What to Charge for a Sponsored Post: A Practical Pricing Framework

Ask ten creators what to charge for a sponsored post and you'll get ten different answers — and most of them will be a gut feeling rather than a documented method. That's not a knock on creators; there simply isn't an official rate card for influencer marketing the way there is for, say, print advertising CPMs decades ago. But a gut feeling is a weak opening position in a negotiation. A transparent formula, even an imperfect one, gives both sides something to actually discuss.

Three inputs that matter most

Most pricing approaches, however dressed up, boil down to three factors:

• Audience size — the raw scale, usually priced per 1,000 followers rather than per follower, since the marginal value of the 10,001st follower isn't meaningfully different from the 10,000th.
• Content format — a 15-second story is cheap to make and disappears in a day; a dedicated long-form video is a production that holds attention for minutes. Format should move the price a lot.
• Engagement quality — two accounts of the same size can reach very different numbers of real, active people. An account whose audience visibly engages is worth more per follower than one with the same count but a quiet feed.

A simple formula

One workable structure: start with a base rate per 1,000 followers, scale it by a content-type multiplier, then adjust for how engaged the audience actually is relative to a typical account on that platform.

Base rate = (Followers ÷ 1,000) × platform rate × content multiplier

Suggested rate = Base rate × (your engagement rate ÷ typical platform engagement rate)

Illustrative platform base rates might run something like $10 per 1,000 followers for an Instagram feed post, $8 for TikTok, $20 for a dedicated YouTube video slot, and $5 for a post on X — these numbers vary constantly by market and niche and should be treated as a rough starting point, not a citation. Content multipliers might scale a story down to roughly 0.4x a feed post and a dedicated video up to roughly 2.5x, reflecting the production effort and attention span involved.

Worked example

Take a 50,000-follower Instagram account with a 2.5% engagement rate (right at a typical benchmark for the platform), posting a standard feed post:

1. Base rate: (50,000 ÷ 1,000) × $10 × 1.0 (post multiplier) = $500.
2. Engagement adjustment: 2.5% ÷ 2.5% (typical) = 1.0x — no adjustment, since this account is exactly average.
3. Suggested rate: $500, with a reasonable range of roughly $400–$600.

Now compare a 200,000-follower TikTok account with a 10% engagement rate (double the typical 5% for the platform), posting a reel-style video:

1. Base rate: (200,000 ÷ 1,000) × $8 × 1.3 (reel multiplier) = $2,080.
2. Engagement adjustment: 10% ÷ 5% = 2.0x.
3. Suggested rate: $2,080 × 2.0 = $4,160.

Notice the second account has 4x the followers of the first but suggests over 8x the rate — the format and the doubled engagement both compound the base scaling.

Where the formula stops and negotiation starts

A formula like this gives you a documented, defensible opening number — but real deals also hinge on things no calculator can see: exclusivity clauses, how long a brand wants usage rights for the content, whether they want to run it as a paid ad themselves (often priced separately, and usually worth more), how competitive the niche is, and plain old negotiating leverage. Use the estimate as an anchor on both sides of the table, then adjust for the terms that are actually on offer.

A few terms worth pricing separately

Two clauses show up in almost every brand-deal contract and both deserve their own line item rather than getting folded quietly into the base rate. Usage rights — a brand's permission to reuse your content in its own ads or website beyond the original post — extend the value of a single piece of content well past its organic life, and are commonly priced as a percentage uplift on top of the base rate, scaled to how long and how broadly the brand wants to use it. Exclusivity — agreeing not to work with competing brands for a period — closes off other income during that window, and is worth pricing as its own line rather than assuming it's included for free.

Price the deal, then handle disclosure — it isn't optional

Every price you calculate here is for a post that has to be disclosed as sponsored, and that obligation sits on you as the creator, not only on the brand paying you. Disclosure requirements exist in many places — the FTC in the US, the ASA and CMA in the UK, and equivalent regulators elsewhere all treat undisclosed paid promotion as a real problem, not a formality — but the specific rules, wording, and placement requirements differ by country and sometimes by platform, and change over time. This isn't legal advice, and nothing here should be read as a summary of any one jurisdiction's current rule; check what actually applies to you, your audience's location, and the platform you're posting on before you publish, and when in doubt, disclose more clearly rather than less.

What travels well across virtually every regime is the underlying principle: disclosure has to be clear, prominent, and hard to miss at a glance — not buried at the bottom of a long caption, not hidden inside a wall of hashtags, and not relying on a platform's own "paid partnership" label as the only signal if that label is easy to overlook. A disclosure a viewer has to hunt for doesn't function as a disclosure in practice, whatever the letter of a specific rule says. Build the cost of doing this properly into how you think about the deal itself, not as an afterthought once the rate is agreed — see Sponsored Content Disclosure: What "Done Properly" Actually Looks Like for what that looks like in practice.

What a rate estimate can't do for you

It's worth being explicit about the limits of a formula-based number like this one. It tells you a reasonable starting figure given audience size, format, and engagement — it says nothing about whether a given brand, product, or campaign is a good fit for your audience, and it can't tell you whether a deal's other terms (payment timeline, revision rounds, whether the brand owns the concept or you do) are fair. Treat the number as one input to a negotiation you're still fully responsible for evaluating, not a verdict that settles it.

Bundling multiple deliverables

Brands frequently ask for more than one piece of content in a single deal — a feed post plus a few stories, or a video plus a round of stills for their own use. A workable starting point is pricing each deliverable separately with the formula above, then summing them for a bundle anchor figure, rather than trying to guess a bundle price from scratch. From there it's common (though never guaranteed, and always a matter of negotiation, not a rule) for the total to come down somewhat from the sum of the parts, since a brand producing multiple assets in one shoot or one relationship is more efficient for both sides than negotiating each piece separately. Whatever discount is applied, keep the itemized math visible in the proposal — it shows exactly what's being given up, rather than presenting a single bundled number nobody can audit.

When a brand offers product instead of payment

Gifted product in exchange for a post is still compensation, and it's worth treating it that way rather than as a separate, informal category. Put a real dollar value on what's being offered — not the brand's suggested retail price if that's inflated, but what you'd actually value it at — and compare that figure to what the formula above suggests the post would be worth in cash. A wide gap is useful information either way: it might mean the product genuinely fits your content and the trade is fair, or it might mean the ask is out of proportion to what's being offered. And critically, gifted-product posts still need to be disclosed as a paid partnership in the places that require disclosure for compensation in any form, not only for cash deals — see the disclosure section above.

Renegotiating for repeat work

A brand that comes back for a second or third deal has effectively told you something a first-time brand hasn't: your first post worked well enough to be worth repeating. That's leverage worth using. If your engagement rate, follower count, or content quality have moved since the first deal, recalculate the estimate with current numbers rather than defaulting to whatever was agreed last time out of convenience. Repeat brand relationships are also a reasonable place to negotiate the usage-rights and exclusivity terms discussed above more favorably, since an ongoing relationship gives both sides more to lose from a bad-faith deal than a one-off post does.

Keep a simple record of what you actually charged

A running log of past deals — audience size and engagement rate at the time, content type, agreed price, and whether usage rights or exclusivity were included — is worth more over time than any generic formula, this one included. It shows your own real trend as your audience grows, gives you a documented answer the next time a brand asks what you charge, and makes it obvious when a new offer is unusually low or high relative to your own recent history. Treat the calculator above as the starting point for that record, not a replacement for keeping one.

Try it yourself

The Influencer Rate Calculator runs this exact formula for four platforms and four content types. If you don't know your engagement rate yet, start with the Engagement Rate Calculator first.