to say, because design sprints were sort of my main thing that I did as a facilitator for a very long time. I'm going to say that my focus here is I do design and follow-up with the facilitation work. Who's usually in the room. I'm going to say in this case, individual contributors, not a lot of managers. What size companies typically hire me? So if I'm a beginner, I'm going to say here that it's small businesses and startups, and maybe I haven't made my way to the fortune 500 yet. What types of workshops do I run? I'm going to say it's mostly product and innovation workshops in this case. Because that's where, again, in this scenario, Johnny beginner was focused. Do I have any formal facilitation certifications? Nope. Do I have recognizable client logos? Nope. And how would I describe my current lead flow? So where are my clients coming from? I'm just going to say, I get occasional word of mouth leads. And how do I price my workshops? Finally, I'm going to say, I'm still a little bit confused about this, but I charge like an hourly rate. And so now it's going to calculate my day rate based on all of these answers and give me a clear answer and recommendations on how to increase my day rate. So I'm going to enter my email address here. This just means that I'm going to get this as an email as well. So I can reference it later. So I'm going to blur this so you guys don't see it. Okay. I'm going to put Jonathan and I'm going to put, um, my email address here, and then I'm going to unlock my day rate. So I'm going to look at my day rate. You're going to see the answer immediately. When you do the quiz, you don't have to wait for any email. The email is just there so that you can actually find it again and never have to go back and do the whole quiz again. So let's have a look. Okay, here we go. So this is my estimated day rate between $2,500 and $5,000 per day. And this is actually like relatively mid range, even though I'm a beginner and we'll see why in a second. So real quick, the industry median day rate across all of the facilitation surveys and across everything we have at AJ and smart in terms of our customer data is around $3,200 per day. My position is within that range. So as a beginner, it's, it's within that range. My annual potential has been between 100 and 200 K gives me some ideas here, like a half day session, team off sites, strategy workshop, you know, what I could charge for those types of things. The straw, my strong points here are the fact that I know how to do specific type of niche workshops, like design sprints, because that's what I said I could do. That I have some sort of methodology. Again, in the, in the survey, I said I had design sprints and my strongest point here, the thing that's bringing up my day rate the most in this case is the fact that I'm specialized in product design, and then I'm adding facilitation on top. And my weakest areas where I have room to grow is that I don't have a lot of social proof because I haven't worked with a lot of clients. I'm still unclear about my pricing and my group size is very low. And so if I'm able to facilitate larger groups, for example, like large group hackathons, I'll be able to get my rates up. And so here it tells me what my biggest opportunity to unlock my higher day rate is, and here is the, the, what this is telling me is that group size is the thing handling larger groups takes more skill, more prep and delivers more value. If you can confidently facilitate 40 or more people, you unlock a new tier of engagements. Let me give you an example for that. So I've just been booked. This is real life Jonathan now, not fake beginner Jonathan here. I've just been booked to run a large scale, two day design thinking workshop, which allows me to facilitate a very large group of people charge individually per person, which brings my day rate up to around $35,000. And that's very hard to do when I'm only facilitating about 10 people. Now you might be asking, do I have to have a co-facilitator there with me to handle a large group size? This is going to be around 50 people. I actually don't. Because of the way I've learned facilitation, it doesn't matter for me how large the group size is. It doesn't matter to me. It's all the same. So group size is one of the things here that I can scale up. If I'm a beginner and I have these skills and that would be my way to increase my day rate. So that's just a first quick pass. This again is, this is a beginner who has already some sort of background in a specific skill. The day rate would actually be lower if I didn't enter a specific skill. So let's do like a fast forwarded version. Let me show you a day rate. If I was a beginner who didn't have a skill and a beginner who was really, really just starting out. So let's look at the absolute beginner version of this. So I'm going to go down to the bottom. I'm going to say retake quiz and I'm going to do it again, but we're just going to fly through this. I'm entering my email. So this is going to be, Oh, why can't I even spell my own name? Okay. So what I'm about to do now is unlock the day rate of someone who's really just starting out. When I say really starting out, I don't mean that you're just coming out of college. You're like 20 years old and just absolutely starting from scratch. What I am making the assumptions of here in these results is that I am just starting out as a facilitator, but maybe I do have some background working in a corporate or being a consultant. So in this case, just to be like super clear, this is not straight out of college day one. This is you're probably in your mid thirties. You've already done some stuff early, early to mid thirties. You've already done some stuff and you're adding facilitation on as a skill or you're already running like design thinking workshops, et cetera. But you're still sort of in the starting mode. Maybe you're moving from having a full-time job to being a consultant and this is where you are. We call it the emerging facilitator. So let's open this up. So I am now down to $1,000 to $2,000 per day. Just to clarify here, this doesn't mean you're booked every single day, right? If you're looking at this and you're like amazing, because that would be 30 to $60,000 per month. No, you're not booked every single day. You might have three to four workshops per month. And you can see here the annual potential of an absolute beginner being between 50 and a hundred K. So you're not booked every single day. You have to also work on your business or whether you're, if you're in a corporate, you're not necessarily at the super high level. So this is again, beginner mode and you can see, you know, my strengths here is that I've said. I've got like, I can go to all of these very high value locations like San Francisco, New York, et cetera. I have a little bit of experience. Again, the tool here is like grasping for straws to figure out where the strengths are when you basically say you you're just beginning on everything, but the room to grow here is focused pricing and groups. Again, it's in, again, in this case, it's using groups as the example is the biggest opportunity in all of these cases, but it's also saying, okay, you don't really have any type of workshop that you focus on your pricing. You haven't even started thinking about it. And again, your group sizes are tiny. And in this case, that's the biggest way to grow, but actually there's a lot of room to grow when you're just starting out. And by the way, at the very end, we also have a, how we can help and the, how we can help this type of facilitators just watch our free stuff. Right. There's just go to our YouTube channel and watch what you're doing right now. So we don't have any like clear, very beginner tools that you can pay for a facilitator.com that's all free. So we just want you guys to be able to learn that stuff. That's what this YouTube channel is about. If you're finding this video useful so far, by the way, please give it a like, please give it a comment because YouTube actually takes that data and then tells people, Hey, this was useful. So it would be good to know if you think this video is useful and if I should do more tactical stuff like this, where we talk just about like the business of being a consultant, the business of being a consultant that does facilitation. Okay. Let's go to the high level. Let's see what the high ranges are of facilitation pay. And let's imagine now we're looking at you're someone who's, you know, either been in a relatively high position or mid-level position at a corporate, or you've been consulting for quite a few years, you either are a facilitator already, or you've been adding it into what you're doing, you're running workshops, you're doing a lot of stuff already, and you're looking, you're trying to figure out like, what are the day rate ranges? What's the potential of someone who's a professional facilitator, whose job it is to facilitate important projects. So let's take a look at that. We're going to fly through it again. I don't want you to have to watch me do this quiz over and over again, because you'll just quit the video. You can do that yourself, but I'm going to smash through it. And at the very end, you'll see the results of that. Okay. We're loading this one up. I hope, I mean, I hope it actually lines up because I've basically put in my answers. Okay. So what it's telling me that I am is the strategic partner. Uh, we're looking at 10,000 to 15,000 per day, 15,000 plus. And to be 100% transparent, my day rate is 35,000. I do not get booked every single day. This is important for you to know. Like when someone says their day rate is 35,000, it doesn't mean I'm getting booked every day. Sometimes I'm doing one day per month of facilitation, but I don't need more than that at that day rate. I'm trying to do like, you know, if you average average this out over the year, I'm trying to do one to two days of facilitation per month. All of the rest of the month, I'm working on promoting my business so that I can get booked more often through doing videos like this or, or, or podcast, et cetera. So let's see, I'll tell you how accurate this actually is. Um, it's pretty accurate. It's not going to the high end, but I think what we also wanted to do is keep it fairly like calm and realistic and not too crazy and not like get people too excited. And also this matches up pretty well with the people in our, uh, facilitator pro community and in our guides communities who are doing the best, right? It's the 1% of the audience is actually getting to this level. So industry median, 3,200 a day. Again, we're talking about facilitation in general. This position is well above industry benchmarks, annual potential 300 to 500 K. You know, if you're watching this video and you're based in the U S you're like, yeah, that's fine. That's not a big deal. If you're watching this video and you're based in the EU or somewhere else, you might be like, Holy crap. That's a lot of money. That's it's, it really depends on where you are and what the context is. Um, half day session team offsite. Uh, you can see that the most expensive thing that I can deliver is executive alignment and transformation. I don't do transformation work at all because I really don't like it, but I do alignment work and offsites and things like this, it's basically telling me that my biggest opportunity to grow is expanding my scope beyond just showing up to facilitate. Okay. So the reason it's saying this is because I don't do pre work and post work. I actually don't want to do that. I just like to go and do the facilitation and then be done with it. So even though it's telling me how I could make more money and how I could grow this, I actually don't want to do that. So that piece of advice is good. I just don't want to do it. And so that's another way you can use this quiz is like, okay, I could grow in that way, but I don't really, I don't want to, that doesn't align with my personal goals. And that's the limitation of this quiz as well. This is just to give you a feeling for, Hey, am I in the range? Am I outside the range? Or especially if you're new to facilitation, you're just wondering how much does this make? Like how much can I actually make? This will just give you more detail than just Googling it. So this is the top tier of facilitation between this 10,000 and 15,000 day rate. Like I said, my target is always 35,000. And by the way, I didn't come up with this target myself. I learned it from another facilitator who was charging that and I was like, okay, I'm going to try charge that too. And again, at these day rates, you're not booked all the time, but just one, two, three bookings, even per quarter is enough to take care of your entire yearly salary. And I think like the one thing I want you guys to be realistic about is the goal is not to work every single day. And I'm not talking about work-life balance here. The goal is not to have be booked every single day. 10% of your time is delivering. So doing client work, 90% of your time is working on your business, trying to figure out how do I increase the amount of people that are contacting me for this work so that I can pick and choose what type of work I want. And so that's essentially about being able to market yourself and to grow your business. So if you go to quiz.facilitator.com, you can take that quiz yourself. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. If you want me to make any more videos around this topic of how much you can get paid as a facilitator, let me know. Other than that, I'm done with this video now. See ya.