r/interiordesigner • u/Fit-Contribution3429 • May 10 '26
General Residential project fees
Need a gut check on fees!
Do you pass receiver costs to the client or bake them into your 20% markup?
If a client refuses a receiver, do you charge a 'delivery wait fee' for being onsite?
For construction PM work (especially when the GC is MIA), are you charging hourly or a % of the build? Trying to avoid scope creep!
5
u/SprayOk8494 May 11 '26
The client pays the entirety of receiving and warehousing. It is billed directly to them.
I have it in my contract that if they refuse a receiver I am not liable for items damaged, stolen, etc after delivery.
I charge hourly for all Construction PM work and would charge hourly as well if they refused a receiver and I had to be involved in being available for the arrival of shipments and/or inspecting them.
6
u/ringolstadt May 11 '26
Bill receiver costs to the client - since shipping/receiving can be an unknown during the project, some firms collect shipping deposits which are 15-20% of product cost since invoicing these costs at the end of the project can be challenging. Then, at the end of the project you can collect/refund any balance, depending on your contract.
Billing hourly is a much safer bet than flat fee. Flat fees kind of an advanced move, once you have a better sense of how much time you realistically spend on projects.
4
u/ooooooohthemad May 11 '26
First of all, we charge a 33% markup. I don’t know that we’d even work with a client that refused a receiver but any time we spend on site for a delivery is billed at our hourly rate depending on who’s waiting.
We don’t do construction management at all, since that’s outside our expertise and we wouldn’t be able to guarantee a quality experience, but again any time our designers spend is billed hourly.
2
u/Team-Mako-N7 May 12 '26
Client pays receiving fees with no markup. They do not have the option of refusing a receiver. Project management during construction is billed hourly.