Deposits that protect you (and the clients who balk at them)

A deposit is not really about the money. It is a test the client takes before you have invested a single hour: can this organization approve a payment? The answer predicts everything about how the project ends. Work out your own split in the deposit and milestones calculator.

What a deposit buys before it buys cash flow

Three things, in order of value. A reserved slot: paying clients respect calendars, inquiring clients do not. Proof of process: a company that cannot cut a 30% check this month will not cut a 100% check next month either. And only third, cash flow.

We think freelancers get the order backwards and negotiate deposits as if the money were the point. The filter is the point. The money is a bonus.

The number: 30-50%, and when to go higher

For most project work, 30% starts the clock and nobody blinks. Go toward 50% when the client is new, the timeline is short, or the work is hard to resell (a brand identity has one buyer; a template does not). Below 25% the deposit stops filtering: it is small enough that a disorganized client will pay it and remain disorganized.

Full prepayment is reasonable for small fixed deliverables under about a thousand dollars, where invoicing twice costs more attention than the risk is worth.

Milestones: never more than one owed either way

The principle behind a good schedule is symmetry. You should never be owed more than one milestone of completed work; the client should never have paid for work that does not exist yet.

Deposit, then one payment per delivered chunk, balance on final handoff. Files transfer when the last invoice clears, which our [contract clause library](/calculators/contract-clause-templates) states politely so you do not have to say it out loud mid-project.

The client who refuses

Hear the refusal precisely. “Our accounting runs net-30 on everything” is a process constraint; fine, structure around it. “We do not pay before seeing work” is a philosophy, and it is describing how the final invoice will go too. In our experience the deposit conversation fails loudly with exactly the clients who would later fail quietly, which is the cheapest possible time to find out.