license: cc-by-4.0
language:
- en
pretty_name: US Self-Employed & Trade Service Pricing Rates (2026)
tags:
- pricing
- freelance
- small-business
- services
- trades
- economics
- tabular
size_categories:
- n<1K
task_categories:
- tabular-regression
- tabular-classification
configs:
- config_name: default
data_files: pricing-rates.csv
US Self-Employed & Trade Service Pricing Rates (2026)
Typical 2026 US price ranges for 226 service, trade, freelance, and maker professions, each expressed in the trade's natural pricing unit (per hour, per job, per square foot, per word, per session, and so on). Built and maintained by WhatToCharge, a free pricing toolkit for the self-employed.
This is, to our knowledge, the only openly licensed, machine-readable dataset that normalizes pricing across this many independent-work professions in a single schema.
What's in it
One row per profession. Columns:
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
slug |
string | URL-safe identifier for the trade |
trade |
string | Human-readable profession name (e.g. "house cleaning") |
category |
string | One of 12 industry categories (Home Services, Creative & Freelance, etc.) |
unit |
string | Machine key for the pricing unit (hour, job, sqft, word, session, month, ...) |
unit_label |
string | Human label for the unit (e.g. "per hour") |
low_usd |
number | Low end of the typical 2026 US range, in USD, in the stated unit |
typical_usd |
number | Typical/midpoint rate, in USD |
high_usd |
number | High end of the typical range, in USD |
source_url |
string | Canonical WhatToCharge page for that trade |
A richer JSON version (adds price_factors per trade) is published at
https://getwhattocharge.com/data/pricing-rates.json.
Example uses
- Train or evaluate a pricing-recommendation or rate-estimation model for independent work.
- Benchmark a quote against the market for a given trade and unit.
- Power an agent or assistant that answers "how much should I charge for X" with grounded numbers.
- Study pricing-unit conventions and rate dispersion across service categories.
How the figures are derived
Ranges are built from published market-rate data, common industry pricing models (hourly, per-job, per-unit, retainer), and standard pricing psychology. They are typical real-world ranges meant to inform a pricing decision, not guarantees, and are reviewed and reissued on each site build. No per-city figures are included, because verified per-city data is not part of this set.
Citation
WhatToCharge (2026). US Self-Employed & Trade Service Pricing Rates.
https://getwhattocharge.com/dataset (CC BY 4.0)
License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Use it freely, including commercially; just attribute WhatToCharge with a link.